| ‘Abolition
and New England Despair’ Lecture is Jan. 26 By Erika Mantz, Media Relations John McWilliams will present Abolition and New England Despair Thursday, January 26, in MUB Theater 1. The lecture, part of the Center for New England Culture’s Heritage New Hampshire Lecture Series, begins at 12:45 p.m. and will be followed by discussion and a reception. It is free and open to the public. McWilliams’ lecture will explore New England’s complex traditions of freedom and regional pride that fueled abolitionist rhetoric before the Civil War. The decline of New England political power in this era may have fueled the powerful and violent rhetoric of New Englanders. McWilliams draws on a wide range of New England writers, including Thoreau, Garrison, Child, Beecher, and Emerson, and he traces the development of radical abolitionism in the region. McWilliams published New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory, a wide-ranging study of the development of New England’s influential cultural identity. Through written responses to historical crises from early New England through the pre-Civil War period, he argues that the meaning of “New England,” despite claims for its consistency, was continuously reformulated. Integrating history, literature, politics, and religion, this is one of the most comprehensive studies of the meaning of “New England” to appear in print. McWilliams is Abernethy Professor of American Literature at Middlebury College in Vermont. He is the author of Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper’s America, Hawthorne, Melville and the American Character: A Looking-Glass Business and The American Epic: Transforming a Genre. The Center for New England Culture’s Heritage New Hampshire Lecture Series is supported by an endowment from Heritage New Hampshire. The series annually presents lectures on the images, people, and places of New England, featuring the best of contemporary scholarship on the region. For more information, contact David H. Watters, 2-0353 or david.watters@unh.edu. |
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