Sisterhoods

Chapter 3 first traces how Grace built a public career for herself in the SWP, working as Minnesota state organizer and running for US Senate in 1940. The chapter also examines how Grace became one of the eighteen Trotskyists who was convicted of violating the Smith Act in 1941. Of vital importance to Grace’s experiences within the SWP and to her survival at Alderson prison in 1944 was her sisterhood of women comrades, which included her biological sister, Dorothy Schultz. Grace’s rich correspondence during the year she spent in prison reveals not only the connections and concerns shared by her and her women friends but also Grace’s relationship with the mostly poor and very young women incarcerated with her at Alderson. Both these experiences served as the inspiration for the working-class Marxist feminism that Grace came to articulate in her writings for the Militant and in her 1945 “Women in Prison” speaking tour. Grace’s experiences and writings were part of the Left’s answer to the woman question during the 1940s. Her story adds to the history of feminisms on the left during the 1940s and early 1950s, the period between the first and second waves.

Irish Patriotes

This chapter explores how codes of manliness and the culture of masculinity in Lower Canada revealed themselves in the public career of Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, the final editor of The Vindicator newspaper in Montreal and a major figure within the parti patriote on the eve of the 1837 Lower Canadian Rebellion. Using the themes of gender, violence, and loyalty, the chapter analyses O’Callaghan’s fidelity to the patriote cause, his commitment to overthrowing British rule, and his ability to use gendered and inflammatory language in order to qualify what and who was truly ‘Irish’ in the Canadas. Through his Irishness, his radicalism, and his use of gendered language, Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan made the Irish element of the Lower Canadian Rebellion appear absolutely fundamental; in the end, however, appearance was not the same thing as reality.

Ogle Gowan and Orangeism in Upper Canada

This chapter examines the early career of Ogle R. Gowan, the founder of the official Orange Order in Canada and his quest for respectability in political life and within the colonial establishment. Gowan introduced a more belligerent construction of Irish loyalist manliness than had existed prior to his arrival in Upper Canada. His public representation of Irishness centred on defending Protestantism, the fraternalism of the Orange lodge, and extreme loyalty to the Crown. The chapter traces his path from Co. Wexford to Upper Canada, and how he presented Orangeism as a vital transatlantic link between Ireland and the Canadas. The chapter also investigates how Gowan’s wife, Frances, was involved with his first cousin, James R. Gowan, and the implications which that close relationship had on James’ decision to abandon Orangeism in favour of a successful public career that his cousin Ogle was never able to attain.

The West Indies, 1959–63

This chapter assesses how the major aspects of W. Arthur Lewis's public career came to a close, fittingly, in the West Indies, where he served as head of the University College of the West Indies between 1959 and 1963. Once he left the West Indies, moving on to become a professor of political economy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University, he concentrated on teaching and research, forsaking the heavy round of government consultancies and government offices that had been so characteristic of the first three decades of his career. In many respects the four-year stint in the West Indies was emblematic of his entire public career. Like the rest of the developing world, the islands of the British West Indies were in the midst of frantic decolonizing efforts. By the 1950s, preparing for economic decolonization had also become the guiding activity of Lewis's life. What better way, then, to put his academic training and his unique public experience to work than to promote the political and economic independence of the islands where he had grown up.

Crowds, Bread and Fame: John 6.1-15 and History Revisited

From the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century it was common to regard the unique conclusion to the Johannine account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand (6.15) as one of the most important episodes in Jesus’ public career. This view has all but disappeared from current Jesus research. This article revisits, challenges and ultimately reframes this thesis with the help of some recent developments in historical method in Jesus studies. The argument is this: even if the exact scenario in Jn 6.14-15 is not historical, the episode captures an important political dimension to Jesus’ activities that probably is historical and can illuminate other events in his life as well. Historians were right to highlight Jn 6.14-15, if perhaps for the wrong reasons.

Mohammad Ali Rogay

Mohammad Ali Rogay, long-time participant in the Bombay Country Trade with China in the first half of the nineteenth century, and partner in the prominent trading firm of Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy & Co, was also the most prominent Muslim citizen of Bombay during his lifetime. He was also the leader of the Konkani Musalman community which had been settled in Bombay for many centuries. In spite of his prominence in business and political spheres, very little information is available on him, nor has he, or the community he hails from, attracted serious scholarly attention. This essay outlines Rogay’s trading career in China and India, his public career in Bombay, his role as a patron of publishing and printing, his secular and religious charities, and his leadership of the Konkani Musalman community. A wide variety of sources including contemporary newspapers, government archives, private business archives, contemporary Urdu imprints and community histories, have helped in reconstructing Rogay’s life, which has largely remained obscure. This investigation explores the reasons why Rogay (and, by extension, his community) continues to remain on the fringes of the mainstream historical narrative on nineteenth-century Bombay.

Eurydice and Her Sons

Our extant sources are full of contradictions and obscurities about Eurydice’s career. I will assess the available evidence relating to a series of questions about her public career and actions. Was she an adulterer? Was she the murderer (or would be murderer) of her husband and any of her sons? Who was the man named Ptolemy who played such an important part in her life and that of her sons? Did she marry Ptolemy? If she married him, when did she do so, in relation to what events? The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the nature, likely origin, and credibility of our extant sources and with a reflection on the role of fourth-century propaganda in what our extant sources say about Eurydice and an examination of Eurydice’s role as a political actor and faction leader during the 360s.

Philip Melanchthon

While a student at the Universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen, Philip Melanchthon (b. 1497–d. 1560) had won recognition for his abilities as a promulgator of the reforms of the biblical humanistic movement. That reputation propelled him into a professorship at the infant University of Wittenberg in 1518. His primary assignment was to teach Greek and other courses in the Arts faculty, but in 1519 he received the first theology degree, which expanded his responsibilities to include lecturing on the Bible. As a key member of that university, he taught theology and also lectured on several texts and topics in the liberal arts (including Aristotle’s De anima), which continued until his death in 1560. His contributions to the liberal arts, especially in rhetoric and dialectic, but also in refining methods of text analysis and teaching in all branches of learning, were more than equaled by his achievements in biblical interpretation and in the formulation of the dogmatic system that prepared his students for preaching and teaching the faith through the topical method of organizing knowledge of scripture and the Christian tradition. He composed The Augsburg Confession, The Apology of the Augsburg Confession, and The Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, which became part of the secondary authority for public teaching in the Lutheran churches. He also served as an ecclesiastical diplomat and counselor on public policy for the electors of Saxony and for the Smalcald League. His later years were marred by criticism from former students, including those to whom he had been very close, whom he disappointed by working with Moritz of Saxony, who had aided the Habsburgs in the defeat of Melanchthon’s former elector, Johann Friedrich, in the Smalcald War (1546–1547). They felt betrayed by his involvement in formulating a compromise policy that was intended to simulate electoral Saxon compliance with imperial commands to return to submission to the papacy while preserving what Luther and Melanchthon had taught in the 1520s, 1530s, and 1540s. His disputed reputation perhaps contributed to the relative dearth of larger scholarly studies of his thought or his multifaceted public career. Much of the scholarship published in what might be called a modest “Melanchthon Renaissance” of the last half century has taken form in essays rather than books, as this bibliography indicates.