논문 / 노예제폐지론의 인종 성 계급 : 해석의 역사 = Race , Sex , and Class in Abolitionism : A History of Interpretations

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960`s has greatly changed the American society, It has also influenced the studies on Abolitionism. Before the 1960`s there were two groups of historians who studied antislavery movements in the 1830`s. The first group was traditional historians. They thought the abolitionists as $quot;moral heroes.$quot; And the other was so-called revisionist historians. They dealt with the abolitionists as $quot;fanatics$quot; whose agitation was a cause of the needless Civil War. This interpretation of the revisionists dominated American historiography of abolitionism through the 1930`s and 1940`s and remained very influential until the 1960`s. In this article I have tried to find some recent trends in the studies on antislavery movement in America. To do this, I focused on some changes which has happened from the 1960`s to the present. Although the revisionists did not deny that antislavery movement was a religious and moral crusade against slavery, they saw Theodore Weld and James Gillespie Birney as the central figures of the movement. They thought William Lloyd Garrison as a fanatic. From the 1960`s revisionist`s interpretation was challenged by some historians. The critics of revisionists insisted that the Garrisonian abolitionists were not fanatics. The change originated in the 1960`s has three directions: reconsideration on the racism of abolitionists, more in-depth studies on black abolitionists, and studies on correlation between abolitionism and the early women`s movement. Until recent time no one questioned about white abolitionists` racism because they devoted their lives to abolishing slavery. But recent works concluded that white abolitionists had racial prejudice against black abolitionists. In addition the 1970`s saw a new trend of extensive studies on black abolitionists. These trends may continue in the future. Finally, the most distinguished contemporary research topic on abolitionism is feminist abolitionists. In the last part of the article, I mentioned debates about the origins of the antislavery movement. In his article in American Historical Review, Thomas Haskell criticized David Brion Davis` thesis about the ideological hegemony of abolitionists. Against this critics Davis replied in the same journal that Haskell misunderstood his thesis. During these debates John Ashworth took almost the same side with Davis. Both of them criticized the market economy theory that Haskell stood on. Although the debates started with the question of the origins of antislavery movement, it seems to develop into the other area of history like historical explanation.