Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers (The American Moment) Paperback – August 1, 1995

Detailed and interesting discussion on the Christian reforms in American between the Revolution and the Civil War and how they changed the country for the better. I would recommend this for history students, politicians and anyone interested in making the world a better place.

This book came in great condition as was described on the description of the Amazon page. The book also arrived when expected.

Mintz's work is the most recent attempt to summarize antebellum reform. Shorter than the other two attempts (Alice Felt Tyler's outdated classic FREEDOM'S FERMENT and Ronald Walter's AMERICAN REFORMERS), he emphasizes the ironies of reform: the religious roots yet secular forms, the conservative self-image yet radical tendencies, the anti-institutional bias yet creation of enduring institutions. He seeks to find middle ground between historians who have highlighted the reformers' fear and desire for social control and those historians who stressed the reformers' hope and benevolent intentions. At its heart, he sees (most of) the antebellum reformers as true heirs of the American liberal tradition, by which he means the attempt to ameliorate harsher aspects of capitalism through collective and government action. (For a scholar who disagrees, at least for some of the reformers, see Leo Hirrel's CHILDREN OF WRATH.) Mintz succeeds in creating a readable and informative synthesis of the historiography in which the reformers are viewed sympathetically as worthy of our respect, however flawed they might have been. Yet, for all his consensus-building, some readers may find this book unsatisfactory in that too many questions are only treated superficially: What really motivated the reformers? How successful were they? What can they teach us today? That's okay. These questions are really topics for different kinds of books. An important purpose of a broad survey text like this is to prompt some readers to explore the topic in more depth, and I believe that Mintz has succeeded in this purpose. I recommend this work as a solid introduction to antebellum reform.

Steven Mintzs' Moralists and Modernizers is about three resopnses to pre- Civil War social problems in America: moral reform, social reform and radical reform. This book is about the reforms that abolished slavery, guaranteed womens rights, free public schools, educating the deaf and blind, sexual discrimination and many others. This book is about breaking up corruption, the social breakdown, doing good, virtue and liberation. This first reform in the U.S. has shaped how the U.S. is today. For a book that I had to read in college U.S. history is was not as boring as I thought it was going to be and it was quite insightful.