Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform

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Univ of North Carolina Press, 2009 M01 5 - 400 pages
In this intellectual history of American liberalism during the second half of the nineteenth century, Leslie Butler examines a group of nationally prominent and internationally oriented writers who sustained an American tradition of self-consciously progressive and cosmopolitan reform. She addresses how these men established a critical perspective on American racism, materialism, and jingoism in the decades between the 1850s and the 1890s while she recaptures their insistence on the ability of ordinary citizens to work toward their limitless potential as intelligent and moral human beings.

At the core of Butler's study are the writers George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, a quartet of friends who would together define the humane liberalism of America's late Victorian middle class. In creative engagement with such British intellectuals as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, John Ruskin, James Bryce, and Goldwin Smith, these "critical Americans" articulated political ideals and cultural standards to suit the burgeoning mass democracy the Civil War had created. This transatlantic framework informed their notions of educative citizenship, print-based democratic politics, critically informed cultural dissemination, and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy. Butler argues that a careful reexamination of these strands of late nineteenth-century liberalism can help enrich a revitalized liberal tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
1 Victorian Duty American Scholars and National Crisis
17
2 The War for the Union and the Vindication of American Democracy
52
3 The Liberal High Tide and Educative Democracy
87
4 Liberal Culture in a Gilded Age
128
5 The Politics of Liberal Reform
175
6 Global Power and the Illiberalism of Empire
221
Epilogue
262
Notes
269
Bibliography
325
Index
361
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About the author (2009)

Leslie Butler is assistant professor of history at Dartmouth College.

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