A Dream of the Judgment Day

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Howard Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early American History ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary United States

The End is near! This phrase, so well known in the contemporary United States, invokes images of manic self-proclaimed prophets of doom standing on street corners shouting their warnings and predictions to amused or indifferent passersby. However, such proclamations have long been a feature of the American cultural landscape, and were never exclusively the domain of wild-eyed fanatics. A Dream of the Judgment Day describes the origins and development of American apocalypticism and millennialism from the beginnings of English colonization of North America in the early 1600s through the formation of the United States and its travails in the nineteenth century. It explores the reasons why varieties of millennialism are an essential component of American exceptionalism, and focuses upon the nation’s early history to better establish how millennialism and apocalypticism are the keys to understanding early American history and religious identity. This sweeping history of eschatological thought in early America encompasses not just traditional and non-traditional Christian beliefs in the end of the world, but also how American Indians and African Americans have likewise been influenced by, and have expressed, those beliefs in unique ways.

FROM POLITY TO EXCHANGE: THE FATE OF DEMOCRACY IN THE CHANGING FIELDS OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 867-888
Author(s):  
JOHANN N. NEEM
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Strong Response ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Early American History ◽  
Early American ◽  
Academic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Gordon Wood stoked a strong response from his fellow early American historians in 2015 when, in the pages of theWeekly Standard, he accused the Omohundro Institute of Early American History, publishers of the prestigiousWilliam and Mary Quarterly, of abandoning interest in the development of the United States. “A new generation of historians is no longer interested in how the United States came to be,” Wood argued. “That kind of narrative history of the nation, they say, is not only inherently triumphalist but has a teleological bias built into it.” Wood blamed the shift away from the nation on historians’ interest in such issues as race and gender: “The inequalities of race and gender now permeate much of academic history-writing, so much so that the general reading public that wants to learn about the whole of our nation's past has had to turn to the history books written by nonacademics who have no PhDs and are not involved in the incestuous conversations of the academic scholars.” Of theWilliam and Mary Quarterly, Wood concluded, “without some kind of historical GPS, it is in danger of losing its way.”

IS THERE AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF EARLY AMERICAN WOMEN?

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLINE WINTERER
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
John Adams ◽  
James I ◽  
Early American History ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of

Catherine Kerrison, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)Susan Stabile, Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006)Consider Abigail Adams. Known to us mostly through over one thousand letters that she exchanged with her husband, John Adams, she was a woman of redoubtable intelligence and energy. Wife of the second president of the United States, she was mother to its sixth. She traveled to France and England, rubbing elbows with dukes and diplomats; she read deeply in history and literature; she supported the literacy of black children; she was a conduit for the American reception of Catharine Macaulay's republican-friendly History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (1763–8). The letters between John and Abigail fly so fast and furious, are so full of learned banter and palpable yearning, that their marriage appears strikingly modern, a union of equals. Let us not be deceived. Abigail Adams, like other women of her generation even in the social stratosphere, had no formal schooling, and her erudition was dwarfed by the massive learning bestowed upon John. He had a Harvard BA and read law for three years. He took for granted a vast public arena in which to unleash his colossal, if tortured, political ambitions. Abigail never published a word.

Reverberations for American Indians, Native Hawai’ians, and Group Rights

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Minow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

Usually left out of discussions of school desegregation, the historic treatments of American Indians and Native Hawai’ians in the development of schooling in the United States was a corollary of conquest and colonialism. As late as the 1950s, forced assimilation and eradication of indigenous cultures pervaded what was considered the “education” of students in these groups. The social, political, and legal civil rights initiatives surrounding Brown helped to inspire a rights consciousness among Indian and Native Hawai’ian reformers and activists, who embraced the ideal of equal opportunity while reclaiming cultural traditions. Between the 1960s and 2007, complex fights over ethnic classification, separation, integration, and self-determination emerged for both American Indians and Native Hawai’ians. Their struggles, crucial in themselves, also bring to the fore a challenging underlying problem: are distinct individuals or groups the proper unit of analysis and protection in the pursuit of equality? The centrality of the individual to law and culture in the United States tends to mute this question. Yet in this country as well as elsewhere, equal treatment or equal opportunity has two faces: promoting individual development and liberty, regardless of race, culture, religion, gender, or other group-based characteristic, and protection for groups that afford their members meaning and identity. Nowhere is the tension between these two alternatives more apparent than in schooling, which involves socialization of each new generation in the values and expectations of their elders. Will that socialization direct each individual to a common world focused on the academic and social mobility of distinct individuals or will it inculcate traditions and values associated with particular groups? Even in the United States, devoted to inclusive individualism, the Supreme Court rejected a statute requiring students to attend schools run by the government and created exemptions from compulsory school fines when they burdened a group’s practices and hopes for their children. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court respected the rights of parents to select private schooling in order to inculcate a religious identity or other “additional obligations.”

