Republicanism: Religious Studies and Church History meet Political History

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 621-624
Author(s):  
Dana W. Logan

Republicanism, both of these authors teach us, by the mid-nineteenth century became indistinguishable from the aims of religion in the United States. A broad array of protestants agreed that the aims of religion cohered with the political principle of republicanism—or the principle that men could only achieve freedom through self-rule. Noll usefully shows that this concept of republicanism underwent a series of changes from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Beginning in the late eighteenth century republicanism referenced liberty from tyranny, man as citizen, and virtue as a kind of constraint on individual interests. Noll, however, argues that two versions of republicanism competed in this earlier period: communitarian republicanism, based in “the reciprocity of personal morality and social-well being,” and liberal republicanism, which valued the independence of the individual. Noll and Modern argue that by the mid-nineteenth century, the liberal version won out. Citizens imagined their freedom to be enabled by a market-based society more than by a community of virtue. For political historians these definitions are not new or controversial, but for historians of American religious history republicanism is an unlikely category of analysis because we see it as “political theory” rather than theology. But as both Noll and Modern argue, republicanism became the very substance of theology in the United States.

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 255-266
Author(s):  
J. Barrie Ross

Objective: On the premise that historical background makes the present more understandable, this review covers the origins of Western dermatology from its Greek and Roman origins through the Middle Ages to the defining moments in the late eighteenth century. Background and Conclusion: The development of major European centers at this time became the background for future centers in the eastern United States in the midnineteenth century and, finally, to the West Coast of the United States and Canada by the midtwentieth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (03) ◽  
pp. 861-866
Author(s):  
Kevin Arlyck

Anyone who picks up a recent volume of the United States Reports or a prominent legal journal will be sure to find judges and lawyers debating, in agonizing detail, the meaning of a particular word or phrase in the Constitution. Marshaling late-eighteenth century dictionaries and legal treatises, records of debates from the drafting and ratifying conventions, and well-thumbed copies of the Federalist Papers, modern constitutional interlocutors will scrutinize text, structure, and history to discern an inherent logic. Above all, although disputants will endlessly contest what a particular provision means, they largely agree on what the Constitution itself is: as Jonathan Gienapp puts it in The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era, “an artifact circumscribed in time and space,” the “fixed Constitution” that we have been collectively dissecting since the late 1780s (10).


2019 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Celestine and Nicolas Martin-Breteau

To talk publicly about race remains taboo in France. Since its origins in the late eighteenth century, the French Republic has grounded its political identity on the theoretical equality of all its citizens, regardless of their origins. In practice, this “universalist” ideology tends to deny and neglect blatant racial inequalities among French citizens. Unlike in the United States in recent years, there has been no public discussion about whether France has turned “post-racial” since most white French people consider that their country never entered any sort of “racial era” to begin with. In fact, the French academic world is one of the few arenas in which debates over the issue of race have been accepted and sometimes encouraged.


Author(s):  
Mike Turner

As the United States expanded in the late eighteenth century and through most of the nineteenth century, much interest and question was raised over the increasing numbers of earthen mounds and earthen constructions encountered by the settlers moving westward across the southeastern woodlands. Mounds? Mound builders? Enough questions were raised about their origins that in 1881, the Division of Mound Exploration of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, was established to address and resolve these issues. The work of the Division of Mound Exploration can be considered the first "modern archeology" done in the United States. Their mound research covered the Dakotas to Texas and all points east. The final research report by Division Head, Cyrus Thomas, was published as the Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. In this report, Thomas mentions in the Gulf District that: some two or three mounds of peculiar form have been discovered in Mississippi and the Arkansas district that have not been observed elsewhere in the mound area. These may be described as earthen platforms surmounted by a conical mound or a conical mound surrounded by a terrace. Sometimes the conical mound is small in proportion to the platform and is not central...A double mound of this type, or mound with two apices, has been observed in western Mississippi. The primary purpose of this report is to make known the occurrence of a two-phase Caddoan earthen mound in Upshur County. Furthermore, this report seeks to add this site to the inventory of known archeological resources of the Cypress Creek basin. Available data relevant to the Cypress Basin and the immediate area of the site has also been summarized and reported here to suggest chronological associations for the two-phase mound.


Rough Waters ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Codignola

This chapter explores the late eighteenth century relationship between North America and the states of the Italian Peninsula, in attempt to challenge the notion of a homogenous Atlantic world. It reveals a myriad of complex networks - commercial, political, and familial - that facilitated trade between Tuscany, Genoa, Naples, British North America, and the United States. It examines these networks primarily through the cod trade, but also considers wheat, tobacco, sugar, and others. It follows case studies of prominent traders, including Filippo Mazzei; Anton Francesco Salucci; Nicola Filicchi; and Stefano Ceronio, and concludes that, despite popular scholarly opinion garnered from factors such as the failure of diplomacy between the nations, trade between the United States and Italy before 1815 was consistently strong and bolstered through business and familial networks.


1994 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Greenwood Onuf

For more than two decades, historians of the United States have energetically debated the relative importance of liberalism and republicanism in the 1770s and 1780s. Was the late eighteenth century a time of progress, and events culminating in the ratification of the Constitution a triumph for individual rights and liberal society, as convention held? Or was it a time of decay, and the events of the founding a renewal of citizen virtue in defense of the common good? Political theorists and constitutional scholars joined the debate, extending it beyond the founding and noting its relevance to our own time. Everyone agreed that liberalism eventually prevailed, more or less completely, for better or for worse. Just when it did so, and why, were questions always asked but never satisfactorily answered as the debate ran its course.


Abolitionism ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 87-107
Author(s):  
Richard S. Newman

Although abolitionists never enjoyed widespread popularity in the United States, they found that northerners were more interested in their critiques of slavery during the 1850s. “The abolitionist renaissance and the coming of the Civil War” explains how the passage of a stronger fugitive slave law, which turned white citizens into would-be slave catchers, raised new questions about the slave power and allowed abolitionist arguments to resonate more deeply, resulting in an abolitionist renaissance. From politics to pop culture, abolitionist ideas were diffused widely through American society. Even if most northerners did not join antislavery societies, the abolitionist struggle seemed ascendant in ways not seen since the late eighteenth century, a development that had profound consequences for sectionalism, disunion, and civil war.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.


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