Baptists in North America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill J. Leonard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Awkward Position ◽  
Group Hierarchy ◽  
Theological Vision

This chapter considers an unlikely trio of groups who opposed the Evangelical Protestant mainstream in nineteenth-century America: the Unitarians, the Quakers, and the Shakers. Each had to navigate two different forms of dissent: the external and the internal. When deciding how best to revise or contradict the hegemonic forms of Protestantism, these groups had certain goals and methods for interacting with those outside their fellowship. In time, they each also had to face a more pernicious adversary, the second generation of dissenters that grew within their own ranks. While these disparate traditions may appear to have little in common, each body faced many of the same questions as they asserted their distinct form of external cultural and religious correction. When articulating a theological vision that went against the mainstream, they had to determine how to serve that particular vision in a culture that did not share their theological views. Some withdrew from contact with outsiders and used their enclaves as a way to practise and preserve their vision of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. On the other hand, there were groups that deliberately sought to model correct religion for others, and thereby hoped to transform other religious groups by disseminating their theological vision beyond the confines of any type of self-imposed seclusion. As the decades passed, though, both sorts of groups were surprised by the inevitable challenges to their founding orthodoxy from within their own membership. This dissent among dissenters was, of course, an outgrowth of the very impulse that stood behind the earlier establishment of the group. Subsequent generations of membership often failed to realize that belonging to a group of dissenters might require adherence to a detailed theological vision. This tension between founding theology and ongoing interpretation could leave a Dissenting group hierarchy in the awkward position of having to restrict innovation, an irony not lost on subsequent generations of members. This chapter asks how Unitarians, Shakers, and Quakers in nineteenth-century America addressed these two aspects of Dissent: external and internal. How did each group perceive their relationship to American culture and other more mainstream religious groups? How did they encounter and negotiate dissent from within their ranks? In each group there was an evolution over the course of the nineteenth century that complicates any interpretation of these multifaceted embodiments of Protestant Dissenting traditions in the United States.

Teaching National Identity and Alterity

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-126
Author(s):  
Bahar Gürsel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Primary Schools ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Race Ethnicity

The swift and profound transformations in technology and industry that the United States began to experience in the late 1800s manifested themselves in school textbooks, which presented different patterns of race, ethnicity, and otherness. They also displayed concepts like national identity, exceptionalism, and the superiority of Euro-American civilization. This article aims to demonstrate, via an analysis of two textbooks, how world geography was taught to children in primary schools in nineteenth century America. It shows that the development of American identity coincided with the emergence of the realm of the “other,” that is, with the intensification of racial attitudes and prejudices, some of which were to persist well into the twentieth century.

Equal Rights, Privilege, and the Pursuit of Inequality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard D. Brown
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
First Century ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Individual Property ◽  
Nineteenth Century America

While cherishing ideas of equal rights and equality, Americans have simultaneously sought inequality. The Revolution of 1776 committed Americans to the idea of equal rights, but just as fundamentally it dedicated the United States to the protection and increase of individual property and the power to direct it to heirs. Although equal rights and individual property rights have proved compatible with religious and ethnic equality, social and economic inequality, both meritocratic and inherited, have been integral to the American social and political order. Moreover, based on the emerging biologies of race and sex, the idea of equal rights for people of color and for women faced new barriers in nineteenth-century America and beyond into the twenty-first century.

On Tour before Domestic Audiences

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Abelson Macleod
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
Cultural Activities ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Evolution Of Music ◽  
The U.S

This chapter focuses on Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler's piano recitals in the United States. It begins with a discussion of the development of an almost sacred canon of composers and the elevation of classical music to a virtual religious status as articulated by critic and transcendentalist John Sullivan Dwight and others. It then considers the bifurcation of various U.S. cultural activities into separate spheres—popular and elite—as described by historian Lawrence Levine, and how recent scholars have modified Levine's position with regard to the evolution of music in nineteenth-century America. The chapter also chronicles the practical aspects of touring in the nation, such as train travel, itineraries, packing lists, and hotels. Finally, it describes Bloomfield-Zeisler's recitals and how they compared with those of her contemporaries, both male and female; the U.S. audiences during that time—their makeup, behavior, etiquette, and their reactions to Bloomfield-Zeisler's performances; and how Bloomfield-Zeisler played.

scholarly journals America in an Arab Mirror

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-109
Author(s):  
Juliane Hammer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Us ◽  
Travel Accounts

