scholarly journals The Contribution of the Religion of the Colonial Period to the Ideals and Life of the United States

1958 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 340-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Scott Latourette

The Great Seal of the United States, designed in the early days of the Republic, has on it symbolism whose significance is often overlooked. On one side is an eagle which grasps with one talon a branch and with the other a sheaf of arrows. Above its head are “E Pluribus Unum” and thirteen stars for the original states bound together in one nation. The other side has on it an unfinished pyramid. The foundation bears the number MDCCLXXVI. Above the pyramid is the eye of God flanked by the words “Annuit Coeptis,” namely, “He smiles on the undertakings.” Underneath is the phrase “Novus Ordo Seculorum,” meaning “New Order of the Ages.” Here succinctly is the vision which inspired the founding fathers of the new nation. The thirteen colonies had become one, prepared to face together the exigencies of the future, whether for preservation in self-defense or for cooperation in the arts of peace. Here was an attempt at building something novel in the history of mankind—a new and ordered structure. That structure, as yet incomplete, was based upon the Declaration of Independence, with its best-remembered phrases: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Here is “the American dream.” As “four score and seven years” later Abraham Lincoln even more briefly described it, the new nation was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and its success or failure was a test whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people” could “long endure.” To that dream faith in God, in His creative activity, and in His sovereignty was basic.

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-465
Author(s):  
Stanley N. Katz ◽  
Leah Reisman

AbstractThis article discusses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement on the arts and cultural sector in the United States, placing the 2020 crises in the context of the United States’s historically decentralized approach to supporting the arts and culture. After providing an overview of the United States’s private, locally focused history of arts funding, we use this historical lens to analyze the combined effects of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement on a single metropolitan area – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We trace a timeline of key events in the national and local pandemic response and the reaction of the arts community to the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that the nature of these intersecting responses, and their fallout for the arts and cultural sector, stem directly from weaknesses in the United States’s historical approach to administering the arts. We suggest that, in the context of widespread organizational vulnerability caused by the pandemic, the United States’s decentralized approach to funding culture also undermines cultural organizations’ abilities to respond to issues of public relevance and demonstrate their civic value, threatening these organizations’ legitimacy.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri

Résumé.L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.Abstract.An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.


Author(s):  
Michael Hogan

A tumultuous period in Mexican history began with the Reform Movement of President Benito Juárez, followed by the French invasion and installation of Maximillian as emperor, the defeat of his troops by the liberal army, and the restoration of the Mexican Republic in 1877. Although most of the basic facts of these events are not in dispute, the narrowness of the lens used to examine them is. Some data have been systematically ignored by national historians, and there are also contradictory interpretations of the published historical data. One common reflection on this period is the depiction of Maximilian as liberal whom some argue contributed in a positive way to Mexico. However, some Mexican scholars dispute this. The other widely held belief is that Benito Juárez can be credited with the restoration of the republic and the betterment of the working poor and indigenous. Although criticism of Juárez is uncommon in official circles, where he is idolized, some Mexican scholars are more skeptical of these claims. The missing or generally ignored data concern the contribution of the United States to the defeat of the French and Austrian armies, which is not mentioned in any survey texts and is minimized in most articles. The fuller inclusion of these data coupled with a closer look at the contributions and failures of both the Maximilian and Juárez regimes provides a clearer picture of the epoch and generates new insights.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-141
Author(s):  
Arthur Aritonang

