Paradoxes of Prosperity
About the Book
In the midst of the United States' immense economic growth in the 1850s, Americans worried about whether the booming agricultural, industrial, and commercial expansion came at the price of cherished American values such as honesty, hard work, and dedication to the common good. This study examines how popular writers and widely read newspapers, magazines, and books expressed social tensions between prosperity and morality. The authors draw on that nationwide conversation through leading mass media, including newspapers such as the New York Herald and the New York Tribune; best-selling magazines aimed at middle-class tastes, Harper's Magazine and the Southern Literary Messenger; novels by women authors Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and works by novelist George Lippard, historian George Bancroft, and travel writer Bayard Taylor.About the Author
Lorman A. Ratner was a professor of history, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, and director of the Center of Multicultural Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He died in 2007 as he worked to complete the manuscript for this book. He worked with his wife, Paula T. Kaufman, university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and with Dwight L. Teeter Jr., professor of journalism & electronic media at the University of Tennessee. Ratner and Teeter coauthored Fanatics and Fire-eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War.Also by this author
Reviews
"Serious students of antebellum America will certainly appreciate this fine book."--Journal of Southern HistoryBlurbs
"This original and enjoyable work will stimulate debate on an important issue and era: the conflict Americans faced in the 1850s between righteous behavior and the drive for financial success."--Ronald T. Farrar, author of A Creed for My Profession: Walter Williams, Journalist to the World
"Paradoxes of Prosperity fills a gap in what we know about American culture, philosophical thought, and media during the decade just before the American Civil War. This book makes an essential contribution to our understanding of the competing philosophical beliefs during an era of American culture that historians have seriously slighted in the pursuit of studying the Civil War."--Hazel Dicken-Garcia, coauthor of Hated Ideas and the American Civil War Press
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