The Department of English invites you to a book launch for Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 by Sandra Gustafson. The book launch will feature remarks by Shirley Samuels who is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies and the Picket Family Chair of the Literatures in English Department at Cornell University. The event will conclude with a reception.
Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840–1900 explores the early peace movement as it captured the imagination of leading writers. The book charts the rise of the peace cause from its sources in the works of William Penn and John Woolman, through the founding of the first peace societies in 1815 and the mid-century peace congresses, to the postbellum movement’s consequential emphasis on arbitration. The Civil War is the central axis for the book, with three chapters organized around readings of novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne spanning the period from 1840 to 1865. The second group of chapters explores fiction engaged with problems arising in the aftermath of that war, including novels by Henry Adams and John Hay on political corruption and class conflict; works on the failures of Reconstruction by Albion Tourgée and Charles Chesnutt; and the varied treatments of Indigenous experience in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and Simon Pokagon’s Queen of the Woods. All of these writers focused on issues related to the cause of peace, expanding its thematic reach and anticipating key insights of twentieth-century peace scholars.
Sandra Gustafson is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, as well as Concurrent Professor of American Studies, Faculty Fellow of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and Faculty affiliate of Notre Dame's Center for Civil and Human Rights. Sandra specializes in American literature and culture, the American novel, political theory, peace studies, and the study of civil and human rights, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity.