Reviews
A sophisticated analysis of sources that have long confused historians. Offering a thoughtful window onto the world of early American men, it demonstrates that sympathy and affection were important qualities for the founding fathers.
Path-breaking... Godbeer has staked out bold ground with this book. Some early Americanists will surely scoff at the notion that sentimentality was relevant even in the macho arena of state formation, just as historians of sexuality will freeze at the inference that there is no sexual attraction or intimacy between these men. That one book could successfully intervene with both the oldest historiographical and the newest theoretical question is no small feat, but rather one for which Godbeer deserves the appreciation and admiration of his fellow historians.
His beautifully crafted book breaks important new ground by connecting the ideal of sympathetic fraternal love to the reconceptualization of politics and political community in revolutionary America.
Godbeer follows his earlier studies of sexuality in early America with this impressively erudite study of male friendship, as expressed in letters, journals, and other literary forms, from the Puritan days to the early republic of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
Godbeer's evocative narrative format allows the reader to enter a lost world of sentiment and even physical affection between men. Godbeer complicates, as others have before him, the modern binaries of sexuality, but he also argues that male friendship provides a new way of seeing familiar faces and analyzing familiar events of colonial British North American history in the eighteenth century.
I know of no other work that conveys so articulately and plangently the crucial role that male love played in the Revolutionary period.
Godbeer compels readers to rethink early American gender roles and to look beyond the modern tendency to see sex in all verbal and physical expressions of love.
A welcome addition to the literature on the formation of the United States. Through rigorous research, creative use of sources, and deep engagement with the work of scholars before him, The Overflowing of Friendship is a thoughtful and new look at the relationships between men of a certain class, race, time, and place.
Godbeer stakes out a judiciously considered position at some length, emphasizing the very different ways early modern individuals understood sexuality and the possibilities of physical yet nonerotic love... An extremely readable work.
In his latest work, Richard Godbeer uncovers a world of feeling hitherto ignored and misunderstood—that of passionate male friendships in the eighteenth century. Deeply and meticulously researched, powerfully and vividly written, The Overflowing of Friendship reveals a compelling picture of human connection in the past and opens a new world of love and possibility for the future.
Just when it seems that new insight about the founding generation would be impossible, Richard Godbeer gives us a wholly new way of understanding that familiar group. In this brilliant and engaging blend of cultural, political, and gender history, Godbeer reveals deep forces at work behind politics in the early republic and at the same time writes a moving elegy to a lost form of male relationship.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. "The Friend of My Bosom": A Philadelphian Love Story
2. "A Settled Portion of My Happiness": Friendship, Sentiment, and Eighteenth-Century Manhood
3. "The Best Blessing We
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. "The Friend of My Bosom": A Philadelphian Love Story
2. "A Settled Portion of My Happiness": Friendship, Sentiment, and Eighteenth-Century Manhood
3. "The Best Blessing We Know": Male Love and Spiritual Communion in Early America
4. "A Band of Brothers": Fraternal Love in the Continental Army
5. "The Overflowing of Friendship": Friends, Brothers, and Citizens in a Republic of Sympathy
Epilogue
Notes
Index