“As a City on a Hill”

2021 ◽  
pp. 157-168
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wellman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Origin ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
History Texts ◽  
Origin Myths ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Christian Nation ◽  
English Colonies ◽  
Religious Fervor

These curricula proudly distinguish themselves from other histories of America; they intend, as the Abeka textbook puts it, to offer “uplifting history texts,” allowing students to understand “its traditional values.” This chapter explores these curricula’s commitment to providential history as English colonies founded the Christian nation. This story of unquestionable religious fervor and Christian virtue relies on nineteenth-century national origin myths. The chapter explores the central arguments used to make this case. They reject Jamestown because the colony adopted the unchristian practice of sharing goods and was no model of virtue. They point to the Massachusetts colonies as the establishment of a Christian city on a hill and herald the Mayflower Compact as the source of the subsequent founding documents of the new nation. They disparage or exclude other colonies and native peoples.

The Christian Nation

2021 ◽  
pp. 169-188
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wellman
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
National Origin ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
American Historical Association ◽  
Association Member ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Origin Myths ◽  
Christian Nation

This chapter begins with the question posed by a historian to the American Historical Association member forum, “Why do my students think America was founded as a Christian nation?” It explores how these curricula sustain crucial elements of that narrative by denying the influence of the Enlightenment and by making crucial claims about the founding: the Declaration of Independence defined a Christian nation; the American Revolution was either a Christian cause or not a revolution at all; and the Constitution, though silent on religion, nonetheless confirmed the intent of unquestionably Christian founders to establish a Christian nation. The chapter also highlights the nuanced work of historians of religion on these questions to show that such arguments contradict the historical consensus, are unduly simplistic, and are rooted in national origin myths.

Covenant

2018 ◽  
pp. 117-154
Author(s):  
Timothy Matovina
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Strong Association ◽  
Our Lady Of Guadalupe ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
National Symbol ◽  
The People ◽  
New Nation

Father Miguel Hidalgo famously adopted the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe as the banner for the insurrectionary movement that led to Mexican independence. Following independence, Guadalupe’s strong association with national identity led interpreters to emphasize that her appearance established a singular election of Mexico as her chosen nation. Guadalupan preachers addressed a variety of national concerns through allusions to biblical notions of covenant, avowing that Guadalupe had established a pact with the Mexican people in similar fashion to God’s covenants with Noah, David, and especially Moses and the people of Israel. Nineteenth-century Guadalupan preachers addressed the theme of covenant as Mexicans won their independence, struggled to establish a new nation, and mounted a successful campaign for papal authorization of an 1895 Guadalupe coronation. This chapter examines their theological claims, the growing devotion to Guadalupe as Mexico’s national symbol, and the unprecedented increase in devotion to Guadalupe among native peoples.

Natives, Religion, and Race in Colonial America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
The Other ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Modern Sense ◽  
Over Time

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.

Transformation of Christian Ritual in the Pacific: Samoan White Sunday

1988 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Roach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
The Pacific

Nineteenth-century LMS agents brought to Samoa, along with other elements of Christianity, the festival of Pentecost. In its new home, however, the celebration of this festival was changed from May or June each year to October. More important, in Samoa it is also a ritual of status reversal. This article gives a detailed description of Pentecost, referred to in Samoa as White Sunday or as Children's Sunday, in a Western Samoan village and shows how a Christian festival has been reinterpreted in terms of traditional values and meanings.

scholarly journals Presidential Address: The Empire Strikes Back: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Canadian Secret Service

2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Gregory S. Kealey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Secret Police ◽  
Lower Canada ◽  
Secret Service ◽  
American Nationalism ◽  
Permanent Home ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Rural Police

Abstract While the history of the RCMP security service is becoming better known, study of its nineteenth-century predecessors is just beginning. From experiments with a rural police force established in Lower Canada in the aftermath of the 1837 Rebellions, the United Provinces of Canada created two secret police forces in 1864 to protect the border from American invasion. With the end of the Civil War, these forces turned to protecting the Canadas from Fenian activities. The Dominion Police, established in 1868, provided a permanent home for the secret service. The NWMP followed in 1873. Unlike the English, whose Victorian liberalism was suspicious of political and secret police, Canadians appear to have been much more accepting of such organisations and did not challenge John A. Macdonald's creation or control of a secret police. Republicanism, whether in the guise of Quebec, Irish or American nationalism, was seen as antithetical to the new nation of Canada, and a secret police was deemed necessary to protect the nation against it.

