Creationism USA

Who are America’s creationists? What do they want? Why do they think dinosaurs were on Noah’s ark? Creationism USA reveals that misconceptions about creationism have led Americans into a full century of unnecessary culture-war histrionics about evolution education and creationism. In fact, America does not and never has had deep, fundamental disagreements about evolution. Not about the actual science of evolution, that is, and not in ways that truly matter to public policy. Americans do have significant disagreements about creationism, though, and Creationism USA offers a new way to understand those battles. Describing the history of creationism and its variations demonstrates that the real conflict about evolution is not between creationists and evolution. The true landscape of American creationism is far more complicated than headlines suggest. This book digs beyond those headlines to prove two fundamental facts about American creationism. First, by any reasonable definition, almost all Americans can be classified as creationists. At the same time, almost all Americans, including creationist Americans, want their children to learn mainstream evolutionary science. Taken together, these difficult truths about American creationism point to a large and productive middle ground, a widely shared public vision of the proper relationship between schools, science, and religion. These facts aren’t hidden, yet they remain surprising to those who do not understand the real world of American creationism. Creationism USA explains the history and current state of America’s true battles over creationism. It offers a nuanced but simple prescription to solve them.

Conclusion

Summarizing the developments in nineteenth-century academic economics, this chapter draws comparisons and discovers new connections between America’s first full century of economists. German historical economics is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century protectionism and industrial capitalism of the Gilded Age. Parallels are found between antebellum and post–Civil War expressions of opposition toward finance. And special attention is paid to the evolution of conservative economics during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and ultimately the ascendancy of laissez-faire capitalism in the conservative economic mind.

Elephantine Revisited

This chapter revisits the scholarship regarding the discovery of the Elephantine Jews. A full century has passed since Eduard Sachau's edition of the Elephantine papyri in 1911. The Elephantine papyri promised direct and unbiased access to a Jewish community as it had been in real life. Furthermore, the sheer number of publications on the papyri between 1905 and 1915 conveyed a sense of the excitement that characterized the early days of Elephantine studies. This chapter shows that Elephantine studies continue to flourish in the twenty-first century. Counting monographs only, the secondary literature is expanding by almost one book a year. An important impetus for the ongoing investigations is the time frame of Elephantine, which is crucial in the formation of ancient Judaism and warrants a reassessment of prevailing scholarship.

A Centennial of Mary Richmond’s Social Diagnosis: A Celebration and Contemporary Assessment of a Seminal Work

Mary Ellen Richmond is often credited with developing social work as a profession in the United States. In this article, we focus on Richmond’s Social Diagnosis, revisiting this hallmark of social work practice a century after its publication and tracing its foundational ideas at the root of the conceptualization and practice of subsequent giants in social work. Our aim is to recenter and retrace these formative ideas so crucial to the origins of social work as a profession and its subsequent growth and development by examining Richmond’s understanding of social diagnosis, evidence-informed practice, and the helping relationship. A full century after the publication of Richmond’s far-reaching Social Diagnosis seems the most apposite time for such a review and revisit.

"What does it have to do with us?" – Rethinking the Russian Revolution in Germany

The author reviews exhibitions and recent publications in Germany which commemorate the centennial of the October Revolution 1917. After a full century of research there is little left of glory and heroism that had been present at the dawn of the »Great Socialist October Revolution«. A de-mystification has taken place which relocates the proclaimed »World Revolution« into the frame of Russian history. But this nationalization of the revolution tends to marginalize the global effects of the Red October, especially when the Bolshevik seizure of power is simply explained as a successful effort to transform anarchy into an organised regime of terror practised by a determined and self-sacrificing Avantgarde. While the totalitarian approach neglects the social origins of the Revolution, recent cultural studies emphasise contingent factors downrating revolutionary uprisings as an escalation of civil war in contaminated »landscapes of violence«. Leaving behind such entire explanations and grand designs, the second part of this paper wants to draw attention to the enduring structural changes which the Russian Revolution caused in post-war Europe. The author concentrates his arguments on three levels, beginning with the political institutions, secondly, the economic and social order, and thirdly, the demographic change.

Modes of Reading

This chapter explores the modes relating to Scripture that the Hasidic masters developed. It analyses the masters' sense of metaphor and poetic language, the roles of imagination, cognition, and the self, and the dynamics of translation and interpretation. It also provides a discussion through a thematic axis, which begins with a closer look at certain elements of Hadism and consider the ways in which they are manifested in the relationship between the rebbe and his Hasidim. The chapter highlights how the Hasidic masters created interpersonal connection by rhetorical means. It represents a full century of Hasidic creativity in a broad range of schools and trends, which speak of transformative learning and its experiential dimensions.

