Divided between Heart and Mind: the Critical Period for Protestant Thought in America

1987 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. G. Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
Church History ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The World ◽  
Heart And Mind

In 1854, Philip Schaff, professor of church history at Mercersburg Theological Seminary and minister of the German Reformed Church, reported to his denomination on the state of Christianity in America. Although the American Church had many shortcomings, according to Schaff the United States was ‘by far the most religious and Christian country in the world’. Many Protestant leaders, however, took a dimmer view of Christianity's prospects. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a nagging sense prevailed that traditional theology was no longer capable of integrating religion and culture, or piety and intelligence. Bela Bates Edwards, a conservative New England divine, complained of the prevalent opinion ‘that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect’. Edwards was not merely lamenting the unpopularity of Calvinism. A Unitarian writer also noted a burgeoning ‘clerical skepticism’. Intelligent and well-trained men who wished to defend and preach the Gospel, he wrote, ‘find themselves struggling within the fetters of a creed by which they have pledged themselves’. An 1853 Memorial to the Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church summed up the doubts of Protestant clergymen when it asked whether the Church's traditional theology and ministry were ‘competent to the work of preaching and dispensing the Gospel to all sorts and conditions of men, and so adequate to do the work of the Lord in this land and in this age’.

Mid-Nineteenth Century New England Women in Evangelical Foreign Missions: Seraphina Haynes Everett, A Missionary Wife in The Ottoman Mission Field

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-102
Author(s):  
Melike Tokay-Ünal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Women’S Perceptions ◽  
Islam And Christianity ◽  
Mission Field ◽  
Journal Entries

This article illustrates American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ support of the “missionary matrimony”, mid-nineteenth-century New England women’s perceptions of the missionary career obtained through matrimony, and their impressions of the Oriental mission fields and non-Christian or non-Protestant women, who were depicted as victims to be saved. A brief introduction to New England women’s involvement in foreign missions will continue with the driving force that led these women to leave the United States for far mission fields in the second part of the paper. This context will be exemplified with the story of a New England missionary wife. The analysis consists of the journal entries and letters of Seraphina Haynes Everett of Ottoman mission field. The writings of this woman from New England give detailed information about the spiritual voyage she was taking in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman lands. In her letters to the United States, Everett described two Ottoman cities, Izmir (Smyrna) and Istanbul (Constantinople), and wrote about her impressions of Islam and Christianity as practiced in the Ottoman empire. Everett’s opinions of the Ottoman empire, which encouraged more American women to devote themselves to the education and to the evangelization of Armenian women of the Ottoman empire in the middle of the nineteenth century, conclude the paper.

scholarly journals Cosmopolitanism, Translocality, Astronoetics: A Multi-Local Vantage Point

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina ◽  
Manpreet Kaur Kang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Special Volume ◽  
Multiple Flows ◽  
The World ◽  
Shed Light

The world in which we live is crisscrossed by multiple flows of people, information, non-human life, travel circuits and goods. At least since the Sixteenth Century, the Americas have received and generated new social, cultural and product trends. As we see through the case studies presented here, modern literature and dance, the industrialization of food and the race to space cannot be historicized without considering the role the Americas, and particularly the United States, have played in all of them. We also see, at the same time, how these flows of thought, art, science and products emerged from sources outside the Americas to then take root in and beyond the United States. The authors in this special volume are devising conceptual tools to analyze this multiplicity across continents and also at the level of particular nations and localities. Concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality and astronoetics are brought to shed light on these complex crossings, giving us new ways to look at the intricacy of these distance-crossing flows. India, perhaps surprisingly, emerges as an important cultural interlocutor, beginning with the idealized, imagined versions of Indian spirituality that fueled the romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists, to the importance of Indian dance pioneers in the world stage during the first part of the twentieth century and the current importance of India as a player in the race to space. 

Beyond Trouillot

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-154
Author(s):  
Marlene L. Daut
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Writings

This essay explores the genealogy of historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s writings as related to broader trends in historical scholarship. The author suggests that it was through Silencing the Past’s acceptance and ascendance within the very North Atlantic “guild” that Trouillot deconstructs in his historical writings that the ideas of nineteenth-century Haitian historians such as Baron de Vastey, Hérard Dumesle, Beaubrun Ardouin, and Thomas Madiou produced an immeasurable influence on the direction of historical scholarship across the world. The author argues that the influence of these nineteenth-century Haitian authors can be seen everywhere in social history, especially in the concept of history from below, even though most historians in Europe and the United States have never even heard the names of these other Haitian authors.

