Harriet Livermore, the Pilgrim Stranger: Female Preaching and Biblical Feminism in Early-Nineteenth-Century America

1996 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-404
Author(s):  
Catherine A. Brekus

On a Sunday morning in January of 1827, “all the taste and fashion” of Washington, D.C., streamed toward the Capitol to witness one of the most remarkable events to take place in the gentlemanly preserve of the Hall of Representatives: Harriet Livermore, a devout evangelical and the daughter of a former Congressman, had convinced the Speaker of the House to allow her to preach to Congress. With crowds of eager spectators spilling out of the Hall and into the street, Livermore ascended into the Speaker's Chair, which served as a makeshift pulpit, and silenced a crowd of a thousand with a sermon on the text, “He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.” Included among her audience were congressmen, senators, and President John Quincy Adams himself, who sat on the steps leading up to her feet because he could not find a free chair. According to published reports, many in the audience wept quietly as she spoke. “It savored more of inspiration than anything I ever witnessed,” one woman marvelled. “And to enjoy the frame of mind which I think she does, I would relinquish the world. Call this rhapsody if you will; but would to God you had heard her!” Livermore's sermon was such a success that she was permitted to preach to Congress again in 1832, 1838, and 1843, each time to large crowds.

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.


Author(s):  
Sarah Collins

This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the “national” and the “universal” in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a “world” on various scales. The chapter explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time and space shaped a conception of “humanity” in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter reexamines those early nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to recover their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the “world” is something that must be actively created rather than empirically observed.


1963 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lefferts A. Loetscher

American Protestants in the early nineteenth century faced intellectual and social challenge which made conspicuous the weakness of their own divided condition. The American Revolution—which was part of a larger upheaval in the Atlantic Community—had spread Enlightenment ideas, with their aggressive attack on orthodoxy. Quite typical was the lament of a convention of Massachusetts Congregational ministers in 1799 over “the present decay of Christian morals and piety, and the awful prevalence of speculative and practical infidelity.” Well before the middle eighteen-thirties the tide of deism had ebbed, but some, like the editors of the new Christian Review, were still building sea walls against it.


Janus Head ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-234
Author(s):  
Robin Room ◽  

The concept of addiction is historically and culturally specific, becoming a common way of understanding experience first in early nineteenth-century America, This paper considers the relation to the concept of elements in current professional definitions of addiction (as dependence). Addiction concepts have become a commonplace in storytelling, offering a secular equivalent for possession as an explanation of how a good person can behave badly, and as an inner demon over which a hero can triumph.


1986 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan B. Carter

National, state, and individual-level data are used to explore the implications of the crowding of educated women into the teaching profession in nineteenth-century America. It is found that the more young women attended school, the lower were teacher wages and the price of educational services. Through this mechanism young women paid for their own education and, by lowering the price of educational services, helped America develop the best-educated population in the world by the century's end.


Author(s):  
William L. Davis

The introduction situates Joseph Smith's oral composition of the Book of Mormon within the religious and rhetorical culture of early nineteenth-century America. In an extended oral performance, Smith gazed into a seer stone and dictated the Book of Mormon to his scribes. The study focuses on orality, oral performance, and the oral composition techniques that Smith used to dictate the work. The introduction also includes a brief summary of the Book of Mormon narratives, along with a discussion on the academic framework for understanding seer stones in the context of Western esotericism and folk magic.


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