scholarly journals A Tocquevillian Examination of Individualism in Early American Federalism

Federalism-E ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-16
Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Plante
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Early American ◽  
Unique Experience ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Almost All

Many pundits commenting on early American affairs, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, believed that the United States of America benefitted from a unique societal and geographic context which would ultimately drive the narrative behind what is now being called American exceptionalism. This unique experience has permeated almost all facets of its state-centric federal system. The maximization of individual liberty was a driving factor in the American Revolution and it continued to drive a unique sense of nationalism which was later evoked on a continental basis. The American Revolution gave rise to a national emancipation movement driven by the revisionist values of liberty, egalitarianism, individualism and populism. The American Revolution held these values highly and attempted to redress longstanding grievances with an oppressive colonial master. Despite the appeal that liberty and egalitarianism had to the American individual, the United States had not completely broken away from European history, as it had retained class inequities, imperialism and war. The inescapable influences and pervasions of the old world would invariably conflict with the nationalistically driven ideals of emancipation, where the maximization of individual freedom, through the nation is seen as the true definition of freedom. [...]

Nativism and Religion in America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodger M. Payne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
World Order ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Antebellum Era

Nativism describes an ideology that favors the rights and privileges of the “native born” population over and against those of “foreign” status, however these categories might be defined and ascribed. In the United States, the term has usually been employed to designate hostility against foreign immigration, although nativist arguments have been used against various internal minority groups as well. Although the term is often used as a synonym for the anti-Catholicism of the antebellum era, nativism has usually focused its apprehensions on ethnic and racial differences rather than religious diversity; since religious identity is often interdependent with racial or ethnic heritage, however, any religious divergence from the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture likewise falls under suspicion. While not all forms of religious intolerance in the United States have been grounded in nativist attitudes and activities, the relationship between antipathy toward immigration and antagonism toward certain religions has been a recurrent and resilient theme in American culture. From the various forms of political and social enmity directed against Catholic immigrants during the antebellum era to the passage of Asian “exclusion acts” and the rise of anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and from attitudes toward the civilizing “mission” of the United States to contemporary expressions of Islamophobia, antagonism toward the foreign Other has often been inseparable from expressions of religious chauvinism and xenophobia. Such chauvinism represents an appropriation of the idea of American exceptionalism by participating in the cultural mythology of the American civil religion, which posits both a divine origin of and special destiny for the United States. Scholars of American religion have long traced this theme of American exceptionalism, particularly as it has been expressed through the way in which Americans have read themselves into the biblical narrative as God’s “new Israel,” as a “shining city on a hill,” or as the location for the realization of the Christian millennial hope of a “new heaven and a new earth.” In less biblical but no less religious terms, the United States has been presented as the reification of a “new world order” (novus ordo seclorum, one of the three Latin mottos included on the Great Seal of the United States) or as offering humanity “the last best hope of earth.” By thus conceptualizing “America” as a type of utopian sacred space, these metaphors have simultaneously created the need for establishing the restrictions that mark one’s inclusion or exclusion in this redemptive process. Through identifying the foreign Other—by ethnicity, race, or religion—nativism has been one way to provide this religious function of defining the symbolic boundaries that keep this new “promised land” pure.

Congregants and Citizens: Religion and Naturalization among US Immigrants

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 674-706
Author(s):  
Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Immigrant Religion ◽  
Religious Membership ◽  
Christian Nationalism

Scholars and pundits have long debated whether religion helps new immigrants integrate politically in the United States. Those who see religion as an integrative institution cite the country’s history of vibrant religious congregationalism that supports connections between the native and foreign born, while critics point to anti-immigrant hostility, Christian nationalism, and patterns of religious membership that can reinforce social segregation. This article aims to adjudicate this debate, using a large sample of survey data, the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), fielded among new legal residents in 2003/2004. I find that religious membership is associated with increased probability of naturalizing in a short (3.5–7 years) timeframe and is stronger for those with greater human capital and income and longer tenure in the United States. Involvement in US-origin congregations also exhibits a stronger effect on naturalization than involvement in national-origin congregations. Additionally, I find that religious minorities, though less likely to be members of congregations, are independently more likely than Christian immigrants to naturalize in the same timeframe. These results are interpreted as support for a view of organized religion as a setting for American identity formation and a basis for mobilizing resources in response to anti-immigrant sentiment. For certain groups, organized religion seems to support a type of selective acculturation that combines American citizenship with the establishment and/or retention of a distinct ethno-religious identity. The article thus affirms, with caveats, the broader relevance of a long tradition of ethnographic scholarship on immigrant religion in the United States.