To 1750

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William H. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American History ◽  
East Coast ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Columbian Exposition ◽  
The Republic

IN THE LATTER part of the nineteenth century, east coast city dwellers in the United States had difficulty repressing a sense of their own persistent cultural inferiority vis-à-vis London and Paris. At the same time a great many old-stock Americans were dismayed by the stream of immigrants coming to these shores whose diversity called the future cohesion of the Republic into question almost as seriously as the issue of slavery had done in the decades before the Civil War. In such a climate of opinion, the unabashed provinciality of Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861-1932) paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at a meeting of the newly founded American Historical Association in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), began within less than a decade to resound like a trumpet call, though whether it signalled advance or retreat remained profoundly ambiguous....

3. Global America

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-62
Author(s):  
Andrew Preston
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
World War ◽  
Wealthy Country ◽  
The World ◽  
A Minor

By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had become the world’s preeminent economic power. Yet for such a large and wealthy country, by 1890 the United States was in a curious position: it was an economic colossus, but a diplomatic and military dwarf. In comparison to the great powers of Europe or Japan, America was a minor actor on the world stage. That would all soon change. ‘Global America’ explores two phenomena—globalization and world war—that brought America deeper into world affairs. By the end of the period, in 1919, the United States had become one of the greatest powers of the world—and yet refused to play its part.

Prize Law and Modern Conditions

1931 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-641
Author(s):  
Thomas Baty
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Ideal

It has been the peculiar glory of the United States in history to be a great neutral Power and the champion of neutral rights. From the earliest days of the republic, the sentiments of her statesmen, of Washington and Hamilton no less than of Jefferson and Franklin, were whole-heartedly for peace and neutrality, for the protection of the merchant against the soldier. And throughout the nineteenth century, the world acclaimed neutrality with her, and regarded the United States as the standing exemplar of a Peace Power. It was recognized that there might indeed be excusable wars, just wars, necessary wars. But the ideal of the nineteenth century was peace. Just and necessary as his cause might be, the belligerent was an ipso facto nuisance. He must be allowed to interfere as little as possible with the peaceful affairs of the world. On any doubtful question of interference with neutral commerce, the presumption was against him. He had always been a nuisance, and he was coming to be an anachronism. As an anachronistic nuisance, the scales were heavily poised against a belligerent.

scholarly journals Complementary and Competitive Regimes of Accumulation: Natural Resources and Development in the World-System

2012 ◽  
pp. 50-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astra Bonini
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
World Economy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Economic Mobility ◽  
The World ◽  
Post War

During the post-war period, natural resource production has often been associated withperipheralization in the world-economy. This paper seeks to demonstrate that this associationdoes not hold when examined from a long-term perspective, and explains the conditions underwhich natural resource production can support upward economic mobility in the world-system.First, this paper provides evidence that the production of cash crops and resource extraction hasnot always equaled peripheralization in the world-economy, as demonstrated by, among otherthings, the upward economic mobility of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealandduring the nineteenth century. It then puts forth a new hypothesis that the existence ofopportunities for raw material producing countries depends on whether the hegemonic regime ofaccumulation at a given time structures the economy in a way that is either complementary orcompetitive to the economic development of raw material producing countries. By examining theBritish centered regime of accumulation during the nineteenth century, we find that it wascomparatively complementary to economic development in raw material producing countrieswhereas the twentieth century United States centered regime was comparatively competitive withraw material producers. Based on a comparison with Britain and the United States, the paperalso suggests that China’s increasingly central role in the world-economy may be comparativelycomplementary to economic development in raw material producing countries.

The Mercersburg Theology Historically Considered

1912 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 117-149
Author(s):  
George Warren Richards
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
German Philosophy ◽  
Franklin County ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Mercersburg Theology ◽  
Marshall College ◽  
The Town

The Mercersburg Theology derived its name from the town of Mercersburg in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Here was the seat of Marshall College from 1835 to 1853, and of The Theological Seminary of the Reformed Church in the United States from 1837 to 1871. While Mercersburg gave the institutions “a local habitation and a name,” they owed their distinctive doctrines to the genius of the German and the Swiss Reformed people in America and to the influence of the contemporary German philosophy and theology.

The Civil War and U.S. World Power

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Sexton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
World Power ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The World

Jay Sexton’s opening essay focuses on the role of the Civil War in the realization of U.S. national and global power in the nineteenth century. Though the Civil War gave evidence of the immense military and economic power of the United States, he shows, the projection of that power on the world stage also required foreign collaboration.

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