Hinton Rowan Helper, 1829–1909
4,025 words
For most readers having a nodding acquaintance with American history, the term “abolitionist” conjures up a vision of a sentimental housewife like Harriet Beecher Stowe, a homicidal psychopath in the mold of John Brown, or some stone-faced Puritan negrophile. Read more …
American Transcendentalism:
An Indigenous Culture of Critique
Philip F. Gura
American Transcendentalism: A History
New York: Hill and Wang, 2007
Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism provides a valuable insight into a nineteenth-century leftist intellectual elite in the United States. This is of considerable interest because Transcendentalism was a movement entirely untouched by the predominantly Jewish milieu of the twentieth-century left in America. Read more …