TY - BOOK ID - 77915529 TI - We shall be no more : suicide and self-government in the newly United States PY - 2012 SN - 0674064798 0674068696 9780674068698 9780674064799 9780674063723 0674063724 PB - Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Suicide in mass media. KW - Suicide KW - Killing oneself KW - Self-killing KW - Death KW - Right to die KW - Mass media KW - Moral and ethical aspects KW - Political aspects KW - Social aspects KW - History. KW - Causes KW - Suicide - United States - History KW - Suicide - Political aspects - United States KW - Suicide - Moral and ethical aspects - United States KW - Suicide in mass media KW - Suicide - Social aspects - United States KW - Etats-Unis KW - History UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77915529 AB - Suicide is a quintessentially individual act, yet one with unexpectedly broad social implications. Though seen today as a private phenomenon, in the uncertain aftermath of the American Revolution this personal act seemed to many to be a public threat that held no less than the fate of the fledgling Republic in its grip.Salacious novelists and eager newspapermen broadcast images of a young nation rapidly destroying itself. Parents, physicians, ministers, and magistrates debated the meaning of self-destruction and whether it could (or should) be prevented. Jailers and justice officials rushed to thwart condemned prisoners who made halters from bedsheets, while abolitionists used slave suicides as testimony to both the ravages of the peculiar institution and the humanity of its victims. Struggling to create a viable political community out of extraordinary national turmoil, these interest groups invoked self-murder as a means to confront the most consequential questions facing the newly united states: What is the appropriate balance between individual liberty and social order? Who owns the self? And how far should the control of the state (or the church, or a husband, or a master) extend over the individual?With visceral prose and an abundance of evocative primary sources, Richard Bell lays bare the ways in which self-destruction in early America was perceived as a transgressive challenge to embodied authority, a portent of both danger and possibility. His unique study of suicide between the Revolution and Reconstruction uncovers what was at stake-personally and politically-in the nation's fraught first decades. ER -