TY - BOOK ID - 50066856 TI - The claims of experience : autobiography and American democracy PY - 2019 SN - 0190060727 0190060700 0190060719 PB - New York, NY : Oxford University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Autobiography KW - Political aspects KW - History KW - Autobiographies KW - Egodocuments KW - Memoirs KW - Biography as a literary form KW - History and criticism KW - Technique KW - Franklin, Benjamin, KW - Douglass, Frederick, KW - Adams, Henry, KW - Goldman, Emma, KW - Chambers, Whittaker. KW - United States KW - Biography KW - History and criticism. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:50066856 AB - Why have so many figures throughout American history proclaimed their life stories when confronted by great political problems? 'The Claims of Experience' provides a new theory for what makes autobiography political throughout the history of the United States and today. Across five chapters, the text examines the democratic crises that encouraged a diverse cast of figures to tell their stories: Benjamin Franklin amid the revolutionary era and its aftermath, Frederick Douglass in the antebellum South and in abolitionist movements, Henry Adams in the Gilded Age and its anxieties of industrial change, Emma Goldman among the first Red Scare and state opposition to radical speech, and Whittaker Chambers amid the second Red Scare that initiated the anticommunist turn of modern conservatism. ER -