Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Porterfield ◽  
John Corrigan ◽  
Darren E. Grem
Keyword(s):  
Religious Organizations ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Marketing Tool ◽  
Commercial Organizations

Beginning with the intertwining of commerce and Christianity in the colonial era, the Introduction offers a historical framework for understanding the evolving relationship between American religious organizations and consumer capitalism. From the move toward parity between religious and commercial organizations under the aegis of contract law in the early American republic to the infusion of business practices into religious organizations beginning in the nineteenth century, and finally to recent equations of religion and prosperity and the strategic use of religion as a marketing tool for business growth, this chapter identifies business practices and economic theories embedded within the history of American religious organizations. The chapter calls for more attention to the business side of religion as not only a neglected aspect of American religious history but also a new way of understanding that history.

Introduction

Horace Holley ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
James P. Cousins
Keyword(s):  
History Of Education ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Transylvania University

The introduction places the life of Horace Holley in the context of the history of education, the history of Kentucky, and the history of the early American republic. It begins with a summary of Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to Lexington in May 1825, reviews Horace’s career at Transylvania University, and provides an overview of the book. It also includes a summary of scholarship related to the life and times of Horace Holley. The introduction outlines the scope and method of research as well as the significance of the project. It concludes with individual chapter summaries that outline themes and historical contexts developed throughout the book.

VENUS ON THE SOFA: WOMEN, NEOCLASSICISM, AND THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLINE WINTERER
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Self ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Early National ◽  
Mercy Otis Warren ◽  
History Of

What did early national Americans mean when they articulated fears of “luxury and effeminacy,” those twin sins of a republic that idolized the classical virtues of manly self-restraint? This essay argues that the fear of luxury and effeminacy circulated not just as airy metaphor but as palpable reality, specifically in the figure of the female recumbent on the sofa. The article traces separately the careers of Enlightenment Venus, who especially in her recumbent form embodied fears of passion in a republic built on reasoned consent, and the sofa, a piece of neoclassical furniture that rose to great popularity at this time and was envisioned as both effeminate and luxurious in fictional and nonfiction writing. The essay then joins the two figures of recumbent Venus and the sofa, showing how they were mutually enabling, and how they entered into early national conversations about labor and race. It concludes by examining how two educated American women, the self-described Roman matrons Mercy Otis Warren and Martha Bayard Smith, incorporated the image of the supine woman and her implied sofa into fictional writings about classical polities in danger. By knitting political ideologies, imaginative worlds, and neoclassical objects, the essay suggests a way for historians to flesh out the intellectual history of early national women, showing how they could participate in a conversation about modern politics and classical antiquity from which we have assumed they were largely disbarred.

Religion and American Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 277-294
Author(s):  
Daniel K. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Religion And Politics ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Moral Regulation ◽  
Early American ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

This article surveys the intersection of religion and politics in America from the colonial era to the present, with a particular focus on the controversies surrounding religiously inspired political causes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article argues that religion (and, in particular, Protestantism and Catholic Christianity) has always played a central role in American politics, and that religious ideologies have inspired both liberal and conservative political movements. In the colonial era and the early American republic, controversies over religion focused primarily on disputes about church establishment and religious liberty, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, controversies over religion and politics increasingly centered on debates over religiously inspired moral regulation. Whether the issue was the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century or regulation of abortion in recent decades, America’s culture wars were usually political contests between competing sets of religiously inspired arguments.

The Early Republic, 1789–1815

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-61
Author(s):  
John L. Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Early Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Past Half Century ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Past Half

The twenty-five-year political history of the early American republic, covering the period from the first federal election through the War of 1812, critically shaped the terms and path of American politics over the ensuing two centuries. During this time the United States emerged from the volatility of revolutionary politics to establish the bipolar party structure that has dominated the American political landscape ever since. The central ideological debate over the power of the national government was shaped by classical understandings of politics and by powerfully contested interests. This essay begins with a short chronological summary of the politics of the period, and then turns to the five broad frameworks that historians of the politics of the early republic have addressed over the past half-century: party structure, republican ideology, political culture, slavery, and state-formation.

Bound Together: The Intimacies of Music-Book Collecting in the Early American Republic

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
GLENDA GOODMAN
Keyword(s):  
Early American Republic ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Early American ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Book Collecting ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Domestic Labour ◽  
Structural Levels ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractThis article is a microhistory of music collecting in eighteenth-century America. It focuses on the life and collection of an elite white woman, Sally Brown, who gathered an amount of music that was unusual for women in the USA at that time. She was able to do so because her family had a successful mercantile business, one that included the slave trade. Sally’s experiences shed light on the gendered history of amateur music-making, which this article posits were connected to other gendered forms of domestic labour in the early American republic. By tracing how Sally acquired music, this article demonstrates the importance both of affective, personal ties and of the anonymized labour of the global trade network, which supplied her and other consumers with music-book materials. This article argues that, in ways with which musicological scholarship has yet to reckon, intimacy and labour contributed to music collecting at both individual and structural levels.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. xxiv-4
Author(s):  
Philip Barnard ◽  
Hilary Emmett ◽  
Stephen Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Short Fiction ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Early American ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown provides an up-to-date survey of the life of and full range of writings by Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), a key writer of the Atlantic revolutionary age and the early American republic. Through the late twentieth century, Brown was best known as an important author of political romances in the Gothic mode that were widely influential in the Romantic era and has generated large amounts of scholarship as a crucial figure in the history of the American novel. More recent work recognizes him likewise as an influential editor, historian, and writer in other genres such as poetry, short fiction, and essays and as a figure whose work resonated throughout the Atlantic world of the revolutionary age. The Oxford Handbook’s thirty-five chapters build on the research of the most recent scholarly generation to introduce readers to Brown and explore his wide-ranging work.

Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic

2005 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 872
Author(s):  
Donald J. Ratcliffe ◽  
Jeffrey L. Pasley ◽  
Andrew W. Robertson ◽  
David Waldstreicher
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
History Of

Cultivated by Hand

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenda Goodman
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Early American ◽  
Amateur Musicians ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material History ◽  
New Nation

Hundreds of volumes filled with hand-copied music sit in archives and libraries across the United States. Created by amateur musicians who came of age in the years following the American Revolution. These manuscript books reveal the existence of a musical culture that was deeply intertwined in people’s everyday lives and at the same time in powerful historical forces that were shaping the new nation. Cultivated by Hand is a social and material history of musical amateurism. It uncovers the influences that directed amateurs’ experiences, delves into how those influences manifested in individuals’ lives, and reveals the hitherto unknown importance of music book creation and collection in early American musical life. This book argues that amateur music-making played an important and heretofore unacknowledged role in the making of gender, class, race, and nation in the early American republic. Moreover, much of the repertoire collected by relatively elite, white amateurs was imported from Britain, undermining concurrent efforts to foster a national musical style. Cultivated by Hand situates the making of manuscript books in the contexts of technology, handcrafts, and sociaability, exploring manuscript’s relationship to print as well as changes in music consumerism in the late eighteenth century. Creating manuscripts required hours of work, yet the labor of amateur musicians, particularly women, was discursively and economically devalued. The gendered attacks obscured the importance of copying and performing music for the self-fashioning of the first generation of amateurs in the new nation, who used their efforts to cultivate gentility, piety, and erudition, as well as sensible connection to others.

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