Abigail and John Adams : the Americanization of sensibility / G. J. Barker-Benfield.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barker-Benfield, G. J.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Adams, Abigail, 1744-1818.

Adams, Abigail.

Adams, John, 1735-1826.

Adams, John.

Sentimentalism.

United States--Social life and customs--To 1775.

United States.

United States--Social life and customs--1775-1783.

United States--Social life and customs--1783-1865.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (514 p.)

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

During the many years that they were separated by the perils of the American Revolution, John and Abigail Adams exchanged hundreds of letters. Writing to each other of public events and private feelings, loyalty and love, revolution and parenting, they wove a tapestry of correspondence that has become a cherished part of American history and literature. With Abigail and John Adams, historian G. J. Barker-Benfield mines those familiar letters to a new purpose: teasing out the ways in which they reflected-and helped transform-a language of sensibility, inherited from Britain but, amid the revolutionary fervor, becoming Americanized. Sensibility-a heightened moral consciousness of feeling, rooted in the theories of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Adam Smith and including a "moral sense" akin to the physical senses-threads throughout these letters. As Barker-Benfield makes clear, sensibility was the fertile, humanizing ground on which the Adamses not only founded their marriage, but also the "abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity" they and their contemporaries hoped to plant at the heart of the new nation. Bringing together their correspondence with a wealth of fascinating detail about life and thought, courtship and sex, gender and parenting, and class and politics in the revolutionary generation and beyond, Abigail and John Adams draws a lively, convincing portrait of a marriage endangered by separation, yet surviving by the same ideas and idealism that drove the revolution itself. A feast of ideas that never neglects the real lives of the man and woman at its center, Abigail and John Adams takes readers into the heart of an unforgettable union in order to illuminate the first days of our nation-and explore our earliest understandings of what it might mean to be an American.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Origins, Definitions, and Social Circumstances

Part II. Particular Applications

Part III. Private Perpetuation

Part IV. Conclusion

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612901768

9781282901766

1282901761

9780226037448

0226037444

OCLC:

688291762