| Popis: |
‘Contests of intellectual authority’ examines the clash of ideas and ideologies that shaped America in the years leading up to the Civil War through the end of the nineteenth century. It opens with two historical events of 1859 that altered the course of American thought: John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The moral challenges raised by race-based slavery and evolutionary theory shaped American notions of freedom, divine providence, and human responsibility. While the Civil War ultimately resolved a political and legal dispute, it did not resolve larger intellectual, religious, and moral ones. These contests of moral authority and the range of human responses to human problems are on full display in late nineteenth-century American life. |
