Lyman Beecher and his children : the transformation of a religious tradition /

More accurately "Lyman Beecher and [Four/Elevenths of] His Children," this study examines the way Catharine, Edward, Henry Ward, and Charles Beecher first accepted, then rebelled against and eventually transformed their father's theology. The children "elicited from their constituents a sense of trust, with respect to the religious tradition they received from their father, which freed them to redefine. . .the content of that tradition." Strangely missing is Lyman Beecher's most famous child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novels deal sensitively with this rebellion and transformation. Unfortunately, Snyder completed this study in 1975 and apparently has done no revision since. He appears to know nothing of Marie Caskey's Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family (CH, Dec'78) which places his subject in a more comprehensive context and includes all 11 Beecher children, let alone wider-ranging treatments like Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture (CH, Nov'77). A reader who has engaged the arguments of these and other recent social, religious, and literary histories is likely to find little excitement in Snyder's thesis. Graduate collections.-L. B. Tipson, Gettysburg College