How do Arab travelers view the US? Much has been written about how westerntravelers and scholars have seen and described the Orient, thereby not onlycreating an image but also transforming the reality of it. Looking at this anthologyone is reminded of Said's book Orienta/ism and inspired to ask whether asimilar process takes place in reverse. Not in terms of change but certainly increating an image of the unfamiliar as the other simultaneously admired andrejected.Kamal Abdel-Malek has collected and edited texts of twenty-seven Arab visitorsto the United States. Some came as students, others as accomplished scholars orcurious visitors. Each text is an excerpt of a longer text, usually a book, and allbooks were originally published in Arabic and have not been translated intoEnglish before. Also, as Abdel-Malek points out in his preface, the collectionrepresents most of the travel literature he was able to locate in Arabic and iscompleted by a list of all Arabic sources. Thus, this collection allows the readeraccess to a genre of Arabic literature otherwise not available.The travel accounts are organized in five sections and chronologically by year ofpublication within each section.The ftrst section is titled America in the Eyes of a Nineteenth-Century Amb andcontains one account of an Arab traveler to the US published in I 895. The authorpresents the reader with a comparison of what Arabs and Americans findimportant and how these preferences are diametrically opposed in most cases.In the second section Abdel-Malek has gathered a variety of accounts under thetitle The Making of an Image: America as the Unchanged Other, Ame1ica as theSeductive Female. The most interesting piece of this section is probably that ofSayyid Qutb, who studied in the US between 1948 and 1950 and published hisaccount under the title The America I have seen. Much of what he noted about theUS ln the first half of the 20th century, in my opinion, still holds true today. Qutbconcludes: "All that requires mind power and muscle are where American geniusshines, and all that requires spirit and emotion are where American naivete andprimitiveness become apparent .... All this does not mean that Americans are anation devoid of virtue, or else, what would have enabled them to live? Rather, itmeans that America's virtues are the virtues of production and organization, andnot those of human and social morals." (p. 26f.) ...

Women’s High-Wheel Bicycle Racing in Nineteenth-Century America: More than Salacious Entertainment

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-158
Author(s):  
M. Ann Hall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Small Group ◽  
Professional Sports ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Players ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Bicycle Racing ◽  
Working Class Women

During the nineteenth century in North America, a small group of working-class women turned to sport to earn a living. Among them were circus performers, race walkers, wrestlers, boxers, shooters, swimmers, baseball players, and bicycle racers. Through their athleticism, these women contested and challenged the prevailing gender norms, and at the same time expanded notions about Victorian women’s capabilities and appropriate work. This article focuses on one of these professional sports, namely high-wheel bicycle racing. Bicycle historians have mostly dismissed women’s racing during the brief high-wheel era of the 1880s as little more than sensational entertainment, and have not fully understood its importance. I hope to change these perceptions by providing evidence that female high-wheel racers in the United States, who often began as pedestriennes (race walkers), were superb athletes competing in an exciting, well-attended, and profitable sport.

Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Altman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
The United States ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Orientalism ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Oriental Mysticism

During the nineteenth century, Americans encountered Asia through a number of exchanges. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, this chapter surveys the development of American Orientalism across three areas: academic Orientalism, representative Orientalism, and Orientalist discourses of power. Academic Orientalism first developed in the United States as the work of British Orientalists in India filtered into the country. Later, Americans such as William D. Whitney placed American Orientalism on par with its European competitors. Meanwhile, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, imagined Asia as a land of Oriental mysticism and contemplation in contrast to American materialism and reason. Finally, the World’s Parliament of Religion in 1893 used representations of the Orient to bolster claims of American cultural supremacy. Through all of these examples, Orientalism collapsed the line between religion and race such that the Orient always represented racial and religious inferiority to white Christian America.

Well, I’ll Be Damned!

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Jerome P. Baggett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Western Religion

This chapter debunks three presumptions about atheism and three presumptions about American atheists themselves. Concerning atheism, it demonstrates that, rather than being something simple, atheism is actually quite complex and variegated. Rather than being new, it is actually a long-standing phenomenon, and to illustrate, this chapter focuses on various atheist roots, or styles of atheist thinking, that appear in ancient Greece. Instead of being something extrinsic to the development of Western religion and consciousness, atheism is actually a reflection of these. Concerning atheists in the United States, this chapter also demonstrates that they are generally not immoral, which they are widely presumed to be. Nor, on the other hand, are they necessarily more rational than their religious fellow citizens. Lastly, atheists are not an insignificant minority since the proportion of Americans who identify as atheist is larger than that of many well-known religious groups; in fact, their numbers and cultural influence seem to be growing.

The Telegraph in Nineteenth-Century America: Technology and Monopoly

1984 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 571-586 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Du Boff
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
And Diffusion

In the United States, the technological optimism that accompanied the birth and diffusion of the magnetic telegraph between 1844 and 1880 had few predecessors-if any. Commercial telegraphy was barely a year old in 1847 when the telegraph was seen as “facilitating Human Intercourse and producing Harmony among Men and Nations\….[I]t may be regarded as an important element in Moral Progress.” “The telegraph system is invaluable,” a business journalist declared twenty years later, “and when the missing links shall have been completed of the great chain that will bring all civilized nations into instantaneous communication with each other, it will also be found to be the most potent of all the means of civilization, and the most effective in breaking down the barriers of evil prejudice and custom that interfere with the universal exchange of commodities.”

Abortion Laws: Comparative and Feminist Perspectives in Australia, England and the United States

1996 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry Petersen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
Reproductive Freedom ◽  
Stepping Stone ◽  
Abortion Laws ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
Moral Questions

In this article I examine the paradoxical nature of abortion developments in three jurisdictions and find that reproductive freedom is a more elusive goal in the United States where abortion has been elevated to a qualified right, than in England or Victoria where nineteenth century criminal statutes have been modified but not repealed. Abortion is now a moral scapegoat in the United States and it is difficult to predict if it will ever be resolved. Changes to law in the other two jurisdictions were less extreme and were shaped by a gradual change in attitudes towards abortion. Nevertheless, the laws in all three jurisdictions deny women full reproductive freedom and are founded on the assumption that women are not responsible moral beings. The repeal of all laws concerning abortion would be a stepping stone to re-framing moral questions about abortion and developing a distinctive feminine morality which attends to the needs of women.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document