Recounts the life and career of Theodore Dwight Weld, the abolitionist held most responsible for the success of the antislavery movement in the United States

Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform

History

Abzug, Robert H.

Americas

Oxford University Press

Recounts Weld's intense childhood, his stormy religious conversion, his entry into the world of reform, and finally, his rejection of public life.

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Forty years ago Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and other concentration camps, and came face to face with the human ruins of the Nazi system of slave labor and genocide. What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind. Inside the Vicious Heart captures the shock of that discovery by telling the story of the camp liberations as experienced by American GIs and other eyewitness, including Eisenhower, Patton, Joseph Pulitzer, and Margaret Bourke-White. Through their diaries, letters, and photographs we see how those Americans finally made the world believe what until then had only been rumored. "A fine book, a signal contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."--Chicago Sun-Times "Abzug has done an excellent job...Not a book to dwell on...but not one that should be overlooked either."--The New York Times "Well and memorably done."--Kirkus Reviews

Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps

Europe

In the forty years before the Civil War, America was awash in political and social reform movements. Abolitionists stormed against the cruelties of slavery. Temperance zealots hounded producers and consumers of strong drink. Sabbatarians fought to make Sunday an officially recognized sacred day. Woman's rights activists proclaimed the case for sexual equality. Others offered programs of physiological and spiritual self-reform: phrenology, vegetarianism, the water-cure, spiritualism, and miscellaneous others. "Even the insect world was to be defended," Emerson mused, "and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes was to be incorporated without delay." Cosmos Crumbling brilliantly reassesses the religious roots of these antebellum reform movements through a series of penetrating profiles of key men and women who sought to remake their worlds in sacred terms. Filled with vivid anecdotes and penetrating analysis, the book presents a genealogy of reform cosmology that begins with the American Revolution and ends with "the woman question," the issue that drove a wedge between traditional evangelical reformers and the more radical reformers who questioned the very foundations of the conventional Christian cosmos. Here is the story of Declaration of Independence signer Benjamin Rush, and his lifelong odyssey to bring together his unorthodox Christian ideals and his revolutionary republicanism. Other portraits highlight the guiding role of religion in the careers of the tireless abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the evangelical minister Lyman Beecher, his daughter, influential educational reformer Catharine Beecher, and of Angelina and Sarah Grimké, and Lydia Maria Child, fearless women who made enormous strides in reimagining the spiritual and moral power of women and their place in society. There is also an intriguing chapter on leaders of the body reforms, including phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler, who began his career reading the heads of his fellow students at Amherst College for small change, and William Andrus Alcott, who advocated a bland vegetarian diet, cold water bathing, and a profusion of daily rituals to guide his followers through their every waking moment. Arguing that we cannot understand American reform movements unless we understand the sacred significance reformers bestowed on the worldly arenas of politics, society, and the economy, Abzug presents these men and women in their own words, placing their cherished ideals and their often heated squabbles within the context of their millennial and sometimes apocalyptic sense of America's role in the cosmic drama. Tracing the lasting impact of what began as a peculiarly Protestant, largely New England, style of social action on the uniquely American traditions of activism that flourish today, Cosmos Crumbling is a signal contribution to our understanding of the myriad ways in which the quest for enlightenment and salvation continues to shape American politics.

Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination

Reference

Words, Language & Grammar

Forty years ago Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and other concentration camps, and came face to face with the human ruins of the Nazi system of slave labor and genocide. What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind. Inside the Vicious Heart captures the shock of that discovery by telling the story of the camp liberations as experienced by American GIs and other eyewitnesses, including Eisenhower, Patton, Joseph Pulitzer, and Margaret Bourke-White. Through their diaries, letters, and photographs we see how those Americans finally made the world believe what until then had only been rumored.

In the forty years before the Civil War, America was awash in political and social reform movements. Abolitionists stormed against the cruelties of slavery. Temperance zealots hounded producers and consumers of strong drink. Sabbatarians fought to make Sunday an officially recognized sacred day. Woman's rights activists proclaimed the case for sexual equality. This colorful text brilliantly reassesses the religious roots of these antebellum reform movements through a series of penetrating profiles of key men and women who sought to remake their worlds in sacred terms. Arguing that we cannot understand American reform movements unless we understand the sacred significance reformers bestowed on the worldly arenas of politics, society, and the economy, Abzug presents these men and women in their own words, placing their cherished ideals and their often heated squabbles within the context of their millennial and sometimes apocalyptic sense of America's role in the cosmic drama. Tracing the lasting impact of what began as a peculiarly Protestant, largely New England, style of social action on the uniquely American traditions of activism that flourish today, Cosmos Crumbling is invaluable for helping students of American and religious history understand the myriad ways in which the quest for enlightenment and salvation continues to shape American politics.

Religion & Spirituality

In post-World War II America and especially during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, the psychologist Rollo May contributed profoundly to the popular and professional response to a widely felt sense of personal emptiness amid a culture in crisis. May addressed the sources of depression,powerlessness, and conformity but also mapped a path to restore authentic individuality, intimacy, creativity, and community. A psychotherapist by trade, he employed theology, philosophy, literature, and the arts to answer a central enduring question: "How, then, shall we live?"Robert Abzug's definitive biography traces May's epic life from humble origins in the Protestant heartland of the Midwest to his longtime practice in New York City and his participation in the therapeutic culture of California. May's books - Love and Will, Man's Search for Himself, The Courage toCreate, and others - as well as his championing of non-medical therapeutic practice and introduction of Existential psychotherapy to America marked important contributions to the profession. Most of all, May's compelling prose reached millions of readers from all walks of life, finding their place,as Noah Adams noted in his NPR eulogy, "on a hippy's bookshelf." And May was one of the founders of the humanistic psychology movement that has shaped the very vocabulary with which many Americans describe their emotional and spiritual lives.Based on full and uncensored access to May's papers and original oral interviews, Psyche and Soul in America reveals his turbulent inner life, his religious crises, and their influence on his contribution to the world of psychotherapy and the culture beyond. It adds new and intimate dimensions toan important aspect of America's romance with therapy, as the site for the exploration of spiritual strivings and moral dilemmas unmet for many by traditional religion.

Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May

Were Americans the heroic liberators of Nazi concentration camp victims in 1945, or were they knowing and apathetic bystanders to unspeakable brutality and annihilation for a dozen years? Historians have long debated what the United States knew about Hitler’s gruesome Final Solution, when they knew it, and whether they should have intervened sooner. Wrapping historical narrative around 60 primary sources — including news clippings, speeches, letters, magazine articles, and government reports — Abzug chronicles the unfolding events in Nazi Germany while tracing the resurgence of anti-Semitism and tightening immigration policies in the United States. He relies on the American journalistic sources through which U.S. citizens read about events in Europe to provide students a real context to understand Americans’ horror when they realized that the reports of the Holocaust were not exaggerations or fabrications. An epilogue examines the complexity of historical interpretations and moral judgments that have evolved since 1945. Useful apparatus includes photographs, a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index.

America Views the Holocaust, 1933-45 : A Brief Documentary History

World

Bedford/St.Martins

Pearl Harbor and the Coming of the Pacific War & America Views the Holocaust, 1933-1945

Iriye, Akira

Bedford/St.Martin's

An account of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps

Replica Books

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Books by Abzug, Robert H.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Abzug, Robert H.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform

Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform

Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps

Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination

Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps

Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination

Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May

America Views the Holocaust, 1933-45 : A Brief Documentary History

Pearl Harbor and the Coming of the Pacific War & America Views the Holocaust, 1933-1945

Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps