bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Private Hopes of American Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, 1925-1975
Authors: Watt David Harrington
Published: August 2007

Much of the best recent scholarship on conservative Protestantism in the middle decades of this Century focuses on what is sometimes called the “mainstream” of interdenominational evangelicalism. Although this variety of evangelicalism was deeply influenced by and, indeed, in some respects the direct successor to the fundamentalist movement of the 1910's, 1920's, and 1930's, it did not begin to assume its present shape until the early 1940's. The formation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 is a convenient symbol of the emergence of what we now think of as constituting the evangelical mainstream.

Drafting a perfect definition of this mainstream is impossible; drafting a good working description of it is not. In the present context, “evangelical mainstream” simply refers to that network of born-again Christians associated with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the National Association of Evangelicals, and Campus Crusade for Christ; with schools such as the Moody Bible Institute, Füller Seminary, and Wheaton College; with publishing firms like Eerdman's and Zondervan; and with magazines such as Christianity Today, Eternity, and Moody Monthly.
Saving The Children by Killing Them: Redemptive Sacrifice in the Ideologies of Jim Jones and Ronald Reagan
Authors: Chidester David
Published: August 2007

It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.

U.S. Army officer, after the destruction of Ben Tre, Vietnam, 1968

I ‘d rather see them lay like that than to see them have to die like the Jews did.

Resident of Jonestown, Guyana

I would rather see my little girls die now, still believing in God, than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer believing in God.

Resident of California, USA

We win when we go down.

Jim Jones

Win one for the Gipper.

Ronald Reagan
The New Infidelity: Northern Protestant Clergymen and the Critique of Progress, 1840-1855
Authors: Hanley Mark Y.
Published: August 2007

Northern Protestant leaders are commonly portrayed as uncritical scions of a cultural Obsession with “progress” that reached high tide in the two decades before the Civil War. Convinced that the United States held a divinely appointed commission to usher in Christ's millennial Kingdom on Earth, ministers supposedly sanctioned the nation's material and political development as integral to spiritual advancement. While they served their American flock a füll portion of Christian moralism to sustain this collective destiny, only a few renegade naysayers—such as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne—remained sensible to human limitations and challenged a pervasive clerical frenzy of “progressivism, bravado and boasting.” Mainstream Protestantism's accommodative spirit, in other words, dulled its “critical edge” and rendered its message subservient to what one scholar calls a “nationwide ritual of progress.”
Benevolent Calvinism and the Moral Government of God: The Influence of Nathaniel W. Taylor on Revivalism in the Second Great Awakening
Authors: Sutton William R.
Published: August 2007

In the early nineteenth century, when theological disputes centered on suggestions of a kinder, gentler God, Yale's Nathaniel William Taylor brought to fruition America's “one great contribution to the theological thinking of Christendom,” the New Haven theology. Taylor's theology combined elements of Calvinist and Newtonian worldviews and centered on three critical assumptions: the benevolence of God, his moral government, and human free agency. Thus, Taylor held that God was both a wise and powerful creator and a good and just ruler, whose concern for and involvement with his creation extended into contemporary human affairs. Moreover, he believed that men and women were moral agents whose sinfulness was worthy of divine condemnation as well as empirically inevitable, but that human sin was in no way preordained or necessary to the prevailing System of moral government.
Witchcraft and the Colonization of Algonquian and Iroquois Cultures
Authors: Porterfield Amanda
Published: August 2007

On Martha's Vineyard in the late seventeenth Century, a Native American called George suffered from being “Tormented” and “impotent” and sought out a renowned “Powaw,” or shaman, for help. According to Matthew Mayhew, who published the story in 1697, the shaman diagnosed George's troubles as effects of witchcraft and proceeded to “dance around a great fire” with George and other sick Natives “lying by.” Other Natives broke up the dance, claiming that the Powaw himself had “bewitched” the sick, and “threatened to burn him unless he cured the sick man.” Fortunately for the shaman, when he “felt the heat of the fire, the sick immediately recovered.”
Representative Emersons: Versions of American Identity
Authors: Smith David L.
Published: August 2007

In 1903, William James began his address to the Emerson centenary gathering at Concord with a meditation on death and memory:

The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing…. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into a mere musical note or phrase, suggestive of his singularity—happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgment.