A Beacon for Applied Plant Pathology: The Origins of Plant Disease

This year marks a full century since the founding of the journal Plant Disease. The story of how the journal developed, from its origins as a service publication of the USDA in 1917 to the leading applied journal in the field today, reflects on major historical themes in plant pathology. Central to this narrative is the delicate balancing act in plant pathology between fundamental and applied science. During the 1960s and 1970s, substantial numbers of plant pathologists in the U.S. expressed concerns through the American Phytopathological Society (APS) over what they viewed as an alarming and increasing scarcity of applied papers in the flagship journal, Phytopathology. These concerns led increasingly to calls for a second APS journal devoted to applied research. After a period of uncertainty and indecision, the dissolution of the USDA Plant Disease Reporter (PDR) in 1979 offered APS leadership an unusual opportunity to assume publication of a journal with a 63-year legacy of publishing practical plant pathology. In a bold move, APS Council, with the decision in 1979 to take on the publication of PDR under the new title, Plant Disease, provided plant pathologists and the larger agricultural science community with an innovative vehicle to communicate applied plant pathology.

DIVISION E COMMISSION 10: SOLAR ACTIVITY

After more than half a century of community support related to the science of “solar activity”, IAU's Commission 10 was formally discontinued in 2015, to be succeeded by C.E2 with the same area of responsibility. On this occasion, we look back at the growth of the scientific disciplines involved around the world over almost a full century. Solar activity and fields of research looking into the related physics of the heliosphere continue to be vibrant and growing, with currently over 2,000 refereed publications appearing per year from over 4,000 unique authors, publishing in dozens of distinct journals and meeting in dozens of workshops and conferences each year. The size of the rapidly growing community and of the observational and computational data volumes, along with the multitude of connections into other branches of astrophysics, pose significant challenges; aspects of these challenges are beginning to be addressed through, among others, the development of new systems of literature reviews, machine-searchable archives for data and publications, and virtual observatories. As customary in these reports, we highlight some of the research topics that have seen particular interest over the most recent triennium, specifically active-region magnetic fields, coronal thermal structure, coronal seismology, flares and eruptions, and the variability of solar activity on long time scales. We close with a collection of developments, discoveries, and surprises that illustrate the range and dynamics of the discipline.

A Neglected Eucharistic Controversy: The Afterlife of John Wyclif's Eucharistic Thought in Bohemia in the Early Fifteenth Century

The renewed interest in John Wyclif (d. 1384) has brought this late medieval figure back into the spotlight of historians, giving rise to numerous studies evaluating his thought and its implications in the context of late fourteenth century England. However, it is not possible fully to appreciate Wyclif's importance in late medieval European culture without understanding the legacy of his ideas on the continent. According to the accepted narrative, John Wyclif's thought was mediated to the continent through the scholarly contacts between the universities in Oxford and in Prague, and re-emerged in the Latin writings of Jan Hus. This article argues that John Wyclif's thought, especially his critique of the church's doctrine of transubstantiation, found a larger audience among the rural clerics and laity in Bohemia, whom it reached through Peter Payne, who simplified and disseminated the works of the Oxford master. Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation sparked a nationwide debate about the nature of the Eucharist, generating numerous treatises, both in Latin and in the vernacular, on the subject of Christ's presence in the sacrament of the mass. This debate anticipated, a full century earlier, the famous debate between Luther and Zwingli and the Eucharistic debates of the sixteenth century Reformation more generally. The proliferation of vernacular Eucharistic tractates in Bohemia shows that Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation could be answered in a number of different ways that included both real presence (however defined) and figurative theologies—a fact, which, in turn, explains the doctrinal diversity among the Lollards in England.

Empire and Mission

The historiography of the entanglement of mission and empire in India has often taken the inclusion of the so-called “pious clause” in the East India Company’s 1813 charter to mark the end of a ban on missions in Company territories, and the beginning of a period of co-operation between church and company. This neglects the importance in this debate of the mission founded by German Lutherans in the Danish settlement of Tranquebar in south India in 1706. The mission received direct patronage from the Company for almost a full century before 1813, and was invoked by both sides in the debate over the pious clause. A work published anonymously in 1812, purporting to be a new translation of dialogues between the first missionaries in Tranquebar and their Hindu and Muslim interlocutors, is shown here to be a skilful and savage satire on the dialogues published by the first missionaries.