دانلود کتاب Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era to the First World War

Pacifism is both an idea and a way of life. This book, in tracing its history in America from colonial times to the start of World War I, deals in equal measure with the theory and practice of pacifism as it evolved in response to the conditions of life in the New World.An introductory chapter on the origins of this pacifist impulse in the religious revival of the Reformation sets the stage for a detailed account of the way the immigrant peace sects maintained, or modified, their views on war and violence in the face of challenges presented by a new and often hostile environment. Almost alone in their testimony to peace in the colonial period, these sects were joined after 1815 by the peace societies which grew up alongside the antislavery and other reform movements of the day. The author unravels the thread of absolute pacifism running through these nondenominational groups, dealing at length with the American Peace Society, the New England Non-Resistance Society, and the League of Universal Brotherhood. A series of chapters on the reactions of those societies and sects to the Civil War, the neglect of pacifism in the postwar period, and the beginnings of a renewal in the years before the outbreak of war in Europe bring the book to a close.This emphasis on the institutional aspects of the movement is balanced throughout by a rich mine of anecdotes about individual pacifists. The author tells of the ordeals of conscientious objectors, of the experiences of settlers living unarmed on the frontier, and of the hardships endured by men fined, imprisoned, and harassed for refusing to compromise their faith in the principle of non-violence. A wide sampling from contemporary books and pamphlets, newspapers and journals, enables the author to bring to light, too, the attempts of pacifists to justify their belief on Biblical, utilitarian, and humanitarian grounds and the dilemmas they encountered in trying to reconcile it with their other concerns. Particular attention is focused in this respect on the Quakers' efforts to merge pacifism with politics in colonial Pennsylvania and on the Garrisonian nonresistants' struggle to harmonize pacifism and militant abolitionism prior to the Civil War.