While James's abridgment of Emerson in the address that followed was unusually apt, Emerson has not been as well served by most who have attempted to call his tune.
The Early Years of the Jewish Presence at the University of Illinois
Authors: Solberg Winton U.
Published: August 2007

For over two centuries, the College was the characteristic form of higher education in the United States, and the College was closely allied to the church in a predominantly Protestant land. The university became the characteristic form of American higher education starting in the late nineteenth Century, and universities long continued to reflect the nation's Protestant culture. By about 1900, however, Catholics and Jews began to enter universities in increasing numbers. What was the experience of Jewish students in these institutions, and how did authorities respond to their appearance? These questions will be addressed in this article by focusing on the Jewish presence at the University of Illinois in the early twentieth Century. Religion, like a red thread, is interwoven throughout the entire fabric of this story.
Sociological Christianity and Christian Sociology: The Paradox of Early American Sociology
Authors: Henking Susan E.
Published: August 2007

In 1975, Robin Gill wrote that “as yet there is a rather thin body of literature on possible correlations between sociology and theology.” Since then, a host of other writers have joined Gill in commenting on the absence of such correlations and in seeking to connect the two phenomena. Indeed, the current era in American culture might, as several commentators have noted, be understood as one of detente between social science and religion. Such a depiction, of course, rests on the assumption that sociology and theology are hostile enterprises that may be brought together. This has, however, not always been the case: the past fifteen years are not the first occasion when theology and sociology have intersected and a Christian sociology been proposed.
The Godly Insurrection in Limestone County: Social Gospel, Populism, and Southern Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century
Authors: Goode Richard C.
Published: August 2007

An “enormous mob” marching, protesting, and burning the governor in effigy does not sound like a typical description of late nineteenth-century southern religion. It more than likely conjures images of campus and urban riots of recent times. Surprisingly, such an event occurred in traditionally staid north Alabama over 100 years ago. On February 25,1891, outraged Limestone County farmers marched on the town square in Athens and demonstrated in front of the county courthouse. Across the street from the courthouse stood Theophilus West-moreland's drugstore. Here an effigy of Governor Thomas Goode Jones, with a noose around its neck, was thrown from a second floor window and set aflame, much to the mob's delight. After the governor was taken care of, Westmoreland's brother-in-law and president of the Limestone County Farmers' Alliance, Hector D. Lane, addressed the mob, stoking the passions of the Alliance's “wool hat boys and sun bonnet girls.”
Women, Public Ministry, and American Fundamentalism, 1920-1950
Authors: Hamilton Michael S.
Published: August 2007

In 1976, a young theologian named Donald Dayton wrote an influential book that sought to put asunder what he saw as an unholy marriage between evangelical religion and conservative politics in America. InDiscovering an Evangelical Heritage, Dayton showed how revivalistic Protestantism had, in the nineteenth century, been wedded firmly to progressive political causes. Dayton began his book by frankly admitting that his own political views had been heavily influenced by the student movements—antiwar, civil rights, equal rights— of the 1960's. Separate chapters linked evangelical religion to nineteenth-century movements for racial equality, economic justice, and feminism. In his final chapter, Dayton argued that twentieth-century evangelicalism had abandoned its heritage of radical social reform under the dual influence of premillennialism imported from England and ideas about biblical inerrancy formulated at Princeton Seminary.
“A True Revival of Religion”: Protestants and the San Francisco Graft Prosecutions, 1906–1909
Authors: Anderson Douglas Firth
Published: August 2007

Almost a year after the great earthquake and fire of April 1906, San Francisco clergyman William Rader declared, “We are having a true revival of religion.” Writing in the San Francisco-based Congregationalist weeklyPacific, Rader was not referring to the visit of a mass evangelist; rather, he meant the graft prosecutions officially launched in October 1906 against the Union Labor party administration of the city. He compared Rudolph Spreckels, a reform-minded member of the city's financial elite who was helping to fund the prosecution, and Francis J. Heney, the lead prosecuting attorney, to the late-nineteenth-century revival team of Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey. “God is moving the city,” Rader asserted, “and when a number of our Supervisors and other officials are sent to prison we will be more free…. Thank God the Christ spirit is not dead; it lives.”
Purgatory and the Powerful Dead: A Case Study of Native American Repatriation
Authors: Flynn Johnny P. , Laderman Gary
Published: August 2007

… what an enhancement of the power of the living there was in this hold over the dead.… And for the Church, what a marvelous instrument of power!… Purgatory brought the Church not only new spiritual power but also, to put it bluntly, considerable profit.

