Responsibility and Re-Orienting the Self in Nineteenth-Century America

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This informal talk offers an overview of responsibility, duty, and obligation as they appeared across nineteenth-century American discourse – in the fields of abolition, domesticity, public welfare, philosophy, law, concepts of community, and so on. As American thinkers and authors theorized and retheorized whom we must be responsible for (and to), and what that responsibility to others might look like, they similarly suggested alternative approaches to traditional Western conceptions of the self and the individual.