Building a State and a Nation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Developing World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Character ◽  
New Nation

This chapter analyzes three U.S. performances: the launch of a new nation, continental expansion, and national consolidation. The mid-nineteenth century, notably the 1860s, seems to have brought a spasm of special character across much of the developed or developing world. Centralizing states swung into place offering strong nationalisms, new constitutional formulas, a spirit of reform in state and economy, and a bent for commodifying property and homogenizing the rights of citizenship across entire populations. In these respects, the 1860s seem to have brought a transnational ideological high. Ensuing years brought a recession from it, as the promises and commitments of the decade wore down. In the United States, the thrusts of rights expansion lost force in the 1870s.

Expectations: Meek’s Cutoff

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Dawn Hall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Aspect Ratio ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Female Gaze

This chapter focuses on Reichardt’s genre mixing, slow cinematic techniques, minimalism, neorealism and her use of the “female gaze” as well as “the open image” or “crystal image” as defined by Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn. Reichardt subtly shifts the environmental and political issues highlighted in her prior films back to the nineteenth century debate of Manifest Destiny and its effects on the landscape and native peoples. Based on historical events during the 1845 “terrible trail” tragedy, Meek’s Cutoff explores contemporary political issues of leadership and community by loosely linking Meek’s violence with George W. Bush era torture tactics and foreign policy. In her feminist Western, Reichardt used an aspect ratio of 1:37:1 creating a claustrophobic framing aesthetic and while this echoes the pioneer women’s vision during their long march in the dessert, it also created distribution concerns.

Indians, Modernity, and History

2020 ◽  
pp. 288-296
Author(s):  
Kate Flint
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Preservation ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
James Welch ◽  
Transatlantic History ◽  
Contemporary Writing ◽  
Modes Of Thought

This chapter assesses how attitudes started to shift at the beginning of the twentieth century—partly under the influence of Western movies, partly as modernist writers and artists started to idealize the Indian for their own ends, and as other wannabe Indians, most notably Grey Owl, began to develop the association of Indianness with environmental preservation. It also looks at some contemporary writing by native peoples—especially James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko—that aims to reappropriate nineteenth-century transatlantic history in a range of imaginative ways. By writing this fiction today, both Silko and Welch reclaim and rewrite the possibilities inherent for native peoples in the late nineteenth century. In so doing, they demonstrate that despite the importance, then and now, of tradition as both concept and practice within Indian society, identity, and modes of thought, it stands not isolated from modernity, but rather in mediation and dialogue with it. At a time when critical attention within American studies has increasingly turned toward imperialism and transnationalism, to explore the importance of the transatlantic Indian is to provide an important reminder that the internal colonial relations of the United States cannot be separated from these other trajectories.

Warring for America

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Physical Parameters ◽  
School Students ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Many

The aftershocks of the American Revolution reverberated through the early nineteenth century, leaving the new country unsettled and at odds with itself. The essays in Warring for America offer a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the internal divisions amongst the inhabitants of the early Republic that hindered the emergence of a coherent American nation as much as did the lingering impact of British imperial influence. Traditional understanding of the War of 1812 era as a moment that reaffirmed the political independence of the United States, thereby ushering in a neat period of stability, have failed to explain the enduring struggle to define the social and physical parameters of the new nation that dominated much of the nineteenth century. By turning from high politics to cultural productions and material problems, the authors in this volume explore the many social and economic conflicts within the United States that were fought on cultural terrain. Wartime calls for unity only cast into sharper relief the arduous efforts of varied Americans to control the terms of inclusion or exclusion within their country. From presidents to African Free School students, from hack magazine writers to Choctaw mothers, Americans fought for country on the battleground of belonging.

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