Throughout history, human communities have converted the dead into sources of living power by grafting symbolic structures onto them and their places of interment. The impact of these structures on society, however, indicates that the “dead” are understood as more than physical remains. The dead can be imagined also as memories, spirits, or deities, and the physical or spiritual locations where they reside are essential to the vitality of the symbolism. When the dead are symbolized and carefully integrated into cultural and/or religious systems, they can become a potent source of political power for those who control the meaning of the dead and their physical remains. For this reason, the dead—especially their tombs and remains—have historically been a valuable commodity in the religious and cultural marketplace.
The Power of Interpretation: The Revival of 1857-58 and the Historiography of Revivalism in America
Authors: Long Kathryn T.
Published: August 2007

For quite some time Timothy L. Smith and J. Edwin Orr have been nudging other historians to sit up and take notice of a revival that is so haphazardly interpreted that there exists little unanimity on what even to call it.

So began a 1982 essay by Leonard Sweet on the Revival of 1857-58, an event usually remembered for its widely publicized urban prayer meetings. As Sweet alluded, lack of consensus on what to call this revival reflected only the tip of an iceberg of interpretative confusion. In addition to what they should title it, historians have differed over where the revival began, how long it lasted, which regions of the country were involved, its religious and cultural significance, and even whether anything happened that actually had significance worthy of academic investigation.
The Easter Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display
Authors: Schmidt Leigh Eric
Published: August 2007

Irving Berlin's popular musical of 1948,Easter Parade, starring Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, opens with a wonderful shopping scene. It is the day before Easter, 1911. Astaire's character, Don Hewes, sings and dances his way along the streets of New York past a dry-goods store and through millinery, florist, and toy shops. “Me, oh, my,” he sings, “there's a lot to buy. There is shopping I must do. Happy Easter to you.” In the millinery store saleswomen model elaborate Easter bonnets and mellifluously offer their wares: “Here's a hat that you must take home. Happy Easter…. This was made for the hat parade on the well-known avenue. This one's nice and it's worth the price. Happy Easter to you.” Everywhere Hewes goes he buys things—a bonnet, a large pot of lilies, a toy bunny. By the time he leaves the florist, he has purchased so many gifts that he is followed by three attendants who help carry all the packages. Don Hewes is a consumer on a spree, and Easter is the occasion for it.
Racial Justice and the People of God: The Second Vatican Council, the Civil Rights Movement, and American Catholics
Authors: McGreevy John T.
Published: August 2007

Catholic participation in the southern civil rights movement culminated at Selma in March 1965. As was customary in much of the South, Selma's Catholic churches were strictly segregated, with the priests in charge of the African American “mission” parish ignored by the city's other clergy. (One attempt at integration of the city's “white” parish by a group of African American Catholic teenagers met with fierce resistance.) In addition, the bishop of Montgomery, Thomas Toolen, attempted to prevent northern Catholics from responding to the pleas of civil rights activists for assistance, maintaining that outsiders were “out of place in these demonstrations—their place is at home doing God's work… .” Regardless, priests from fifty different dioceses, lay people, and nuns flocked to Alabama to join in the marches.
Song and Dance: Native American Religions and American History
Authors: Sullivan Lawrence E.
Published: August 2007

What are some recent works on Native American religions that make good additions to courses on American History? With this question, the editors framed their charge for this review. This is a good moment to pose such a question because of the recent upsurge in publishing on the subject of Native American religious life. The treatment of some recent books is outlined in three stages that cover three ways of including Native American religions in courses: framing questions, case study, and key themes.

Of course, teachers teach best within the compass of their own interests. This is where their passions reside and where there is the deepest motivation to communicate clearly with others. There is much to be interested in and passionate about in the recent publications on Native American religions.
Fundamentalism and Folk Science between the Wars
Authors: Davis Edward B.
Published: August 2007

Reports of the demise of the “warfare” school of writing the history of religion and science may yet be premature, but it seems safe to say that it has had a near-death experience. Much recent historiography has underscored the shallowness, futility, and wrongheadedness of treating controversies involving religion and science simply as skirmishes in an ongoing, inevitable conflict between contradictory ways of viewing the world. We have been urged, as historians, to probe beneath the surface of apparent conflicts in search of the underlying reasonswhypeople with different beliefs have come to disagree so deeply about matters involving science and to accept the realities of an historically complex situation. After showing the inadequacy of the warfare thesis, David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers note sadly that “we will never find a satisfactory alternative of equal simplicity.” John Hedley Brooke, the author of a recent comprehensive study, concludes that “Serious scholarship in the history of science has revealed so extraordinarily rich and complex a relationship between science and religion in the past that general theses are difficult to sustain. The real lesson turns out to be the complexity.”
A New Denominational Historiography?
Authors: Wilson John F.
Published: August 2007

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?

