Banks failed, credit contracted, inequality grew, and people everywhere were out of work while political paralysis and slavery threatened to rend the nation in two. As financial crises always have, the Panic of 1837 drew forth a plethora of reformers who promised to restore America to greatness. Animated by an ethic of individualism and self-reliance, they became prophets of a new moral order: if only their fellow countrymen would call on each individual's God-given better instincts, the most intractable problems could be resolved. Inspired by this reformist fervor, Americans took to strict dieting, water cures, phrenology readings, mesmerism, utopian communities, free love, mutual banking, and a host of other elaborate self-improvement schemes. Vocal activists were certain that solutions to the country's ills started with the reformation of individuals, and through them communities, and through communities the nation. This set of assumptions ignored the hard political and economic realities at the core of the country's malaise, however, and did nothing to prevent another financial panic twenty years later, followed by secession and civil war. Focusing on seven individuals-George Ripley, Horace Greeley, William B. Greene, Orson Squire Fowler, Mary Gove Nichols, Henry David Thoreau, and John Brown-Philip Gura explores their efforts, from the comical to the homicidal, to beat a new path to prosperity. A narrative of people and ideas, Man's Better Angels captures an intellectual moment in American history that has been overshadowed by the Civil War and the pragmatism that arose in its wake.

The year 2003 marked the tercentenary of the birth of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), the man perpetually hailed as "America's most original religious thinker." Edwards's impact, both on colonial religious life and on the Anglo-American world of his day, was internationally acknowledged, and his legacy for the century and a half and more after his death in 1758 has been profound. Even to this day, Edwards's life is studied and his writings consulted on a global basis more than any other American theologian. The most significant scholarly conference marking the Edwards tercentenary took place in October 2003 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The papers from that gathering are presented in this volume. They represent much of the best and most recent work being done on Edwards and reflect the wide diversity of approaches to his life, thought, and legacy.

"American Transcendentalism "is a sweeping narrative history of America's first group of public intellectuals, the men and women who defined American literature and indelibly marked American reform in the decades before and following the American Civil War. Philip F. Gura masterfully traces their intellectual genealogy to transatlantic religious and philosophical ideas, illustrating how these informed the fierce theological debates that, so often first in Massachusetts and eventually throughout America, gave rise to practical, personal, and quixotic attempts to improve, even perfect the world. The transcendentalists would painfully bifurcate over what could be attained and how, one half epitomized by Ralph Waldo Emerson and stressing self-reliant individualism, the other by Orestes Brownson, George Ripley, and Theodore Parker, emphasizing commitment to the larger social good. By the 1850s, transcendentalists turned ever more exclusively to abolition, and by war's end transcendentalism had become identified exclusively with Emersonian self-reliance, congruent with the national ethos of political liberalism and market capitalism.

Philip F. Gura's Truth's Ragged Edge is perhaps the first comprehensive study of the early American novel since Richard Chase's 1957 classic, The American Novel and Its Tradition. Gura opens with the first truly homegrown genre of fiction: religious tracts, which were parables, intended to instruct the Christian reader. He then turns to the city novels of the 1840s, which depicted with mixed feelings the rapid growth and modernization of American society. He concludes with fresh interpretations of the introspective novels that appeared before the Civil War, such as those by Hawthorne and by Melville, from whom Gura takes his title. The grand narrative sweep of the book is balanced by Gura's great insight that the early novel never fully left its origins behind, even as it evolved-it remained a means of theological and philosophical dispute, and reflected the oldest and deepest divisions in American Christianity, politics, and culture. In addition to discussing novels that are considered classics, Gura recovers many novels - by authors as diverse as the evangelical writer Susan Warner, the African American novelist Frank J. Webb, and the early feminist novelist Elizabeth Stoddard - that will be revelations to the contemporary reader. Panoramic and original, Truth's Ragged Edge is an indispensable guide to the origins and development of the American novel and will become a standard book on its subject.

A riveting story of faith, politics, and ideas, Liberty or Justice for All? brings to life four of America’s greatest thinkers, whose dialogue across the ages has never been more relevant. The book traces a striking pattern—the vexed relationship of individual liberty to inclusive social justice—in an elaborate fabric, woven over more than three centuries of American history. Philip F. Gura begins his nimble tale with Jonathan Edwards, a fiery preacher who insisted that God would reward those who embraced social cooperation. One generation later, the Founding Fathers grounded their own project of civic renewal in rights and freedom. But if every citizen is guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, does this mean America is a nation where the individual reigns supreme? America’s young democracy soon found its prophet in Ralph Waldo Emerson, who preached a gospel of self-reliance, small government, and self-improvement. But with the coming of the Civil War, Emerson’s triumphant individual became a cog in a vast war machine. Radical technological transformations convinced the naturalist-turned-philosopher William James that the self was more fragmented and fragile than Emerson believed. He found virtue in pluralism and diversity, seeing selfishness as the cardinal sin. Two world wars and several failed revolutions later, John Rawls, shaken by the divisions of Vietnam, sought to establish a new secular foundation for social cooperation. Over time, we have sought to hold these opposing value systems in delicate balance, promising both liberty and justice for all.

The Pequot Indian intellectual, author, and itinerant preacher William Apess (1798-1839) was one the most important voices of the nineteenth century. Here, Philip F. Gura offers the first book-length chronicle of Apess's fascinating and consequential life. After an impoverished childhood marked by abuse, Apess soldiered with American troops during the War of 1812, converted to Methodism, and rose to fame as a lecturer who lifted a powerful voice of protest against the plight of Native Americans in New England and beyond. His 1829 autobiography, A Son of the Forest, stands as the first published by a Native American writer. Placing Apess's activism on behalf of Native American people in the context of the era's rising tide of abolitionism, Gura argues that this founding figure of Native intellectual history deserves greater recognition in the pantheon of antebellum reformers. Following Apess from his early life through the development of his political radicalism to his tragic early death and enduring legacy, this much-needed biography showcases the accomplishments of an extraordinary Native American.

The Crossroads of American History and Literature collects two decades' worth of the best-known essays of Philip F. Gura. Beginning with a definitive overview of studies of colonial literature, Gura ranges through such subjects in colonial American history as the intellectual life of the Connecticut River Valley, Cotton Mather's understanding of political leadership, and the religious upheavals of the Great Awakening. In the nineteenth century, he visits such varied topics as the history of print culture in rural communities, the philological interests of the Transcendentalist Elizabeth Peabody, the craft and business of the early Amerian music trades, and Thoreau's interest in exploration literature and in the Native American. Displaying remarkable sophistication in a variety of fields that, taken together, constitute the heart of American Studies, this collection illustrates the complexity of American cultural history. Philip F. Gura is Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the American Renaissance (Wesleyan, 1981) and A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660 (Wesleyan, 1984), and editor, with Joel Myerson, of Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism (G. K. Hall, 1982).