Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Making America's First Moral Majority
2. Sunday Laws and the Problem of the Christian Republic
3. The License Question and the Perils of "Pure Democracy"
4. Mixed Marriages, Motley Schools, and the Struggle for Racial Equality
5. "Jim Crow Conveyances" and the Politics of Integrating the Public
6. America's First Wet Crusade and the Sunday Question Redux
Epilogue: Making Democracy Safe for Minorities
Notes
Index

About the Author

Kyle G. Volk is a history professor at the University of Montana.

Reviews

"[W]onderful, lively..."--Journal of American History
"In this engaging historical account, Professor Volk provides perspective that illuminates political movements of both the 1800s and today."--Harvard Law Review
"In this boldly argued and engagingly written book, Kyle Volk brilliantly recasts the political history of nineteenth-century America. Volk's narrative brings to life the political ideas and tactics of a motley crew of individuals and groups--from German immigrants and African Americans to Seventh Day Baptists and liquor dealers--who struggled mightily against their era's proliferating array of morals regulations and racial codes. Taking their causes to the
courts, the statehouses, and the streets, these unlikely champions of minority rights forged a pluralistic conception of democracy that shaped the public culture of their era and left behind an enduring
legacy of dissent for later generations."--Michael Willrich, author of Pox: An American History
" In Moral Minorities, Kyle Volk examines why, in an era of mass democracy, ordinary Americans organized to protect their civil liberties. Minority rights, it turns out, did not emerge just from elites and courts, but from the grassroots efforts of citizens determined to protect their liberties from overzealous majorities. A must-read for anyone interested in the tension between majority rule and minority rights in a diverse society."--Johann Neem,
author of Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts
"Moral Minorities is a stunning intervention in the history of grass-roots politics
and American democratic thought, as well as in the emerging fields of popular constitutionalism and everyday political practice. Kyle Volk shows us the history of minority rights movements in an entirely new light. He dramatically revises our understanding of the origins of such movements, their constitutional underpinnings, and their surprising political trajectories."--Reeve Huston, author of Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York
"This excellent book chronicles the rise of what Kyle G. Volk calls 'a new, popular minority-rights politics' in the mid-nineteenth century that laid the groundwork for minority mobilization in the century and a half to follow. In six compelling chapters, the book tracks transformations in who were the most vocal minorities arguing for a place in American democracy and how those minorities made the case for protecting themselves from majoritarian
demands....This is the rare book that is both deeply historical and strikingly urgent....This book is clever in its conception, rich in its research, wise in its argumentation, and eloquent in its
writing."--Common-place
"In this timely book, Professor Kyle G. Volk artfully explains the competing forces and shifting political coalitions in the mid-nineteenth century that ultimately constructed the modern paradigms of morality politics, majority rule, and minority rights that still govern our democratic landscape today."--Harvard Law Review