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.

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.

MIDWIFERY AND WOMEN'S WORK IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC: A RECONSIDERATION OF LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH'S A MIDWIFE'S TALE

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
TANFER EMIN TUNC
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Women's Work ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early American ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Wage Earning

ABSTRACTTwenty years after its initial publication, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize winning monograph A midwife's tale: the life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812 (1990) still serves as a major benchmark in women's labour/economic history mainly because it provides scholars with a window into the life of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century lay American rural healer not through the comments of an outsider, but through the words of the healer herself. While, on the surface, Ballard's encoded, repetitive, and quotidian diary may seem trivial and irrelevant to historians, as Ulrich notes, ‘it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies … For her, living was to be measured in doing’ (p. 9). By piecing together ‘ordinary’ primary source material to form a meaningful, extraordinary socio-cultural narrative, Ulrich elucidates how American midwives, such as Martha Ballard, functioned within the interstices of the private and public spheres. A midwife's tale is thus not only methodologically significant, but also theoretically important: by illustrating the economic contributions that midwives made to their households and local communities, and positioning the organizational skill of multitasking as a source of female empowerment, it revises our understanding of prescribed gender roles during the early American Republic (1783–1848). Even though A midwife's tale is clearly limited in terms of time (turn-of-the-nineteenth century) and place (rural Maine), it deserves the renewed attention of historians – especially those interested in gender relations and wage-earning, the economic value of domestic labour, and women's work before industrialization.

French Missionary Priests and Borderlands Catholicism in the Diocese of Bardstown during the Early Nineteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Pasquier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early American ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
Institutional Church ◽  
The One ◽  
Spiritual Suffering

An examination of the experiences of French missionary priests in the trans-Appalachian West adds a new layer of understanding to places ordinarily associated with the evangelical Protestant revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Their experiences of material deprivation, physical hardship, spiritual suffering, and lay opposition to ecclesiastical authority prompted some of them to reconsider what it meant to be a Catholic missionary in the early American republic, a context quite different from the one they envisioned. Many had difficulties relating their premigratory expectations of the missionary priesthood to their actual experiences of life within a borderlands diocese constructed by church officials in Rome thousands of miles away from the local populations, regional histories, and geographic obstacles that the foreign clergy would come to know intimately over the course of the early nineteenth century. As church leaders in the United States and Rome gradually broke up the Diocese of Bardstown during the antebellum period, French missionary priests realized that their dreams of establishing a nationwide institutional church and saving the peoples of an entire continent always clashed with the goals of other interest groups in the backwoods of Kentucky.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 275-282
Author(s):  
Laura Lohman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Music ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Political Music ◽  
Early American ◽  
Early National ◽  
National Period

This conclusion traces how early American political music was used throughout the nineteenth century. While political music in the early nation was often ephemeral, some of it proved surprisingly durable. Not only were songs from the early national period still performed, printed, and compiled in the following decades, but their melodies were used to carry new lyrics responding to later political developments. At times, early American political music was adapted and repurposed for sectional and election purposes. Focusing on the example of Joseph Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia,” this conclusion highlights how political music created in the early American republic was circulated in song collections, performed on varied occasions, and used to create new music through the end of the nineteenth century.

“Ours from the top to the very bottom”: Seneca Land, Colonial Development, Proto-Conservation, and Resistance in the Early American Republic

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Matthew Dennis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Native People ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Property A ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Early American ◽  
Environmental Practice ◽  
Changing Economy

This essay focuses on the Senecas of western New York and their transformation, resilience, and resistance in the early nineteenth century. Rooted in a hybrid economy and environmental practice, among the postcolonial threats they faced in the context of white territorial expansion, republican and capitalist ideology, was an emerging new instrumental view of property, a radically changing economy, and embryonic ideas about “conservation.” Colonial expansion in the early American republic came at the expense of the Senecas and other Indians—or least that was the design. This expropriation has often been less visible because its story mostly is told from the perspective of (white) nationalism, democracy, and expanding opportunity embedded in the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In addition, such colonialism in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth has often been masked by another emerging, “greenish” ideology, that of conservationism. Native (residual) rights, autonomy, and sovereignty could be ignored or overwhelmed by the supposedly objective, universal, scientific, and progressive demands that land and resources be conserved, not only from outsiders, but from Native people themselves. Thus, occurring at the expense of American Indians and environmental justice, conservation could be as exploitive and unjust as development.

Susanna Rowson’s Barbary Captivity Narrative, or the Struggle for the Freedom of American Women in Algiers

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Sabrina Zerar
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Sentimental Literature ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
American Women ◽  
Early American ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
The Many

This research explores the feminist dimensions of Rowson's play, Slaves in Algiers or, a struggle for freedom (1794), from historicist and dialogical perspectives. More particularly, it looks at the play within the context of the politics of the early American republic to uncover how Rowson deploys the captivity of American sailors in Algiers (1785-1796) as a pretext to deconstrust the established gender power relations without hurting the sensibilities of her audience in its reference to the issue of black slavery. The research also unveils the many intertextual relationships that the play holds with the prevalent captivity culture of the day, sentimental literature, and more specifically with Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

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