Johns Hopkins University Press
The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic
Key Metrics
- Richard Godbeer
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Paperback
- 9781421413839
- 8.9 X 6 X 0.7 inches
- 0.85 pounds
- History > United States - Colonial Period (1600-1775)
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
When eighteenth-century American men described with a swelling of the heart their friendships with other men, addressing them as lovely boy and dearly beloved, celebrating the ardent affection that knit their hearts in indissoluble bonds of fraternal love, their families, neighbors, and acquaintances would have been neither surprised nor disturbed.
Richard Godbeer's groundbreaking new book examines loving and sentimental friendships among men in the colonial and revolutionary periods. Inspired in part by the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility and in part by religious models, these relationships were not only important to the personal happiness of those involved but also had broader social, religious, and political significance.
Godbeer shows that in the aftermath of Independence, patriots drafted a central place for male friendship in their social and political blueprint for the new republic. American revolutionaries stressed the importance of the family in the era of self-government, reimagining it in ways appropriate to a new and democratized era. They thus shifted attention away from patriarchal authority to a more egalitarian model of brotherly collaboration. In striving to explore the inner emotional lives of early Americans, Godbeer succeeds in presenting an entirely fresh perspective on the personal relationships and political structures of the period.
Scholars have long recognized the importance of same-sex friendships among women, but this is the first book to examine the broad significance ascribed to loving friendships among men during this formative period of American history. Using an array of personal and public writings, The Overflowing of Friendship will transform our understanding of early American manhood as well as challenge us to reconsider the ways we think about gender in this period.
Author Bio
Dr. Godbeer joined KU on July 1, 2019. He received his B.A. from Oxford University in 1984 and his Ph.D from Brandeis University in 1989. He taught in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside, from 1989 to 2004 and in the Department of History at the University of Miami from 2004 to 2014; he served as founding Director of the Humanities Research Center at Virginia Commonwealth University from 2014 to 2019.
His research focuses on witchcraft, religious culture, gender, and sexuality in colonial and revolutionary North America.
Dr. Godbeer is the author of six books: The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Sexual Revolution in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (Oxford University Press, 2004), The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), The Salem Witch Hunt: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martins, 2011), and World of Trouble: A Philadelphia Quaker Family's Journey Through the American Revolution (forthcoming from Yale University Press in Fall 2019).
Dr. Godbeer is currently working on two book projects, Performing Patriarchy: What Gender Meant in Early America and The Empire of Topsy-Turvy, which will tell the story of the partnership between composer Arthur Sullivan, dramatist W.S. Gilbert, and theatre impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, who together dominated the late Victorian theatre in England and produced a string of famous comic operas, including The Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance.
Dr. Godbeer has been awarded research grants and fellowships by a range of institutions, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. He has taught a broad range of undergraduate and graduate courses on the colonial and revolutionary periods, including the first half of the U.S. survey, Images of a New World, Witchcraft in Early America, Religious Culture in Early America, Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Early America, The American Revolution, and U.S. LGBTQ History.
Source: The University of Kansas
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