Kyle G. Volk, “Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy” (Oxford UP, 2014)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jul 21, 2015 · 57m

Kyle G. Volk is an associate professor of history at the University of Montana. His book Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2014) provides a compelling narrative of how nineteenth-century Americans negotiated the tension between majority rule and minority rights and between representative democracy and popular democracy. He focuses on debates in the antebellum northern states where moral reform efforts of Sabbatarians, temperance activist, and racial segregationists circumvented representative government to assert their social vision through direct…