Jordan T. Watkins

Slavery and Sacred Texts (eBook, ePUB)

The Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts - the Bible and the Constitution - to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters' emphasis on historical readings of the sacred texts, and in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated nineteenth-century Americans from biblical and founding pasts. While many Americans continued to adhere to a belief in the Bible's timeless teachings and the Constitution's enduring principles, some antislavery readers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, used historical distance to reinterpret and use the sacred texts as antislavery documents. By using the debate over American slavery as a case study, Jordan T. Watkins traces the development of American historical consciousness in antebellum America, showing how a growing emphasis on historical readings of the Bible and the Constitution gave rise to a sense of historical distance.

---

Dieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in A, B, BG, CY, CZ, D, DK, EW, E, FIN, F, GR, HR, H, IRL, I, LT, L, LR, M, NL, PL, P, R, S, SLO, SK ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Juli 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781108806107
• Artikelnr.: 62746225

Autorenporträt

Jordan T. Watkins is an assistant professor of church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University. Previously, he was a coeditor at The Joseph Smith Papers Project.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction
1. 'Recourse must be had to the history of those times'
2. 'The ground will shake'
3. 'Texts ... designed for local and temporary use'
4. 'The further we recede from the birth of the constitution'
5. 'The culture of cotton has healed its deadly wound'
6. 'Times now are not as they were'
7. 'We have to do not ... with the past, but the living present'
8. A 'Modern crispus attucks'
Conclusion
Epilogue
Index.