Heavens on Earth: Christian Utopias in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century America

2010 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 396-418
Author(s):  
Christopher Clark

In the rich and complex history of American Christianity, utopias in one form or another have played a constant part. From the early puritan settlements onwards, North America has played a distinctive role in the Christian imagination — as a place of refuge, as a place for experimentation, as the founding-spot for new sects, churches, and denominations. Among the experimenters have been many groups of Christians in America who have, over more than two centuries, gathered themselves into communal organizations — what participants and commentators now call ‘intentional communities’. Their numbers have been almost impossible to measure accurately; one authoritative listing counts about six hundred communal groups with over fifteen hundred separate settlements in the USA before 1965, and there will have been thousands more communes formed since then. Membership figures are even harder to pin down, but it is certain that the numbers of people who have at one time or another lived in an American intentional community runs into the hundreds of thousands.

1877 ◽  
Vol 4 (11) ◽  
pp. 481-496
Author(s):  
Searles V. Wood

From no part of the world have we of late years derived more additions to the Geological Record than from North America. Besides important additions to the earliest pages of that record, the rich collections made by the United States Surveyors, both of fauna and flora, from the Cretaceous, Eocene, and Miocene deposits, have thrown much light upon the life history of the Earth; and it is even contended that they have bridged over the interval which, notwithstanding the Maestricht beds, the Pisolitic, and the Faxoe Limestones, still remains sharply marked between the Cretaceous and Tertiary formations of Europe so far as they have yet been examined.


2003 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter F. Merenda

This article presents a brief history of psychometrics and the development in the USA shortly after the end of World War II of university graduate programs to educate and train psychometricians. Three decades later these programs in North America were on a steady decline. But, at the same time there was a surge in universities abroad in producing well-trained psychometricians, particularly in Western European countries, especially The Netherlands. Broad implications of the effect of this movement on psychological testing are suggested.


2021 ◽  
pp. 79-81
Author(s):  
Mark Finke ◽  
Liz Koutsos

Abstract This chapter discussed the history of the sale and production of live insects as ingredients in pet food and animal feed in North America, Canada, and USA. Highlights focused on the purpose of using insects as feed and on the currents species available in the market such as crickets Acheta domesticus, Gryllodes sigillatus, yellow mealworms (Tenebrio molitor), superworms (Zophobas morio), waxworms (Galleria mellonella), black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) (Hermetia illucens), silkworms (Bombyx mori) and fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila hydei).


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 95-115
Author(s):  
Brandon Plewe

Historical place databases can be an invaluable tool for capturing the rich meaning of past places. However, this richness presents obstacles to success: the daunting need to simultaneously represent complex information such as temporal change, uncertainty, relationships, and thorough sourcing has been an obstacle to historical GIS in the past. The Qualified Assertion Model developed in this paper can represent a variety of historical complexities using a single, simple, flexible data model based on a) documenting assertions of the past world rather than claiming to know the exact truth, and b) qualifying the scope, provenance, quality, and syntactics of those assertions. This model was successfully implemented in a production-strength historical gazetteer of religious congregations, demonstrating its effectiveness and some challenges.


2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Goggin

Interest in the fate of the German psychoanalysts who had to flee Hitler's Germany and find refuge in a new nation, such as the United States, has increased. The ‘émigré research’ shows that several themes recur: (1) the theme of ‘loss’ of one's culture, homeland, language, and family; and (2) the ambiva-lent welcome these émigrés received in their new country. We describe the political-social-cultural context that existed in the United States during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Documentary evidence found in the FBI files of three émigré psychoanalysts, Clara Happel, Martin Grotjahn, and Otto Fenichel, are then presented in combination with other source material. This provides a provisional impression of how each of these three individuals experienced their emigration. As such, it gives us elements of a history. The FBI documents suggest that the American atmosphere of political insecurity and fear-based ethnocentric nationalism may have reinforced their old fears of National Socialism, and contributed to their inclination to inhibit or seal off parts of them-selves and their personal histories in order to adapt to their new home and become Americanized. They abandoned the rich social, cultural, political tradition that was part of European psychoanalysis. Finally, we look at these elements of a history in order to ask a larger question about the appropriate balance between a liberal democratic government's right to protect itself from internal and external threats on the one hand, or crossover into the blatant invasion of civil rights and due process on the other.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 32-54
Author(s):  
Silvia Spitta

Sandra Ramos (b. 1969) is one of the few artists to reflect critically on both sides of the Cuban di-lemma, fully embodying the etymological origins of the word in ancient Greek: di-, meaning twice, and lemma, denoting a form of argument involving a choice between equally unfavorable alternatives. Throughout her works she shines a light on the dilemmas faced by Cubans whether in Cuba or the United States, underlining the bad personal and political choices people face in both countries. During the hard 1990s, while still in Havana, the artist focused on the traumatic one-way journey into exile by thousands, as well as the experience of profound abandonment experienced by those who were left behind on the island. Today she lives in Miami and operates a studio there as well as one in Havana. Her initial disorientation in the USA has morphed into an acerbic representation and critique of the current administration and a deep concern with the environmental collapse we face. A buffoonlike Trumpito has joined el Bobo de Abela and Liborio in her gallery of comic characters derived from the rich Cuban graphic arts tradition where she was formed. While Cuba is now represented as a rotten cake with menacing flies hovering over it ready to pounce, a bombastic Trumpito marches across the world stage, trampling everything underfoot, a dollar sign for a face.


Author(s):  
Stefan Winter

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.


Author(s):  
Peter T. Struck

This book casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination—the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. The book reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact—that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights—and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, the book demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, the book notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, this book illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.


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