Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-256) and index.
Contents:
Part one. Working citizens: from ideas to organization. Liberty: eighteenth-century transatlantic legacies and challenges -- Equality: the mandates of community and the necessity of expropriation -- Solidarity: coalescing a mass resistance. Part two. Working citizens towards a working class: from organization to a movement. The movement party: beyond the failures of civic ritual -- Confronting race and empire: slavery and Mexico -- Free soil: the electoral distillation of radicalism, 1847-8. Part three. An unrelenting radicalism: from movement to cadres. Free soil radicalized: the rise and course of the Free Democrats, 1849-53 -- The pre-revolutionary tinderbox: Universal Democratic Republicans, Free Democrats and radical abolitionists, 1853-6 -- The spark: small initiatives and mass upheavals, 1856-60 -- Epilogue: Survival and persistence: the lineages and legacies of the Early American Movement.
Summary:
Offers a comprehensive history of pre-Civil War American radicalism, mapping the journeys of the land reformers, Jacksonian radicals, and militant abolitionists who paved the way to the failed slave revolt at Harpers Ferry in 1859. Lause provides new insights into the cast of characters who created a homegrown socialist movement in America--from Thomas Paine's revolution to Robert Owen's utopianism, and from Thomas Skidmore's agrarianism to George Henry Evans's industrial workers' reforms. He also discusses the persistent resistance of Native Americans to the expansion of capitalism. Showing how class solidarity and consciousness became more important to a generation of workers than notions of American citizenship, Lause presents an historical background to help us understand the rise of radicalism in the United States today. --Adapted from publisher description.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.