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 fie...
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 voi...
An authoritative new history of the early American novel from a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Gura's great insight is that the early novel never fully left its origins behind, even as it evolvedNand is reflected in the oldest and deepest divisions in American Christianity, politics, and culture.
In C.F. Martin and His Guitars, 1796-1873, Philip Gura chronicles the career of Christian Frederick Martin from his humble start as an importer and repairman of musical instruments through the founding of C.F. Martin & Company.
The Pequot Indian intellectual, author, and itinerant preacher William Apess (1798-1839) was one the most important voices of the nineteenth century. Philip F. Gura offers the first book-length chronicle of Apess's fascinating and consequential life. Placing Apess's activism on behalf of Native American people in the context of the era's rising tide of abolitionism, Gura argues that he deserves greater recognition in the pantheon of antebellum...
An important new biography of America's founding religious father. Jonathan Edwards was America's most influential evangelical, whose revivals of the 1730s became those against which all subsequent ones have been judged. The marvelous accomplishment of Philip Gura's" Jonathan Edwards "is to place the rich intellectual landscape of America's most formidable evangelical within the upheaval of his times. Gura not only captures Edwards’ brilliance...
Banks failed, inequality grew, people were out of work, and slavery threatened to rend the nation in two. The Panic of 1837 drew forth reformers who, animated by self-reliance, became prophets of a new moral order that would make America great again. Philip Gura captures a Romantic moment that was soon overtaken by civil war and postwar pragmatism.
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 oft...
In this valuable history of the 19th century, historian Gura chronicles the career of C.F. Martin, from his humble start as an importer and repairman of musical instruments in New York City in the 1830s through the founding of C.F. Martin & Company and its move to Nazareth, Pennsylvania.