No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.
The Troubles with Harry: Freedom, America, and God in John Updike'sRabbitNovels
Authors: Pasewark Kyle A.
Published: August 2007

[I] had all of Shillington to say, Shillington and Pennsylvania and the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America to say.…In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea—this odd and uplifting line from among the many odd lines of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” seemed to me, as I set out, to summarize what I had to say about America, to offer itself as the title of a Continentalmagnum opusof which all my books, no matter how many, would be mere installments, mere Starts at the hymning of this great roughly rectangular country severed from Christ by the breadth of the sea.

John Updike's corpus is punctuated forcefully by his own magnum opus, the Rabbit series, a tetralogy that is simultaneously literature, cultural critique, and theology.
Carnival of Shame: Doctorow and the Rosenbergs
Authors: Detweiler Robert
Published: August 2007

“Literature can turn language, for the moment at least, against the sentence of death.”

Considering the national and international furor provoked by the sensational early 1950's “atom spy” trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, one may be surprised that these dramatic and traumatic events have not inspired more literary artistry than they have. But a prominent playwright, Arthur Miller, did write The Crucible (produced in 1953) in part as a response to the rabid McCarthyism of that era, and two highly regarded novelists in a later decade composed ambitious novels drawing directly on the Rosenberg affair: E. L. Doctorow in The Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover in The Public Burning (1977). In 1987, Sidney Lumet produced the little noticed film Daniel, based on Doctorow's novel, and still more recently Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America, with Ethel Rosenberg as one of the characters, has been playing on Broadway.
Manna and the Manual: Sacramental and Instrumental Constructions of the Victorian Methodist Camp Meeting during the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Authors: Cooley Steven D.
Published: August 2007

“The character of the place on which one Stands is the fundamental symbolic and social question,” Claims historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith. From this sense of place, there follows a “whole language of Symbols and social structures.” Studies of Methodist history have also considered sensitivity to Methodism's distinctive sense of place essential to their subject. It is now commonplace to observe that Methodism shattered the geographic bounds of church and parish in order to situate religion for activity across an open, unbounded terrain. This proved one of the most offending characteristics of its ministers, whose itineracy commonly violated civil laws intended to locate spatially religion. Within some traditions, the receipt of a “location” meant a minister received a church and thereby became a minister. Within Methodist discourse, granting a “location” has held quite the opposite meaning: it has meant a departure from the ministry.
The Puritans as Founders: The Quest for Identity in Early Whig Rhetoric*
Authors: Hammer Dean C.
Published: August 2007

In looking at the politics of the opening decades of the nineteenth Century, scholarly attention has been drawn to the self-destruction of the Federalists, the ascendancy of the Jeffersonian Republicans, or the emergence of the Jacksonian Democrats. What gets lost in the way scholars view this political drama is the coalescence of an American Whig identity, forged in the decade of the 1820's. At least part of this inattention can be explained by scholarly appraisals of the Whig party as intellectually incoherent, politically cynical, and, ultimately, unsuccessful.

The Whig position was, indeed, a curious one: the Whigs heralded the growth of the modern capitalist market that would unleash the forces of entrepreneurial individualism, yet they decried the loss of the precommercial values of deference, virtue, and hierarchical Community; they embraced the prosperity brought about by commerce, yet they feared the corruption of virtue that resulted from the pursuit of interest; and they looked forward to a capitalist economy while glancing back at an antidemocratic Federalism and Puritan moralism.
The New Divinity and Williams College, 1793-1836*
Authors: Kling David W.
Published: August 2007

The story is a familiar one, found in nearly every narrative text of American religious history In the summer of 1806, five Williams College students met in a grove of trees to pray for divine guidance and to discuss their religious faith and calling. While seeking refuge from a summer rainstorm under a haystack, Samuel J. Mills, Jr., and the other four students consecrated their lives to overseas missions. This incident, later publicized as the Haystack Prayer Meeting, became the pivotal event in the launching of American Protestantism's foreign missionary movement. Mills and several comrades carried their vision from Williams to Andover Theological Seminary, where they created a more formal organization that eventually led to the establishment of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in 1810. In the hagiography of missions, Mills is revered as the “father” of American foreign missions and Williams as the birthplace. Subsequently, Mills's “sons”—the alumni of Williams—followed precedent: from 1810 to 1840, Williams provided more missionaries to the ABCFM than any other American College.
“Christians Love the Jews!” The Development of American Philo-Semitism, 1790-1860
Authors: Whalen Robert K.
Published: August 2007

