The First Calvinist Encounters with New World Religions

European Calvinists first encountered Native Americans during three brief expeditions of French adventurers to Brazil and Florida during the mid-sixteenth century. Although short-lived and rarely noted, these expeditions produced a remarkable commentary by Huguenots on the Tupinamba people of Brazil and the Timucuan people of Florida. Informed by Calvinist understandings of human nature and humanist approaches to cultural observation, authors such as Jean de Léry produced narratives that posed European and Christian decadence against the sociability and honesty of Native Americans. They used their experiences in America to suggest that Huguenots in France, like indigenous people in America, ought to be tolerated for their civic virtues whatever their doctrinal allegiances. Huguenot travel writings indicate variations in Calvinist approaches to Native peoples from the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries.

Seeing Britain and the World

Chapter six, ‘Seeing Britain and the World’ explores the remarkably widespread practice of travelling to the far corners of Britain, its empire, and the wider world during the summer holiday. Teachers tended to go alone or with just a couple friends and preferred to venture ‘off the beaten path’. When they got back, they wrote up short accounts of their trips for their training college alumni magazines. Teachers drew on bourgeois and elite conventions, but ultimately forged their own culture of travel and social and cultural observation. They put a premium on intimate knowledge about the everyday life of the peoples among whom they travelled and frequently confronted their own assumptions about important concepts like class and state welfare, race and the nature of imperial rule. Most of all, a sense of urgency pervaded teachers’ travel narratives. Engaging with the wider world was an ethical imperative and a key facet of teachers’ personal and professional identity.

‘Twin transformations’: The Salvation Army’s charity shops and the recreating of material and social value

This article uses an empirically grounded historical case study of The Salvation Army’s charity shops in Melbourne, Australia to review recent debates around the position and function of ‘cultural intermediaries’ beyond its traditional meaning and application to aesthetic sectors within cultural industries. Drawing on archival research, cultural observation and interviews with staff members, the article focuses on the stores’ specific cultural identity engendered by the organization’s history of remaking the value of discarded objects, alongside its development of individual human agency and context-based community links. Secondhand ‘Salvos Stores’ form a network of hybrid commercial and social enterprises that serves as a basis for developing a wider conceptualization of the notion ‘cultural intermediary’. Following Cronin, Howells and McFall, we argue for an understanding which emphasizes their embedded, contextually reliant qualities, informed by the discourses, practices and networks of sociality.