Reform in Pre-Civil War America : 

 

NEHTA Fall Conference

 

November 4^th, 2005

 

Download the Registration Form

 

 

 

            Join NEHTA members and friends for our annual fall conference on Friday, November 4^th at the American Antiquarian Society in Worchester , Massachusetts .  History teachers and scholars will gather to learn about the latest scholarship on “Reform in Pre-Civil War America .” 

 

 

 

                                  Steven Mintz, professor of history at the University of Houston and a top level scholar will frame the issues and update participants on current scholarship in his keynote “The Birth of the American Reform Tradition.”  Recent recipient of the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Award for the best book in American social history (for Huck’s Rafts: A History of American Childhood, Harvard, 2004), Mintz is also the author of Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil War Reformers (Johns Hopkins, 1995).  In the latter, he asserts: “Antebellum reform has been characterized in many ways.  In positive terms, it was an effort to alleviate suffering and improve the conditions of the unfortunate; to eradicate problems long considered inevitable parts of the human condition—poverty, ignorance, slavery, and gender inequality.  And in a more negative description, it was a class-based instrument of social control: an effort to create modern institutions of confinement—including prisons, asylums, and workhouses; to reshape the behavior of deviant groups; and to divert attention from more fundamental problems, such as the growth of economic inequity in the North.  There is, however, a term that better defines the antebellum reform impulse and better encompasses its dualities and contradictions:  liberalism.” 

 

 

 

The “l” word is packed in today’s political rhetoric.  By connecting antebellum reform to the “l” word, Mintz will challenge us to rethink the roots of liberalism and the reform era itself.  In so doing, antebellum reform will provide us with opportunities to learn about a number of movements through a series of workshops.

 

 

 

 

 

Workshops will include:

 

 

 

 

Christopher Jones of Brown University presenting “Shall We

 

Fly or Shall We Resist? Martin Delany and the

 

Alternative to Frederick Douglass’s Abolitionism”.  

 

Carolyn J. Lawes of Old Dominion University presenting a

talk on the Second Great Awakening.

Michael Wallace and Teresa Vilardi of Bard College ’s

Institute for Writing and Thinking presenting “Thinking Historically

 

Through Writing: Abraham Lincoln’s attitude toward slavery.”

Jan Turnquist of the Alcott House and a representative from Fruitlands Musuem

will present on Utopian Movements. 

 

 

 

In addition to these workshops, there will be two performances (Merrill Kolhofer as William Lloyd Garrison and another performer as the temperance crusader John Gough).  The day will close with a plenary given by Gayle Fisher of Salem State College on the women’s reform. 

 

 

 

The conference is open to all.  The cost is $75. per person ($60 for members of NEHTA) and includes coffee, lunch and a reception at the end of the day.  For more information, see www.netha.net or contact the conference chair, Charlie Newhall at cnewhall@stjohnsprep.org.  We hope you will join us!