Pilgrims at the Golden Gate: Christian Scientists on the Pacific Coast, 1880––1915

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rolf Swensen

There has never been a social history of Christian Science, a distinctive and controversial new religious group that emphasized metaphysical healing. The group appeared in the United States in the 1870s and 1880s under the leadership of Mary Baker Eddy. This article examines the early rapid growth of Christian Science on the Pacific Coast, for the religion flourished to a greater degree in this health- conscious and socially fluid region than in any other section of the world. Analysis of the occupations of more than 1,000 members and spouses of six Christian Science churches in California, Oregon, and Washington for the years 1905-1907 provides detailed conclusions at variance with previous conjecture. The new evidence shows that Christian Scientists on the Pacific Coast were an ethnically homogeneous, uprooted, and energetic lot from all social levels, with a surprisingly large contingent from the working classes.

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-172
Author(s):  
Katherine G. Morrissey

The following was the author’s presidential address at the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association, in Northridge, California, on August 4, 2017. The twentieth-century visual history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, la frontera, offers a rich set of representations of the shared border environments. Photographs, distributed in the United States and in Mexico, allow us to trace emerging ideas about the border region and the politicized borderline. This essay explores two border visualization projects—one centered on the Mexican Revolution and the visual vocabulary of the Mexican nation and the other on the repeat photography of plant ecologists—that illustrate the simultaneous instability and power of borders.


2018 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Wade Graham

This introductory chapter sets out the author's explanation of why he chose Molokai to study. That Molokai's marginality, relative to its larger neighbors and to the larger outside world, gives it a focused explanatory power, like a small lens that refracts and reflects back bigger processes and wider histories with which it has intersected, thereby illuminating them in invaluable ways. Because it is more isolated and simplified in comparison to larger, more central places, certain processes are more visible, their outlines less blurred by complexity. To understand the history of this marginal place is to go a long way toward understanding the history of Hawaii, the United States, the Pacific, and the world.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 32 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. E. Hickson ◽  
F. W. Rodolf

Columbia River is the largest river on the Pacific Coast of the United States. It heads at Columbia Lake in British Columbia, about 80 miles north of the international boundary, and flows northward parallel to the summit of the Rocky Mountains for about 185 miles, thence turns back and flows generally southward through Upper and Lower Arrow Lakes and enters the United States about 25 miles west of the northeast corner of the State of Washington. Thence the river flows by a sinuous course southward, westward, and southeastward to the Oregon-Washington boundary, thence generally westward between the two states, discharging into the Pacific Ocean 583 statute miles north of San Francisco Bay and 154 miles south of the Straits of Juan de Fuca (distances computed from differences in latitude). The river has a total length of 1,210 miles, of which 750 miles are in the United States.


Abstract.—There is a long history of exploitation of spiny dogfish along the Pacific coast of the United States. In modern times there have been three distinct phases of exploitation: a fishery for oil (1917–39), followed by a fishery for livers for their vitamin content (1937–1950), and then one for muscle tissue for human consumption (1975–1995). By the end of the liver fishery, the resource showed clear signals of decline and similar signals of decline were noted at the end of the food fishery.


1976 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-160
Author(s):  
T. F. Mulcrone

In almost every history of the Negro in the United States one can find an account of the incidental contributions of Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806) to the social history of Ms race. But no chronicle is readily available of the scientific life of Banneker as a student of mathematics, almanac compiler, surveyor, and astronomer. The object of this article is to provide such an account of the scientific activity of Benjamin Banneker, whom W. Douglas Brown called “the first American Negro to challenge the world by the independent power of his intellect,” and to indicate how close Banneker comes to approximating the composite picture of the mathematician in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century.


Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.


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