The Problem of the History of Religion in America

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Keyword(s):  
American Academy ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Program Committee ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
American People ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
History Of

Half a year before this paper was read before a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion (26 October 1969), the program committee had requested an essay dealing in some comprehensive way with the field of American religious history. Because I would in any case have to be thinking about the introduction to my own “religious history of the American people,” I agreed.The title was sufficiently broad; and goodness knows the problems of this subject area are sufficiently large.1 Aside from innumerable large and small questions of fact there are the countless questions of emphasis and interpretation, not to mention the problem of discerning an overarching theme. I also confess great sympathy with Max Lerner's comment on the ten years he spent on America as a Civilization (1957). “I found when I came to the end of the decade,” he said, “that a number of things I had written about America were no longer valid. The American civilization had been changing drastically right under my fingertips as I was writing about it.”2 The present-day historian's predicament is, if anything, more difficult than Lerner's in that the sixties, by contrast with the fifties, have experienced a veritable earthquake of revisionism which has profoundly altered our interpretation of the entire course of American history. By reason of its screaming moral dilemmas, moreover, the decade had an especially rude impact on long accepted views of religious history. But enough of this: let us consider the substantive questions.

The Problem of the History of Religion in America

1988 ◽  
Vol 57 (S1) ◽  
pp. 127-138
Author(s):  
Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Keyword(s):  
American Academy ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Subject Area ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Program Committee ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
American People ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
History Of

Half a year before this paper was read before a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion (26 October 1969), the program committee had requested an essay dealing in some comprehensive way with the field of American religious history. Because I would in any case have to be thinking about the introduction to my own “religious history of the American people,” I agreed. The title was sufficiently broad; and goodness knows the problems of this subject area are sufficiently large. Aside from innumerable large and small questions of fact there are the countless questions of emphasis and interpretation, not to mention the problem of discerning an overarching theme. I also confess great sympathy with Max Lerner's comment on the ten years he spent onAmerica as a Civilization(1957). “I found when I came to the end of the decade,” he said, “that a number of things I had written about America were no longer valid. The American civilization had been changing drastically right under my fingertips as I was writing about it.” The present-day historian's predicament is, if anything, more difficult than Lerner's in that the sixties, by contrast with the fifties, have experienced a veritable earthquake of revisionism which has profoundly altered our interpretation of the entire course of American history. By reason of its screaming moral dilemmas, moreover, the decade had an especially rude impact on long accepted views of religious history. But enough of this: let us consider the substantive questions.

The Immigrants and Their Gods: A New Perspective in American Religious History

1988 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay P. Dolan
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Church History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
New Perspective

Twenty years ago Jerald Brauer wrote an essay on the writing of American church history entitled, “Changing Perspectives on Religion in America.” In this essay he noted that “change in perspective marks the writing of the history of religion in America.” After discussing the work of Robert Baird and William Warren Sweet, the two historians whose perspectives most influenced the writing of American church history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, Brauer then directed his attention to a third and new perspective. This new perspective had developed in the post-World War II era and was the result of the work of Sidney E. Mead, Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Winthrop S. Hudson, and others. Brauer described the new perspective by pointing out how it differed from the work of Sweet. It was clear to Brauer, however, that no one historian or school of historians had yet emerged whose perspective was able to dominate the landscape in the manner that Baird and Sweet had. There really was no new single perspective, but a variety of approaches and interpretations. In other words, in the late 1960s the discipline of American church history was in a state of flux, and “a number of young historians” were, in Brauer's words, “anxious to develop a new perspective through which to view the development and nature of Christianity in America.”

The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Sarah Osborn (1714–1796)

1992 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 408-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
American People ◽  
New Divinity ◽  
Documentary History ◽  
Biographical Dictionary ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Spiritual Pilgrimage

Sarah Osborn does not appear in the definitive biographical dictionary, Notable American Women. She is not in the pages of Sydney Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People, nor of any more recent standard American religious history text. She failed to catch the attention of the editors and authors of the recent Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience or Dictionary of Christianity in America. The great New Divinity pastor-theologian Samuel Hopkins in some measure owed his career to Sarah Osborn, but studies of him mention her only in passing or not at all. Scholars have learned of her through the work of Mary Beth Norton and in the documentary history, Women and Religion in America, but the Sarah Osborn most often mentioned in connection with early New England is the one accused as a witch at Salem who died in Boston prison 10 May 1692.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Altman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
William James ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Comparative Religion ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of

The epilogue examines what the genealogy of “heathen,” “Hindoo,” and “Hindu” means for the study of American religious history and religious studies. It argues that the various projects of comparative religion that included representations of heathens, Hindoos, and Hindus must be incorporated into the larger history of religious studies. As the previous chapters have shown, definitions of heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, and Hinduism emerged from American debates about the category “religion.” The epilogue gestures toward a history that would locate religious studies within the history of religion in the United States and cites William James as a possible starting point for such a history.

