The Bible and American Empire

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith H. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Equal Treatment ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Land Dispossession ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Anglo American

The influence of the Bible in the shaping of American empire is rooted in the colonial era but is most clearly in evidence in the nineteenth century. In the spirit of postcolonial frameworks, this chapter seeks to lay bare some of the ways in which scriptural discourse undergirded the religious, political, and cultural power of Anglo-American settlers that legitimated the land dispossession of Native Americans and enslavement of African Americans. The first part of the chapter contrasts some alternative epistemologies about mapping land by colonial settlers, Native Americans, and Mormons. The second half of the chapter evaluates the racialized interpretations of the myth of Ham that supported the southern plantation “slaveocracy” and some alternative scriptural interpretations offered by African Americans in their aspirations for liberation from slavery and equal treatment in society.

Visualizing Race

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Coward
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Status ◽  
Western Expansion

This chapter looks at racial imagery in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in the final years of the nineteenth century, comparing the illustrations of Indians and African Americans as a way of explaining the shifting nature of race and representation as Western expansion ran its course. Native Americans were usually portrayed more sympathetically than African Americans. Indians were also depicted as more progressive than blacks. Moreover, Indians in the early 1890s were seen predominately as nonthreatening, both militarily and culturally. African Americans, by contrast, were closer and more familiar to whites and often perceived as less interesting to illustrators and more threatening to the status quo. Unlike Indians, whose apparent strangeness could be presented as exotic, black strangeness was ridiculed.

Nineteenth-Century American Biblical Interpretation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Noll
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
Bible And Slavery

Nineteenth-century interpretation reflected traditional Protestant devotion to scripture and hermeneutical conventions from American experience, especially the democratic empowerment of ordinary people and a republican resentment of intellectual aristocracy. In the antebellum era, interpretations flowed from long-standing Protestant convictions adjusted to republican common sense. Contention over the Bible and slavery generated the sharpest differences. After false starts from Tom Paine in the 1790s and a few New Englanders in the 1840s, modern biblical criticism affected interpretations from the 1870s. In the postbellum era, some Protestants adopted a more liberal understanding of scripture because of the earlier standoffs over slavery. Groups previously marginalized (Catholics, Jews, skeptics, women, African Americans) also became more visible.

Seventeen Centuries of Sin: The Christian Past in Antebellum Slavery Debates

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-332
Author(s):  
Paul Gutacker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Church History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Close Study

AbstractHistorians of American religion generally agree that religious debates over slavery were characterized by a reliance on the plain meaning of the Bible. According to the conventional wisdom, antebellum Americans were uninterested in or even overtly hostile to tradition and church history. However, a close study of pro- and antislavery literature complicates this picture of ahistorical biblicism. For some defenders of slavery, not merely the Bible but also Christian tradition supported their position, and these Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists mined the past for examples of Christian slaveholding. On the other hand, both white and Black antislavery authors used religious history to bolster their cases against the peculiar institution, with African Americans leading the way in developing an antislavery account of the Christian past. The previously unnoticed historical dimensions of religious arguments over slavery prove central to understanding why these debates failed, while also modifying how we conceive of scripture, tradition, and religious authority in nineteenth-century America. Arguments over slavery show that religious Americans—even many who claimed to be biblicists—did not read the Bible alone but always alongside and in relation to other texts, traditions, and interpreters.

Anglo-American Inter-Imperialism: US Expansion and the British World, c.1865–1914

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Tuffnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Economic Networks ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Colony ◽  
Anglo American

This article examines the overlooked synergy between American economic expansion and British imperialism in the late nineteenth century. The established scholarship on American empire in this period focuses on the domestic origins of US expansion into the markets of the Western Hemisphere. This article contends, however, that informal American expansion was shaped by external collaborations with the British World. Between 1865 and 1914, an American “colony” of expatriate businessmen emerged in London that is central to this study. The American “colony” integrated itself within the social and economic networks upon which British imperialism depended and mediated new inter-imperial collaborations. Migrants, knowledge, and investment flowed through these intersections, shaping the geography of American expansion around the global footprint of the British World. A snapshot of the pharmaceutical firm Burroughs Wellcome & Co. spotlights these processes, highlighting the mutual imbrications of the British and American empires and the inter-imperial reciprocities sustaining late-nineteenth century globalisation.

