A Yankee Saint

Considered to be one of the definitive biographies on John Humphrey Noyes, an American preacher, radical religious philosopher, and utopian socialist who founded the Putney, Oneida, and Wallingford Communities and is credited for having coined the term “free love”.

Many scholars, according to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, have mistakenly attributed the coming of the Civil War solely to the slaveholding South’s determination to retain black bondage as a means of economic and political advantage. That view, he maintains, too readily diminishes the ethical dynamics involved in the chasm between antebellum North and South. In Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners, Wyatt-Brown explores in a series of wide-ranging essays the ethical differences—epically with regard to honor, liberty, and slavery—that divided the two regions of the country. Slavery was, of course, the crucial issue in the conflict, but such moral concerns as honor and shame, conscience and guilt were inextricably a part of the dispute as well. Northerners, under abolitionist and antislavery guidance, came to regard slavery as a violation of American conscience and understandings of individuality, personal liberty and civic responsibility, whereas soothers adhered to an ethical scheme based on traditional concepts of honor. Wyatt-Brown suggests that to most southern whites the rubric of honor was much more than a matter of duels and political posturing. It was instead an integral part of the moral and cultural heritage of the region, affecting a variety of social relationships. Sometimes the dictates of honor were even more powerful than the Christian morality that nearly all Americans espoused. Using Stanley Elkins’ antislavery interpretation as a point of departure, Wyatt-Brown devotes the first part of the book to the abolitionists’ dynamic relationship to evangelical culture in which conscience, implanted in childhood, became the primary ethical code guiding reformers. In the most dramatic and probing chapter in this section, he shows how the violent “antinomian” John Brown capitalized on the tensions between Christian conscience and primal manhood to gratify his own and his fellow countrymen’s desire for righteous glory, albeit for noble ends. The second half of the book reveals the contrasting ethical spirit of the South, as explained in W.J. Cash’s Mind of the South. After placing the proslavery argument in the context of evangelical and, later, secular “modernity,” Wyatt-Brown analyzes the ethical texture of secessionism in one of the book’s most original and intriguing arguments. Differences over the meaning and applicability of honor and shame, he contends, played a major part in the South’s struggle in 1860 and 1861 over secession and the North’s response to it. Making abundant use of anthropological, sociological, and psychological insights, Bertram Wyatt-Brown offers here an interpretation of the causes of the Civil war that is both provocative and persuasive.

Yankee Come Home explores one family's history in Cuba, and through it, the intense, complex, smoldering relationship between the island nation and its leviathan neighbor. In Cuba's most entrancing, storied landscape, William Craig is searching for a history that his family has lost-and now needs to recover. He's looking for the truth about his mysterious great-grandfather, Thomas O'Brien, a self-proclaimed hero of the "splendid little war" who left a legacy of glorious, painful lies. Living a dream that haunts American hearts-the dream of escaping the past, of becoming who we say we are-"Papa" died leaving his own children wondering who he'd really been. Along the way, Craig searches for the place where Gilded Age America abandoned republican ideals in favor of imperial ambition-and where his own generation of Americans now preside over arbitrary imprisonment and systematized torture. "I needed to see Guantánamo the way some Americans needed to drive through the night to kneel at JFK's coffin, and others are drawn to Ground Zero," he writes. "Sometimes, we don't know what we've lost until we trace the scars." Traveling with Craig, readers will join in present-day adventures: spirit-possession rituals, black market odysseys, roots-music epiphanies, and discovering the continuing impact of the war in 1898 on both Cuba and America. The story of the United States in Cuba is fascinating, but none too flattering. Like the reality of "Papa" O'Brien's identity, it reflects more hubris than heroism, more avarice than sacrifice. In the end, however, Craig's journey in Yankee Come Home is a transformation from disillusionment to redemption.

A reference guide to the work of 115 modern British and American critics.

This book is divided in two parts. The first, by far the larger, is a recording of events in the history of the Sherwood family, whose origins lie in the marriage of Frank P. Sherwood and Frances Howell on February 14, 1948. As might be anticipated, the first story is about a very happy honeymoon in San Francisco. The last story in Part One relates an experience of the family that grew out of the 1948 marriage, now numbering 11 people. They helped Frank and Frances celebrate their 50th anniversary with a weeks outing in Devon, England. In between these two quite delightful events, there were less welcome occasions when things did not go so well. The pets in the family, the experience with smoking, and the family finances also are subjects found in these chronicles. Part Two reverts to an earlier period before Frank was married, and it is essentially concerned with famous people he encountered as a young man. There are brief reports on President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the baseball star Ted Williams, and famed screen actress Ingrid Bergman, all of whom Frank met before his marriage in1948.

Few images of early America were more striking, and jarring, than that of slaves in the capital city of the world’s most important free republic. Black slaves served and sustained the legislators, bureaucrats, jurists, cabinet officials, military leaders, and even the presidents who lived and worked there. While slaves quietly kept the nation’s capital running smoothly, lawmakers debated the place of slavery in the nation, the status of slavery in the territories newly acquired from Mexico, and even the legality of the slave trade in itself. In the Shadow of Freedom, with essays by some of the most distinguished historians in the nation, explores the twin issues of how slavery made life possible in the District and how lawmakers in the District regulated slavery in the nation.