Interpretations of women in the antebellum period have long dwelt upon the notion of public versus private gender spheres. As part of the ongoing reevaluation o

Alexis de Tocqueville famously said that Americans were "forever forming associations" and saw in this evidence of a new democratic sociability--though that see

The Jacksonian period under review in this dictionary served as a transition period for the United States. The growing pains of the republic’s infancy, during

Women's Activism and Social Change challenges the popular belief that the lives of antebellum women focused on their role in the private sphere of the family. E

The common view of the nineteenth-century pastoral relationship--found in both contemporary popular accounts and 20th-century scholarship--was that women and cl