Philo-Semitism is America's enduring contribution to the long, troubled, often murderous dealings of Christians with Jews. Its origins are English, and it drew continuously on two centuries of British research into biblical prophecy from the seventeenth Century onward. Philo-Semitism was, however, soon “domesticated” and adapted to the political and theological climate of America after independence. As a result, it changed as America changed. In the early national period, religious literature abounded that foresaw the conversion of the Jews and the restoration of Israel as the ordained task of the millennial nation—the United States. This scenario was, allowing for exceptions, socially and theologically optimistic and politically liberal, as befit the ethos of a revolutionary era. By the eve of Civil War, however, countless evangelicals cleaved to a darker vision of Christ's return in blood and upheaval. They disparaged liberal social views and remained loyal to an Augustinian theology that others modified or abandoned.
The Religious Construction of Masculinity in Victorian America: The Male Mediumship of John Shoebridge Williams
Authors: Carroll Bret E.
Published: August 2007

After John Shoebridge Williams became a Spiritualist medium in February 1852, establishing what he believed to be contact with the spirit of his deceased daughter, Eliza, and access to the wisdom of the spirit world, the sixty-one-year-old man came to the startling realization that he was assuming the features of a woman. At least, this is what he thought as he recorded the events of March 15, 1852, in his spiritual Journal:

When walking the streets of Cincinnati Eliza said to me, “You know, Dear Father, that of late years, your breasts have been partly developed like a females [sic]. This was from my influence. You were well prepared to receive me into your bosom, and already do our souls unite in substance so as to become one.”
Sentimental Catechism: Archbishop James Gibbons, Mass-Print Culture, and American Literary History
Authors: Ryan James Emmett
Published: August 2007

Building on an ample foundation of (often feminist) revisionary literary scholarship, which over the last decade has fostered a substantial reexamination of “sentimental” texts created by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American novelists, recent studies of sentimentality in nineteenth-century American culture have continued to expose its political import, social complications, gender paradoxes, and racial construction. Once dismissed as shallow tearjerkers, American sentimental novels, which often drew on the example of British fictional models from Samuel Richardson'sPamela(1740) andClarissa(1747-1748) to Charles Dickens'sA Christmas Carol(1843) andLittle Dorrit(1857-1858), have recently been recognized as “the most radical popular form available to middle-class culture.” By now, Leslie Fiedler's despair in the face of the alleged artistic impoverishments of these books has been abandoned by many critics, who, bypassing or modifying Fiedler's aesthetic imperatives, now prefer to ask pointed questions about the “cultural work” that these books have performed within American society.
The Church Irrelevant: Paul Hanly Furfey and the Fortunes of American Catholic Radicalism
Authors: McCarraher Eugene B.
Published: August 2007

When prophets are honored, it is time to be wary. Placing prophets on pedestals can be a way not only of disarming them but also of evading all the lessons they can teach. American Catholic radicals, for instance, occupy several revered niches in the history of American Catholicism. Here, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin break bread on Mott Street and milk cows on Maryfarm; there, Daniel Berrigan destroys draft records and leads G-men on a merry chase through New England. Though vilified in their times, this communion of saints now commands respect in most quarters of American Catholic intellectual life and could even constitute a Catholic wing in the pantheon of American radicalism.
Applying the Devil's Works in a Holy Cause: Working-Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879-1900
Authors: Taiz Lillian
Published: August 2007

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”
Conjure and Christianity in the Nineteenth Century: Religious Elements in African American Magic
Authors: Chireau Yvonne
Published: August 2007

Shortly before the turn of the nineteenth Century, an amateur collector of Negro Spirituals and folklore recounted a conversation that she had had with an unidentified African American clergyman. According to the collector, the clergyman, “one of the most scholarly and noted ministers of the colored race,” admitted that, even as a professed Christian, he found himself “under the influences ofvoodooism” and other African occult practices. He explained that, as a young pastor, he had grown “completely discouraged” after numerous unsuccessful attempts to attract new worshipers into his congregation until one day an unexpected visitor happened his way:

I was in my study praying when the door opened and a little Conjure man came in and said softly: “You don't understand de people. You must get you ahandas a friend to draw 'em. Ef you will let me fix you a luck charm, you'll git 'em.”
“Memorial Stones”: The Geography of Womanhood inHeathen Woman's Friend, 1869-1879
Authors: Wills Anne Blue
Published: August 2007