Colonial Contexts and Global Dissent

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Confessional Identity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Intensive Reading

Until late in the nineteenth century, the otherwise fractious universe of Dissent united in affirming Scripture as the supreme religious authority and in exalting the individual conscience as the final interpreter of the Bible’s message. Because of this scriptural fixation, Dissenters contributed disproportionately to the manifestly biblical character of nineteenth-century Anglo-American civilization. It is for that very reason often hard to differentiate a specifically Dissenting history of the Bible from much shared with other Protestants. General cultural influences such as an emphasis on human subjectivity had a lot to do with how Dissenters read their Bibles. The ‘Bible civilization’ to which they contributed was permeated with scriptural phrases and assumptions. Disputes about biblical authority became important because most people were privately committed to the intensive reading of Scripture with the aid of family Bibles. Scripture also lived in public through hymnody and preaching. The Bible featured heavily in political controversy, notably due to disagreements about its place in systems of public education. The tendency to found claims to religious authority on a purified reading of Scripture and to contrast this with the practice of Roman Catholicism was characteristic of Dissent, as was the tendency for those claims to clash. Dissenters divided, for instance, on prophetic interpretation or on whether biblical interpretation needed to be guided by creeds. Conflict over how to interpret the Bible deepened and widened to encompass questions about the character of Scripture itself. Representative early nineteenth-century Dissenters such as Moses Stuart and Josiah Conder held on to unsophisticated if potentially liberal assumptions about the nature of its inspiration but disputes about higher criticism would mount in the wake of Anglican controversies in the 1850s and 1860s. It was striking, however, that these disputes were not as acrimonious in the British Empire as in the United Kingdom or the United States, perhaps because Canadian or Australian Dissenters were more interested in confessional identity and national service. By the end of the century, the expanding terrain of intra-Protestant conflict made it increasingly difficult to discern a unified Dissenting voice. By 1900, it was not as clear as it had once been that ‘the Holy Scriptures are the sole authority and sufficient rule in matters of religion’.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

The Blue Flower and the Account Book

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Anne F. Hyde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
American West ◽  
Fur Trade ◽  
Blue Flower ◽  
Racial Category ◽  
North American West ◽  
Mixed Blood ◽  
Anglo American

This essay, a revised version of the August 2015 talk, examines the story of two mixed-blood women, indigenous and Anglo American, who lived in the fur trade North American West. The essay examines a racial category, mixed blood or “half-breed” and considers the challenges for people who lived in and used that category in the nineteenth century. The essay illuminates the challenges of using different kinds of personal records to understand how these nineteenth-century women might have thought about identity, a word they never would have used.

Sigurðr, Þórr and Ragnarök and their Christian Counterparts

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 81-104
Author(s):  
Manu Braithwaite-Westoby
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
The Bible ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Stone Sculpture ◽  
Popular Subject ◽  
New Religion

Few scholars would deny that some Old Norse myths have Christian counterparts, a phenomenon first noticed by nineteenth-century archaeologists and antiquarians in their observations of Anglo-Scandinavian stone sculpture in northern England. It is strange, therefore, that despite this long tradition, there is no systematic study on the topic. While this ambition is unfortunately outside the scope of this article, it does seek to address a number of Old Norse myths/legends and place them in conjunction with their Christian counterparts. One of the most important myths for Anglo-Scandinavian craftsmen was probably Sigurðr, who has an obvious parallel in Christ. The apocalyptic narrative in Voluspa known as Ragnarök was also a very popular subject and has a clear cognate in the apocalyptic sections of the Bible. Þórr and the Miðgarðsormr, though less appealing to artists, strongly recalls accounts of the conflict between Christ and Satan or Leviathan. This article uses a theoretical methodology called ‘figural interpretation’ to examine the Old Norse myths and explore how they reflect certain myths from the new religion. While distinctly art historical in approach, this article also invokes some Old Norse texts where relevant, which may themselves have been influenced by Christian thinking.

Slavery and Class in the American South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
American South ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Harriet Jacobs ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
William Wells Brown ◽  
The American South ◽  
Work Family

In this study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than sixty mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Andrews also reveals how class awareness shaped the views and values of some of the most celebrated African Americans of the nineteenth century. Slave narrators discerned class-based reasons for violence between “impudent,” “gentleman,” and “lady” slaves and their resentful “mean masters.” Status and class played key roles in the lives and liberation of the most celebrated fugitives from US slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. By examining the lives of the most- and least-acclaimed heroes and heroines of the African American slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers’ advantage, but at other times fueling convictions among even the most privileged of the enslaved that they deserved nothing less than complete freedom.

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