The three decades before the Civil War have long been recognized as a time of crucial change in American society. In this comprehensive and insightful reinterpretation of antebellum culture, Anne C. Rose analyzes the major shifts in intellectual life that occurred between 1830 and 1860 while exploring three sets of concepts that provided common languages_Christianity, democracy, capitalism. Whereas many interpretations of American culture in this period have emphasized a single theme or have been preoccupied with the ensuing Civil War, Rose considers sharply divergent tendencies in religion and politics and a wide range of reformers, authors, and other public figures. She contends that although the key characteristic of the society in which Americans explored their ideas was openness, the freedom and creativity of antebellum thought depended on conditions of cultural security. Including works by African Americans, Irish Americans, Native Americans, and Jewish Americans that have seldom been seen in relation to the era's more famous masterpieces, Voices of the Marketplace provides a clearer portrait of antebellum America.

Victorian America and the Civil War examines the relationships between American Victorian culture and the Civil War. The author argues that at the heart of American Victorian culture was Romanticism, a secular quest to answer questions previously settled by traditional religion. In examining the biographies of seventy-five Americans who lived in the antebellum and Civil War eras, elements of disequilibrium, passion and intellectual excitement are explored in contrast to the traditional view of Victorian self-control and moral assurance. The Civil War is shown to be a central event in the cultural life of the American Victorians, which both was an environment for the resolution of their questions and a place where their values and aspirations could be reshaped.

Victorian America and the Civil War examines the relationships between American Victorian culture and the Civil War. The author argues that at the heart of American Victorian culture was Romanticism, a secular quest to answer questions previously settled by traditional religion. In examining the biographies of seventy-five Americans who lived in the antebellum and Civil War eras, elements of disequilibrium, passion and intellectual excitement are explored in contrast to the traditional view of Victorian self-control and moral assurance. The Civil War is shown to be a central event in the cultural life of the American Victorians, which both was an environment for the resolution of their questions and a place where their values and aspirations could be reshaped.

Animals cannot use words to explain whether they feel emotions, and scientific opinion on the subject has been divided. Charles Darwin believed animals and humans share a common core of fear, anger, and affection. Today most researchers agree that animals experience comfort or pain. Around 1900 in the United States, however, where intelligence was the dominant interest in the lab and field, animal emotion began as an accidental question. Organisms ranging from insects to primates, already used to test learning, displayed appetites and aversions that pushed psychologists and biologists in new scientific directions. The Americans were committed empiricists, and the routine of devising experiments, observing, and reflecting permitted them to change their minds and encouraged them to do so. By 1980, the emotional behavior of predatory ants, fearful rats, curious raccoons, resourceful bats, and shy apes was part of American science. In this open-ended environment, the scientists' personal lives-their families, trips abroad, and public service-also affected their professional labor. The Americans kept up with the latest intellectual trends in genetics, evolution, and ethology, and they sometimes pioneered them. But there is a bottom-up story to be told about the scientific consequences of animals and humans brought together in the pursuit of knowledge. The history of the American science of animal emotions reveals the ability of animals to teach and scientists to learn.

In the American South at the turn of the twentieth century, the legal segregation of the races and psychological sciences focused on selfhood emerged simultaneously. The two developments presented conflicting views of human nature. American psychiatry and psychology were optimistic about personality growth guided by the new mental sciences. Segregation, in contrast, placed racial traits said to be natural and fixed at the forefront of identity. In a society built on racial differences, raising questions about human potential, as psychology did, was unsettling. As Anne Rose lays out with sophistication and nuance, the introduction of psychological thinking into the Jim Crow South produced neither a clear victory for racial equality nor a single-minded defense of traditional ways. Instead, professionals of both races treated the mind-set of segregation as a hazardous subject. Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South examines the tensions stirred by mental science and restrained by southern custom. Rose highlights the role of southern black intellectuals who embraced psychological theories as an instrument of reform; their white counterparts, who proved wary of examining the mind; and northerners eager to change the South by means of science. She argues that although psychology and psychiatry took root as academic disciplines, all these practitioners were reluctant to turn the sciences of the mind to the subject of race relations.

The three decades before the Civil War have long been recognized as a time of crucial change in American society. In this comprehensive and insightful reinterpretation of antebellum culture, Anne C. Rose analyzes the major shifts in intellectual life that occurred between 1830 and 1860 while exploring three sets of concepts that provided common languages-Christianity, democracy, capitalism. Whereas many interpretations of American culture in this period have emphasized a single theme or have been preoccupied with the ensuing Civil War, Rose considers sharply divergent tendencies in religion and politics and a wide range of reformers, authors, and other public figures. She contends that although the key characteristic of the society in which Americans explored their ideas was openness, the freedom and creativity of antebellum thought depended on conditions of cultural security. Including works by African Americans, Irish Americans, Native Americans, and Jewish Americans that have seldom been seen in relation to the era's more famous masterpieces, Voices of the Marketplace provides a clearer portrait of antebellum America.

In this comprehensive and insightful reinterpretation of antebellum culture, Anne C. Rose analyzes the major changes in intellectual life that occurred between 1830 and 1860 while exploring three sets of concepts that provided common languages: Christianity, democracy, and capitalism. Whereas many interpretations of American culture in this period have emphasized a single theme - such as revivalism, slavery, reform, Jacksonian democracy, or New England's transcendentalist authors - or have been preoccupied with the ensuing Civil War, Rose considers sharply divergent tendencies in religion and politics and a wide range of reformers, authors, and other public figures. She contends that although the key characteristic of the society in which antebellum Americans explored their ideas was openness, the freedom and creativity of antebellum thought depended on conditions of cultural security. In tracing the genesis of a "native culture", Rose surveys the art, literature, and scholarship of the American Renaissance, citing as particularly representative the genres of photography, the short story, history, and the essay. Rose examines Walden, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, and other celebrated works associated with the American Renaissance, but she also discusses works by African Americans, Irish Americans, Native Americans, and Jewish Americans that have seldom been seen in relation to the era's more famous masterpieces. Rose emphasizes the construction of cultural institutions and intellectual patterns that supported both the mainstream American Victorian culture and the points of view that contested conventional assumptions. Whether the language of public discussion wasChristianity, democracy, or capitalism, antebellum intellectual thought, Rose argues, developed through the ferven and often tense interaction among advocates of diverse ideals.