The accompanying engraving [see fig. 1] appeared in a mid-nineteenth-century issue ofThe Ladies' Repository.Its caption, “Missionary Cemetry[sic], Fuh-Chau, China,” gives an accurate enough description of the scene. The artist even included a legend identifying the missionary wives and children whose remains the graves held. It is difficult to know exactly in what spiritThe Repositorypresented this engraving to its subscribers. But the shady silence of the scene, like a pictorial obituary, invites reflection on both the lives and the deaths of the entombed. Significantly, like an obituary, the embrace of the trees also draws one in to reflect on one's own life and eventual death.
Trifling with Holy Time: Women and the Formation of the Calvinist Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, 1815-1820
Authors: Lawes Carolyn J.
Published: August 2007

It was half past nine on a quiet Monday night in April 1818. Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury, known throughout Worcester as “Madame Salisbury” in deference to her family's wealth and social position, was passing a serene evening at home with her niece and adopted daughter, Eliza Weir. Her husband, Stephen, a merchant and the town's wealthiest Citizen, was away on business. The Salisbury mansion's comfortable drawing room was pleasant, graced by Elizabeth's harp and a piano bought expressly for Eliza.

Suddenly, the peace was shattered as something crashed violently against the front window. Salisbury immediately “call'd in the people” (the servants) for protection. Venturing outside, they spotted no one lurking about but did find two good-sized stones, one weighing over half a pound. Peering out into the now still night, Elizabeth Salisbury noted that “it was very dark, & no one appeared to be in the street. [Y]ou may suppose I did not recover my tranquil[l]ity very soon.”
“To Form a More Perfect Union”: The Moral Example of Southern Baptist Thought and Education, 1890-1920
Authors: Heffron John M.
Published: August 2007

Conservative politically, inured to the new empiricism, and yet the least secularized of the Protestant ideologies, Southern Baptistism was a “guiding light” in the ascendancy of southernness in American education. Its primitivist Christian values—a Christology in which the God of Scripture and the God of Nature were united in the person of Christ (and in the Community of all persons)—tended to reinforce the atavistic, agricultural values of the Old South while blocking the encroachment of avowedly more modern urban-industrial ones. Its appropriation of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century evidentialism added credence to credulity, substituting rational belief for narrow sectarianism. Its ethic of hard work, temperance, and self-sacrifice was bound to the soil and rooted in the southern country and mission school, where agricultural and religious instruction were the traditional mainstays.
Mary Marshall Dyer, Gender, and A Portraiture of Shakerism
Authors: De Wolfe Elizabeth A.
Published: August 2007

Those who have witnessed [the Shakers'] institutions, seen the neatness and economy … the sincere though singular ceremonies of their religious devotions, have feit an unwillingness to believe the slanderous representations of Mrs. Dyer.

—Newburyport Herald, April 27, 1824

Suffice it to say that everything we saw and heard tended to confirm M. Dyer's assertions respecting them.

—Mary Clark to Francis Jackson, July 16, 1823

When Mary Marshall Dyer, a vociferous and ambitious convert, departed the Enfield, New Hampshire, Shakers in 1815, the elders breathed a sigh of relief. Since joining the Community two years earlier, Dyer sought her own interpretation of Scripture, repeatedly questioned the eiders, and aggressively campaigned for a leadership position. When Mary left the Enfield Community, the elders felt relief—but it was momentary. Little did they realize that they would soon become embroiled in one of the most public and aggressive disputes to threaten Shakerism in forty years.
The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America
Authors: Pagliarini Marie Anne
Published: August 2007

In the years between 1830 and 1860, anti-Catholicism in America became unprecedentedly virulent. In 1834, the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, was burned to the ground by an angry mob, touched off in large part by the anti-Catholic sermons of Lyman Beecher and rumors of convent abuses spread by Rebecca Reed. The following years saw several attempts by State governments to legislate against convents as well as numerous incidents of violence. In 1839, thousands of people in Baltimore rioted for three days and threatened to destroy a Carmelite convent. Five years later, rioting mobs in Philadelphia killed thirteen people and left blocks of Catholic homes and two Catholic churches smoldering in ruins. And, throughout the 1850's, a political party called the Know-Nothings convulsed the nation with its violent hostility toward Catholics. The worst incidents occurred in St. Louis, where ten people were killed in 1854, and in Louisville, where twenty were killed in 1855. The Know-Nothings diminished in popularity only with the turmoil of the Civil War.
Entering the “Tent of Abraham”: Fraternal Ritual and American-Jewish Identity, 1880-1920
Authors: Soyer Daniel
Published: August 2007

