The Colonization of British North America as an Episode in the History of Christianity

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles L. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
Covenant Theology ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
British North America ◽  
History Of ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Historical Issues

The proposition that, to paraphrase Carl Degler, Christianity came to British North America in the first ships, has long enjoyed popular and scholarly currency. The popular account, sometimes found today in evangelical Christian circles, holds that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colonists erected a mighty kingdom of God whose gates the humanist barbarians have unfortunately breached. The scholarly variation derives from Perry Miller's eloquent melodrama about Puritanism's rise and fall. Miller anatomized Puritanism as a carapace of Ramist logic, covenant theology, and faculty psychology surrounding the visceral vitality of Augustinian piety, an intellectual body that grew in health and cogency in Tudor-Stuart England and then suppurated on the American strand, corrupted by internal contradictions, creeping secularism, and periwigs. Miller understood that he was describing one single Christian tradition—Reformed Protestantism of a particularly perfervid variety—but such was his narrative's majesty that his tale of New England Puritanism ramified into the story of Christianity in the colonies; in the beginning, all the world was New England, and, at the end, the extent to which the colonists had created a common Christian identity owed mightily to Puritan conceptions of the national covenant. Miller was too good a scholar to miss the pettiness of Puritan religious politics and the myriad ways in which even the founding generation of Saints failed to live up to their own best values, but his chronicle of Puritan decline parallels the popular vision that the colonial period represented the “Golden Age” of Christianity in America: the faith began on a fortissimo chord but has decrescendoed ever since. The logic of this declension scheme spotlights some historical issues while ignoring others. The central problem for declension theory is to explain how and why Christianity's vigor ebbed, whereas the creation of a Christian culture in the colonies—the erection of churches, the elaboration of governing apparatuses, the routinization of personal devotion and moral order—is made unproblematic: it just spilled out of the Mayflower and the Arbella onto Plymouth Rock and Shawmut.

Establishment of Canada as a sovereign state: from dominion to kingdom

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Сергей Котов ◽  
Sergey Kokotov
Keyword(s):  
Nova Scotia ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
New France ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
British North America ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial

The history of the establisment of Canada as a sovereign state is inseparably linked with the history of the English (later British) colonial empire. Initially land amounting then to Canada, are peripheral areas of the continental possessions of the British Crown in North America. First of all, they include the possession of Hudson´s Bay, Nova Scotia peninsula and the island of Newfoundland. A stronghold of the British presence in the New World colonies were New England, which followed the metropolis actively at odds with the neighboring colonies of France. The long period of Anglo-French wars culminated in the defeat of France and inclusion of its holdings (Louisiana, New France) to the British colonial empire. The territory of the future of Canada became part of a vast political and legal space, which some researchers call the British-American colonial empire. On the socio-economic point of view nothing has changed - these lands were still underdeveloped periphery of the colonies of New England. There had no prerequisites to the formation here of their own institutions of statehood. In the course of the war for the independence of the inhabitants of the colony of Quebec (the former New France), the peninsula of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, for various reasons did not support the rebellious colonies, so many supporters of the unity of the British Empire (the so-called loyalists) moved to these areas. This led to the formation of a number of new colonies, such as Upper Canada, Nyubransuik, Prince Edward Island. Together, they accounted for British North America - in contrast to the United States. It is important to emphasize that even in the middle of the XIX century British North America remained a conglomerate of disparate, sparsely populated, economically underdeveloped areas, both in the immediate possession of the British Crown, and under the control of private companies. Their transformation into a self-governing federation certainly reflected the interests of the nascent trade and economic elite of these colonies. However, this was no less exposed to "US factor" and the liberal-democratic changes that took place in the metropolis itself. Exploring the complex of concrete historical factors that determine the character of the process of establishing Canada as a sovereign state, the author of this article analyzes the formal and legal aspects of the system of power and administration, established under the British colonial empire, as well as the key points of the doctrine of English law, refers to the institution of the Crown, Parliament and the status of imperial colonial government. Emphasized is the idea that the evolution of Canada from the set of "royal" to the self-governing colonies of the federation in the status of dominion and then gaining the status of the kingdom carried out on the basis of gradual development of constitutional conventions of political practice that leaves open to interpretation the question of when exactly Canada acquired the status of a sovereign state.

scholarly journals Les relations canado-américaines : Nationalisme et continentalisme

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Balthazar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Integration ◽  
British North America ◽  
History Of ◽  
Canadian Nationalism ◽  
Set Up ◽  
National Perspective