“Kekristenan dan Nasionalisme di Indonesia” membahas mengenai sejarah kekristenan di Indonesia yang diasumsikan sebagai agama yang pro terhadap penjajah dari Barat namun asumsi itu tidak benar sebagai bukti ada banyak tokoh Kristen yang ikut memperjuangkan kemerdekaan Indonesia dengan didasarkan semangat nasionalisme. Kemudian pasca-kolonial Belanda kekristenan ingin menampilkan wajah baru yang sungguh-sungguh keindonesiaan dengan lahirnya organisasi DGI/PGI. Namun seiring waktu ketika berakhirnya era orde baru dan memasuki era reformasi, kekristenan dan masyarakat lainnya di Indonesia menghadapi arus gelombang yang mengatas-namakan agama yang pergerakannya cukup masif dibandingkan di era orde lama diantaranya: kelompok Islam fundamentalis yang ingin menjadikan NKRI bersyariat Islam, adanya gerakan politik transnasional HTI yang ingin menghidupkan kembali kejayaan Islam pada abad ke-6 dan faham Wahabisme yang sarat dengan kekerasan. Persoalan lainnya ialah adanya kemiskinan yang terstruktur akibat dari krisis moneter yang melanda di Indonesia tahun 1997. Melalui masalah ini, setiap agama-agama di Indonesia harus melakukan konvergensi atas dasar keprihatinan yang sama. Abstract: Christianity and Nationalism in Indonesia” discuss the history of Christianity in Indonesia, which is assumed to be a religion that is pro to Western colonialism. Still, this assumption is incorrect as evidence that many Christian figures fought for Indonesian independence based on the spirit of nationalism. Then post-colonial of Dutch, Christianity wanted to be presented a truly Indonesian face with the birth of the DGI / PGI organization. But over time when the end of the new order and entering the era of reform, Christianity and the other societies in Indonesia faced challenges in the name of religion whose movements were quite massive compared to the old order including fundamentalist Islamic groups who wanted to make the Republic of Syariat Muslim Indonesia, a transnational HTI political movement that wanted to revive the glory of Islam in the 6th century and the ideology of Wahhabism which is loaded with violence. Another problem is the existence of structured poverty due to the monetary crisis that hit Indonesia in 1997. Through this problem, every religion in Indonesia must converge on the basis of the same concerns.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mallory Lapointe Taylor

Within the United States, the American South can be perceived as its own entity. From the arts to Southern cuisine, the South commands attention with its own history, myths and culture. Within the history of photography, Walker Evans's photographs of Alabama are arguably some of the most culturally significant images taken of the state and its residents. This thesis investigates how photographs of Alabama are collected in the same locality. By examining the collecting practices of four Alabama institutions in regards to photographs in general, and Walker Evans specifically, this case study will expand on the question of how photographs, in a Southern cultural context, work to create a sense of place and attachment to local geography.


1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Arditi

This paper explores the opening of a discursive space within the etiquette literature in the United States during the 19th century and how women used this space as a vehicle of empowerment. It identifies two major strategies of empowerment. First, the use or appropriation of existing discourses that can help redefine the “other” within an hegemonic space. Second, and more importantly, the transformation of that space in shifting the lines by which differentiation is produced to begin with. Admittedly, these strategies are neither unique nor the most important in the history of women's empowerment. But this paper argues that the new discourses formulated by women helped forge a new space within which women ceased being the “other,” and helped give body to a concept of womanhood as defined by a group of women, regardless of how idiosyncratic that group might have been.


Author(s):  
Peggy Cooper Davis

In chapter 6, Peggy Cooper Davis notes that in a democratic republic, the people are sovereign and must be free and educated to exercise that sovereignty. She contends that the history of chattel slavery’s denial of human sovereignty in the United States, slavery’s overthrow in the Civil War, and the Constitution’s reconstruction to restore human sovereignty provide a basis for recognizing that the personal rights protected by the United States Constitution, as amended on the demise of slavery, include a fundamental right to education that is adequate to enable every person to participate meaningfully as one among equal and sovereign people.


Author(s):  
Brian Cremins

After Fawcett’s legal settlement with National in 1953, the original Captain Marvel did not return to comic books until 1973. In the meantime, comic book fans and amateur historians began writing about the character in the 1960s. This chapter traces Captain Marvel’s afterlife in these fanzines, publications that helped to establish the foundation for comics studies in the United States. The chapter also includes an overview of recent developments in the field of memory and nostalgia studies. These recent studies of the history of nostalgia in medicine, psychology, and the arts are essential for an understanding of how childhood memories have shaped comics studies as a discipline.


1985 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Williams

Realignment theory is a recent but flourishing sub-branch of the study of American political parties. Over the last thirty years, the original suggestions of its inventor, V. O. Key, have been elaborated and refined in several directions and through several phases, gradually being modified to take variations in historical circumstances more carefully into account. Problems of the same kind often occur, and are likely to prove even less manageable, when efforts are made to apply the theory to another political system and culture as authors from both countries (and from neither) have in recent years tried, more or less explicitly, to use it to explain developments in the British party system. Some techniques travel quite well, and some useful insights can be obtained by looking afresh at familiar patterns in the light of similar experiences elsewhere. But the differences between the two nations and states preclude any rigorous attempt to apply a theory derived from the history of one country with a view to explaining the experiences of the other.


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