One evening in 1893, a young Jewish immigrant named William Bakst joined the New York mutual-aid association made up of his compatriots from the Lithuanian town of Oshmene. The strange ceremony that marked his induction made a deep impression on him. He found especially striking the regalia that seemed utterly to transform the presiding officer, whom Bakst knew by his familiar old-country nickname. “When the inside-guard led me to the president,” Bakst later recalled,

so that I could give the oath that I would never, God forbid, reveal the secrets of the society and that I would be true to its goals, when I set eyes on Gershke Yankls with a red sash across his chest, Standing there giving three strong raps of the gavel, and all those present responding by standing, I became so scared that I didn't even know what they were telling me to repeat. The “regalia” that the president wore frightened me most of all. For me, a greenhorn just out of the yeshiva who had never in his life attended a meeting, the red sash gave the impression of a high government official.
The Poetic Uses of Religion inThe Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez
Authors: León Luis
Published: August 2007

It is surprising that so few historians of religions have ever tried to interpret a literary work from their own perspective.

—Mircea Eliade

There are no gospels that are immortal, but neither is there any reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones.

—Emile Durkheim

Was that what God expected, that ritual of more pain? She thought of Milagros. Addthisto all her miseries? Milagros yearned for less pain… . Was the old woman in veils courting something more with her crawling on bloodied knees—a miracle—by displaying her endurance for greater misery?

—John Rechy

The past thirty years have been a watershed in Mexican American literature, witnessing the proliferation of texts with increasingly diverse themes. For the most part, this literary production has been motivated by the impulse to narrate the stories that typify Mexican cultural history in the United States.
Infallible Proofs, Both Human and Divine: The Persuasiveness of Mormonism for Early Converts
Authors: Harper Steven C.
Published: August 2007

In March 1830, the Grandin Press in Palmyra, New York, published the first edition of the Book of Mormon. On April 6, Joseph Smith, Jr., organized the Church of Christ—Mormonism—in Fayette near the Finger Lakes. Shortly thereafter, Joseph's unschooled younger brother Samuel filled a knapsack with copies of the book and traveled to villages westward to make converts to what he believed to betherestoration of primitive Christianity. From these beginnings, a small army of itinerant missionaries gathered several thousand American converts throughout the 1830's.
The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate
Authors: Harrill J. Albert
Published: August 2007

The study of nineteenth-century U.S. biblical exegesis on the slavery question illumines a fundamental paradox in American religious culture. The relationship between the moral imperative of anti-slavery and the evolution of biblical criticism resulted in a major paradigm shift away from literalism. This moral imperative fostered an interpretive approach that found conscience to be a more reliable guide to Christian morality than biblical authority. Yet, the political imperative of proslavery nourished a biblicism that long antedated the proslavery argumentation and remains prevalent in American moral preaching. The nineteenth-century desire to resolve this paradox led to important innovations in American interpretations of the Bible.
Clinician Scientist Training Program: A Proposal for Training Medical Students in Clinical Research
Authors: Mark Allyn L. , Kelch Robert P.
Published: August 2007

There is national alarm about a decline in the number of clinician scientists. Most of the proposed solutions have focused on housestaff and junior faculty. We propose a new national program for training medical students in clinical research. This program, coined “Clinician Scientist Training Program” (CSTP), would consist of a combined degree program in medicine (MD) and clinical research (eg, masters in translational research or masters in clinical epidemiology). Students could enroll in the program at any stage during medical school. After 3 years of medical school, students would spend at least 2 years in a combined didactic and mentored clinical research training program and then complete medical school. Students could elect to pursue more prolonged clinical research training toward a combined PhD and MD. The CSTP is designed to meet six critical challenges: 1) engage students early in clinical research training; 2) provide a didactic clinical research curriculum; 3) expose students to several years of mentored clinical research training; 4) promote debt prevention by providing tuition payments during medical education and a stipend during clinical research training; 5) facilitate prolonged exposure to a community of peers and mentors in a program with national and institutional identity and respect; and 6) permit enrollment in the program as students enter medical school or at any stage during medical school. If the success of the Medical Scientist Training Program in training medical students in basic research is a guide, the CSTP could become a linchpin for training future generations of clinician scientists.
High-Resolution Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Normal and Atherosclerotic Human Coronary Arteries Ex Vivo: Discrimination of Plaque Tissue Components
Authors: Yuan Chun , Hatsukami Thomas S. , O'Brien Kevin D.
Published: August 2007

Background

Noninvasive detection of plaque lipid and calcium in human atherosclerosis may have clinical utility, because the presence of each may be associated with increased risk of plaque disruption. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has the potential to detect both plaque lipid and calcium. However, no previous studies have: 1) used an MR coil with sufficient resolution to image the components of human coronary arteries, 2) evaluated the utility of a combination of different MR contrast weightings in discriminating plaque components in human coronary arteries, or 3) used sensitive and specific histological stains for lipid and calcium to determine their MR image characteristics in human atherosclerosis.

