{"product_id":"perpetual-scriptures-in-nineteenthcentury-america-9781501398995","title":"Perpetual Scriptures in NineteenthCentury America","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the tumultuous decades of rapid expansion and change between the American Founding and the Civil War, Americans confronted a cluster of overlapping crises whose common theme was the difficulty of finding authority in written texts. The issue arose from several disruptive developments: rising challenges to the traditional authority of the Bible in a society that was intensely Protestant; persistent worries over America's lack of a national literature and an independent cultural identity; and the slavery crisis, which provoked tremendous struggles over clashing interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, even as these parascriptures were rising to the status of a kind of quasi-sacred secular canon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the same time but from the opposite direction, new mass media were creating a new, industrial-scale print culture that put a premium on very non-sacred, disposable text: mass-produced news, dispensed immediately and in huge quantities but meant only\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bloomsbury Publishing Plc","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53187878388055,"sku":"9781501398995","price":28.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/perpetual-scriptures-in-nineteenthcentury-america-9781501398995","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}