Book Launch: Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900
Longtime associate of the Kroc Institute, Sandra M. Gustafson draws on key insights from the field of peace studies (including positive and negative peace, as well as direct and indirect violence) in a rich study of US literature and culture in her most recent volume, Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 (Oxford, 2023).
Exploring the early peace movement, the book charts the rise of the peace cause in the works of William Penn and John Woolman, through the founding of the first peace societies in 1815 and the mid-century peace congresses, to the postbellum movement's consequential emphasis on arbitration. With the Civil War as the central axis, the volume includes readings of novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne spanning the period from 1840 to 1865. It also explores fiction engaged with problems that arose in the aftermath of that war, including novels by Henry Adams and John Hay on political corruption and class conflict; works on the failures of Reconstruction by Albion Tourgée and Charles Chesnutt; and the varied treatments of Indigenous experience in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona and Simon Pokagon's Queen of the Woods.
Each of these writers focused on issues related to the cause of peace, expanding its thematic reach and anticipating key insights of twentieth-century peace scholars.
Lunch will be provided.
Speakers:
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Sandra Gustafson, Department of English
- Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Department of English
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Spencer French, Department of English
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George Lopez, Kroc Institute