Item Detail
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27967
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3
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0
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English
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Some Themes of Counter-Subversion
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Mormonism and American Culture
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New York, NY
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Harper & Row
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59-73
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Where Arrington treats the experimental efforts to establish an integrated economic life within the Mormon community, David Brion Davis in this article on counter-subversion looks at the effect which such experimentation and integration had upon the nervous psyche of some other Americans. In a period of rapid social change with accompanying dislocation of values, as he indicates, early nineteenth-century Americans were hostile toward any group that seemed contemptuous of the traditional ways. In studying the social roots of the anti-Masonic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Mormon movements before the Civil War, Davis finds that the most prominent element within these societies to which the antis were opposed was their secrecy and seeming loyalty to an autonomous group. [Editors' summary]