We shall be no more : suicide and self-government in the newly United States / / Richard Bell

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910955316203321
• Autore: Bell Richard <1978->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Cambridge, Mass., : Harvard University Press, 2012
• ISBN: 9780674064799; 0674064798; 9780674068698; 0674068696
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (345 p.)
• Disciplina: 362.280973
• Soggetti: Suicide in mass media; Suicide - Moral and ethical aspects - United States; Suicide - Political aspects - United States; Suicide - Social aspects - United States; Suicide - United States - History
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p.[269]-317) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Alarming Progress -- 1. Suicide and the State of the Union -- 2. The Sorrows of Young Readers -- 3. Saving Sinking Strangers -- 4. Wounds in the Belly of the State -- 5. The Threshold of Heaven -- 6. The Problem of Slave Resistance -- Conclusion: Martyrs on the Altar of the Nation -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: Suicide is a quintessentially individual act, yet one with unexpectedly broad social implications. Though seen today as a private phenomenon, in the uncertain aftermath of the American Revolution this personal act seemed to many to be a public threat that held no less than the fate of the fledgling Republic in its grip.Salacious novelists and eager newspapermen broadcast images of a young nation rapidly destroying itself. Parents, physicians, ministers, and magistrates debated the meaning of self-destruction and whether it could (or should) be prevented. Jailers and justice officials rushed to thwart condemned prisoners who made halters from bedsheets, while abolitionists used ; slave suicides as testimony to both the ravages of the peculiar institution and the humanity of its victims. Struggling to create a viable political community out of extraordinary national turmoil, these interest groups invoked self-murder as a means to confront the most consequential questions facing the newly united states: What is the appropriate balance between individual liberty and social order? Who owns the self? And how far should the control of the state (or the church, or a husband, or a master) extend over the individual?With visceral prose and an abundance of evocative primary sources, Richard Bell lays bare the ways in which self-destruction in early America was perceived as a transgressive challenge to embodied authority, a portent of both danger and possibility. His unique study of suicide between the Revolution and Reconstruction uncovers what was at stake-personally and politically-in the nation's fraught first decades.