How Exceptional Is the History of Violence and Criminal Justice in the United States? Variation across Time and Space as the Keys to Understanding Homicide and Punitiveness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randolph Roth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Complex Issue ◽  
Long Span ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter contends that American exceptionalism is a far more complex issue than it initially appears. Which nations are exceptional? When, and in what ways? Once the question of exceptionalism is asked over a long span of time, its answer is almost always fluid and complicated. Hence, the chapter turns to comparative historical research in isolating the most important causes of incidents like homicide and punitive penal policies, by showing that those causes recur again and again in the presence of certain phenomena. It asserts that history shows that the relationship between crime and punitiveness is far from simple.

The Early American Origins of Entitlements

1996 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 360-404
Author(s):  
Laura S. Jensen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Health Security ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
First Time

There is perhaps no topic that has generated more sustained interest and controversy in the United States during the past three decades than the public policies called “entitlements.” From the Great Society innovations of the 1960s to the guaranteed income plan of the 1970s to the “health security” proposal of the early 1990s, debate over the issue of which U.S. citizens should be entitled to what kind of national-level benefits has been a constant in American political life. Though consensus has occasionally been reached, moments of accord have been fragile and fleeting. Late 1995 and early 1996 found both President William Clinton and a large, bipartisan majority of Congress targeting poor Americans and their benefits, advocating an “end to welfare as we know it.” Yet interbranch disagreement over the way that “welfare” reform should be implemented reached such heights that the annual U.S. budget development process broke down, resulting in repeated shutdowns of government agencies and the threat that, for the first time in the history of the American nation, the United States would default on its obligations to its creditors.

The Chinese Art “Arms Race”

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-256
Author(s):  
K. Ian Shin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chinese Art ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
Metropolitan Museum Of Art ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of

Interest in Chinese art has swelled in the United States in recent years. In 2015, the collection of the late dealer-collector Robert Hatfield Ellsworth fetched no less than $134 million at auction (much of it from Mainland Chinese buyers), while the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew over 800,000 visitors to its galleries for the blockbuster show “China: Through the Looking Glass”—the fifth most-visited exhibition in the museum’s 130-year history. The roots of this interest in Chinese art reach back to the first two decades of the 20th Century and are grounded in the geopolitical questions of those years. Drawing from records of major collectors and museums in New York and Washington, D.C., this article argues that the United States became a major international center for collecting and studying Chinese art through cosmopolitan collaboration with European partners and, paradoxically, out of a nationalist sentiment justifying hegemony over a foreign culture derived from an ideology of American exceptionalism in the Pacific. This article frames the development of Chinese art as a contested process of knowledge production between the United States, Europe, and China that places the history of collecting in productive conversation with the history of Sino-American relations and imperialism.

American Exceptionalism and the Naturalization of “America”

Prospects ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Social Recovery ◽  
The 19Th Century

American exceptionalism, Joyce Appleby has recently reminded us, is “America's peculiar form of Eurocentrism.” Now that the multicultural history of the United States is finally being written, nothing would justify another look at American exceptionalism, except perhaps the need to examine the intellectual ways that have hidden American historical and social diversity for so long. In this essay I basically argue that a certain appropriation of the 18th-Century conception of nature as “what is” played a role also in the development of American exceptionalism. The naturalist rhetoric in American discourse in the 19th Century, I further argue, ran parallel to the most savage depredations of nature ever performed by humankind. I am particularly interested in foregrounding the discrepancy between the steady construction of that greatest of modern artifacts, the American nation, and its concomitant self-justification as a thing of nature. The other side of the commodification of America is its naturalization, an idea that I find is supported, whether critically or uncritically, by many American poets and artists. In recent times we have witnessed a number of ecological attempts at the social recovery of nature in the most advanced capitalist countries, including, of course, the United States. I am not concerned here with these developments, of which ecofeminism is arguably one of the most interesting ones.

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