ACCEPTANCE OF THE PRESIDENCY OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-130
Keyword(s):  
Head Start ◽  
American Academy ◽  
American People ◽  
American Academy Of Pediatrics ◽  
Temporal Pressure ◽  
History Of ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Many

To be selected as President of the American Academy of Pediatrics is the greatest honor that could be given me. I approach this year with humility and pledge my best efforts. Never before in the brief history of the Academy has the pressure of time been so enormous and demanded as much immediate vigorous effort as now for the welfare of children. The many problems accompanied by this temporal pressure need no enumeration here. Dr. Logan has mentioned several. With each one, the degree of urgency and the length of time needed to accomplish realistic goals need evaluation. The fact that many problems will take years or decades to solve makes no less important the necessity to address ourselves to them now, before the welfare of a generation of children suffers irrevocably, or before alternative and less desirable solutions are imposed by government or other agencies. The American people are impatient. Witness only Head Start. The Administration was impatient to start the operation before it was pretested so that one year crop of 5 year olds would not be deprived of help. Many Fellows of the Academy, by the same token, have been impatient because the health aspects are not still functioning smoothly. If Head Start works well across the country in 10 years, it will have been a notable achievement. These factors of temporal pressure and impatience disturb pediatricians. Our training as scientists, which advocates careful and deliberate study of problems, makes us distrust hasty diagnosis or ill-considered therapy.

Abandoned Quarries

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-136
Author(s):  
Seth Perry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early National ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Period

This concluding chapter discusses the consequences of biblicism in the early national period for subsequent American religious history. It considers bible culture in the later nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the corporatization of religious printing amplifed the Bible's status as an abstract commodity. Responding to the arguments put forward by W. P. Strickland in his 1849 History of the American Bible Society, the chapter argues that attaching the Bible's importance to American national identity could not leave the Bible unchanged, because that is not how scripturalization works. It also explains how the Bible's availability for citation and re-citation fundamentally changed the desire, effectiveness, and circumstances of its citation. Finally, it uses the abandoned quarry—empty because it has flled other places—as a figure for the themes of citation, performance, and identity explored in this book.

The 1970s

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Benjamin Rolsky
Keyword(s):  
Culture Wars ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
American People ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formative Experiences ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Nervous Breakdown ◽  
Governing Institutions

Few decades in the history of America resonate more with the American people than the 1960s. Freedom, justice, and equality seemed to define the immediate futures of many of America’s historically most ostracized citizens. Despite the nostalgia that tends to characterize past and present analyses of the sixties, this imaginative work is important to consider when narrating the subsequent decade: the 1970s. Such nostalgia in considering the 1960s speaks to a sense of loss, or something worked at but not quite achieved in the eyes of the nation and its inhabitants. What happened to their aspirations? Where did they retreat to? And, perhaps more importantly, to what extent did “the spirit” of the 1960s catalyze its antithesis in the 1970s? In many ways the 1970s was a transitional period for the nation because these years were largely defined by various instances of cultural, or tribal, warfare. These events and their key actors are often under-represented in histories of late-20th-century America, yet they were formative experiences for the nation and their legacy endures in contemporary moments of polarization, division, and contestation. In this sense the 1970s were neither “liberal” nor “conservative,” but instead laid the groundwork for such terms to calcify into the non-negotiable discourse now known simply as the culture wars. The tone of the time was somber for many, and the period may be best understood as having occasioned a kind of “collective nervous breakdown.” For some, the erosion of trust in America’s governing institutions presented an unparalleled opportunity for political and electoral revolution. For others, it was the stuff of nightmares. America had fractured, and it was not clear how the pieces would be put back together.

A Religious History of the American People

1973 ◽  
Vol 78 (5) ◽  
pp. 1521
Author(s):  
Robert D. Cross ◽  
Sydney E. Ahlstrom
Keyword(s):  
Religious History ◽  
American People ◽  
History Of
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