This paper's objective is to bring forth some elements which confirm the following hypothesis : Canada is consigned to continentalism, namely to economic and cultural integration with the United States though this fact is shrouded in a Canadian nationalism of sorts. The continentalist mentality is rooted in the history of British North America, inhabited mostly by refugees from America who have remained inherently "Yankees" in spite of their anti-americanism. The Confederation itself is based on a sort of complicity with the United States. More recently there were talks of a "North American nationality", and continentalism both cultural and economic has come to be seen as a 'force of nature" which the governments, at the most, put into a chanelling process. Still, it is possible for Canadian nationalism to exist provided it does not go beyond the threshold whence it would run headlong into the continental mentality. Canada has defined itself through an international or non-national perspective far too long for today's nationalism not to remain weak and poorly established. But the Americans whose "manifest destiny" has succeeded in spreading over Canada without even their having tried to hoist their flag there find it to their advantage to maintain some form of Canadian sovereignty. Canada as a "friendly nation" can be of use to Washington. That is why there are almost as many advocates for Canada's independence in the United States as there are north of the border. Canadian nationalism can thus further the interests of some Canadian elites without seriously prejudicing continental integration which can very well afford not to be set up into formalized structures.

Antebellum America

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Western World ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
British North America ◽  
Southern States ◽  
The North ◽  
Basic Law ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
History Of

In 1810, more than four in five Americans lived in one of the original thirteen seaboard states. Half a century later, though those states had grown considerably, they held less than half of the nation's population. The reason lay in the post-1815 rush of settlers beyond the Appalachians into the continental interior, "one of the great immigrations in the history of the western world." Chaotic though this movement was in many ways, it showed at least one orderly pattern. Individually these settlers followed many paths, but the typical ones moved due west, erring to the north or south only when their path was blocked by mountains or water or political boundaries or when they were pulled aside by the easier travel routes along navigable rivers. Most of the inhabitants of every inland state in i860 came from the states to the east within its own latitudes. It was mostly New Englanders and upstate New Yorkers—themselves mostly of New England origin—who occupied the territories and states bordering on British North America. They left the central and southern parts of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois mainly to settlers from the middle states and the Chesapeake. The frontier of the Deep South was colonized from the far southern coastal states much more than from Virginia or North Carolina, states that furnished Kentucky and Tennessee and Missouri with the bulk of their inhabitants. "Ohio Fever" swept the rural Northeast after 1815, followed by "Michigan Fever" in the 1830s, but it was "Alabama Fever" and "Texas Fever" that gripped the southern states. Modern research has documented what many Americans at the time spotted for themselves, what some who could agree on little else agreed was a constant truth of human behavior growing out of a basic law of climate-society relations. "The great law that governs emigration," announced a Massachusetts congressman during an argument against the spread of slavery, "is this: that emigration follows the parallels of latitude." It was "a great law of emigration," "fixed and certain," echoed a Louisiana editor in a defense of the South and its institutions, "that people follow the parallels of latitude." People were presumed to do so in order to avoid the change of climate that traveling north or south would have entailed.

Consumption

2020 ◽  
pp. 295-299
Author(s):  
Richard J. Kahn
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
Southern States ◽  
History Of

This brief chapter begins with a letter dated December 20, 1831, from Samuel Emerson of Kennebunk, Maine, commending the manuscript, particularly the volume on consumption, and agreeing with the “necessity of copious and repeated bleedings.” Barker promises a history of consumptive diseases as they have appeared in Maine and some other parts of New England since 1768, to be preceded by a history of the disease back to Hippocrates by Thomas Young. He notes that earlier in the eighteenth century consumption made up only about one-tenth of the bills of mortality but by the close of the century, it appears to have made up one-fourth of all deaths. Several physicians in North America have made valuable observations on consumption, though chiefly in the middle and Southern states; Barker will provide results of his inquiries and observations as it has appeared in the northern and eastern parts of the Union. He remarks about some cures that have come about by what are called by some, “the efforts of nature.”

Federation and the History of the Administration of Indigenous Affairs in Canada, the United States, and Australia: New Insights through a Transnational Approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-53
Author(s):  
Ted Binnema
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Previous History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal States ◽  
British North America ◽  
Exclusive Jurisdiction ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Relations

The importance of decisions regarding the allocation of jurisdiction over Indigenous affairs in federal states can only be understood well when studied transnationally and comparatively. Historians of Canada appear never to have considered the significance of the fact that the British North America Act (1867) gave the Canadian federal government exclusive jurisdiction over Indian affairs, even though that stipulation is unique among the constitutional documents of comparable federal states (the United States and Australia). This article explains that the constitutional provisions in Canada, the United States, and Australia are a product of the previous history of indigenous-state relations in each location, but also profoundly affected subsequent developments in each of those countries. Despite stark differences, the similar and parallel developments also hint at trends that influenced all three countries.

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