Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States

Auteur

Michael E. Woods is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Marshall University, West Virginia. His work has been published in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Social History, and in Ann Brooks and David Lemmings's edited volume, Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (2014). Woods has written book reviews for the Journal of American Studies, the Journal of the Civil War Era, Civil War History, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Journal of Social History. He was a 2012 13 postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina.

Texte du rabat

This book explores how specific emotions shaped Americans' perceptions of, and responses to, the sectional conflict over slavery in the United States.

Résumé
The sectional conflict over slavery in the United States was not only a clash between labour systems and political ideologies but also a viscerally felt part of the lives of antebellum Americans. This book explores how emotions shaped Americans' perceptions of, and responses to, the sectional conflict in order to explain why it culminated in disunion and war.

Contenu

Introduction: finding the heart of the sectional conflict; Prologue: slavery, sectionalism, and the affective theory of the Union; Part I. Emotion and the Growth of Sectional Political Identities: 1. Free labor, slave labor, and the political economy of happiness; 2. Managed hearts and unmanageable slaves; 3. Jealousy and the sectionalization of emotional styles; Part II. Emotion and the Mobilization of Sectional Coalitions: 4. Indignation and the fitful growth of mass antislavery sentiment, 1820; 5. Indignation and the Northern mobilization for war, 1856; 6. Political jealousy and Southern radicalism from nullification to secession; 7. Mourning and the mobilization of reluctant secessionists, 1860 Epilogue: reconstructing the affective theory of the Union.