The Moment of Decision: Biographical Essays on American Character and Regional Identity

(Hardback)

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Focusing primarily on 19th-century social reform, political issues, or intellectual issues, the essays in this collection all consider the historical moment in the lives of representative 19th-century, and one family of 19th- and 20th-century, Americans. Each of these Americans experienced a moment of decision that converted them to action and altered their lives and identities thereafter. All the essays examine the moments of decision within regional and social contexts. In three separate sections, the volume looks at the role of identity within the southern regional context, antislavery and moral reform within the antebellum northern regional context, and the response to emancipation.

Author Bio

RANDALL M. MILLER is Professor of History at Saint Joseph's University. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Dear Master: Letters of a Slave Family, Shades of the Sunbelt (Greenwood, 1988), and with John David Smith The Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (Greenwood, 1988). JOHN R. McKIVIGAN is Associate Professor of History at West Virginia University. He is an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale Univerity and the author of The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and Northern Churches, 1830-1865.