Methods

Using a custom-made surface coil on a whole-body, 1.5T MRI scanner, high resolution MR images were obtained from 22 nonatherosclerotic and atherosclerotic human coronary artery segments and then compared with histological sections stained for neutral lipid, calcium, and fibrous and cellular components.

Results

With a multicontrast protocol using T1-, proton density-, and T2-weighted images, statistically significant differences were found among MR image contrast values for regions identified by histological stains as containing lipid only, calcium only, mixed lipid and calcium, or fibrous tissue. All four of these histologically defined region types could be differentiated from one another by a multicontrast MRI protocol. Of the 22 segments, 10 (45%) contained areas with combined plaque lipid and calcium; calcium would not have been recognized histologically in these regions without the use of a specific calcium stain.

Conclusions

These results demonstrate that multicontrast MRI can produce remarkably high-resolution images and can discriminate between clinically relevant components of the atherosclerotic vessel wall.
Relationship of Early Carotid Artery Disease with Lipoprotein (a), Apolipoprotein B, and Fibrinogen in Asymptomatic Essential Hypertensive Patients and Normotensive Subjects
Authors: Rossi Alberto , Baldo-Enzi Goretta , Ganzaroli Chiara , Coscetti Giovanna , Calabrò Alessio , Baiocchi Maria Rosa , Maiolino Giuseppe , Pessina Achille C. , Rossi Gian Paolo
Published: August 2007

Background

We investigated the relationships between plasma lipids and lipoprotein fractions and carotid artery lesions (CAL) in 177 cerebro-vascularly asymptomatic subjects, of whom 107 were primary hypertensive patients and 70 normotensive controls.

Methods

The prevalence and severity of CAL, as assessed by calculating a score of severity (score of CAL) and the maximal stenosis of both sides, as well as the intimal-medial thickness (IMT) were evaluated with a high-resolution echo-Doppler technique. We measured total serum cholesterol, triglycerides, low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol, lipoprotein (a) [Lp(a)], Apo (apolipoprotein)AI, ApoAII, ApoB, and fibrinogen.

Results

Both the prevalence (59.4% vs 26.2%) and severity of sex- and age-adjusted and unadjusted CAL and IMT were significantly higher in hypertensive patients than in controls. Regression analysis showed different predictors of IMT and maximal stenosis. The variables that remained in the model were age, mean blood pressure (BP), and smoking for IMT; pulse pressure, known duration of hypertension (HT), fibrinogen, and ApoB for the score of CAL; and the last four variables along with age and mean BP for maximal stenosis. Furthermore, we identified a link between the atherogenic lipoprotein fractions Lp(a) and ApoB, fibrinogen and early carotid artery atherosclerotic changes.

Conclusions

The different correlates of IMT, CAL, and maximal degree of stenosis suggest that they reflect different events occurring in the arterial wall in response to aging, HT, and other risk factors, rather than simply different stages of the same atherosclerotic process.
Transesophageal Dobutamine Stress Echocardiography with Tissue Doppler Imaging for Detection and Assessment of Coronary Artery Disease
Authors: Vitarelli Antonio , Conde Ysabel , Ferro Luzzi Marco , Di Benedetto Giulia , Giubilei Rossella , Leone Tiziana , Cimino Ester
Published: August 2007

Background

Transesophageal dobutamine stress echocardiography (T-DSE) has been shown to be a sensitive and specific technique for the detection of myocardial ischemia. A major limitation of echocardiographic study interpretation, however, is the subjective visual analysis of endocardial motion and wall thickening, which is only semiquantitative.

Methods

To analyze whether T-DSE with the use of tissue Doppler imaging (TDI) during graded dobutamine infusion may be useful to detect and quantify stress-induced myocardial ischemia by changes in myocardial velocities, 70 patients undergoing coronary arteriography were studied with T-DSE and TDI. Midesophageal and transgastric short- and long-axis images were obtained at each level of dobutamine infusion. T-DSE was successful in 67 patients (96%). Baseline resting pulsed and color peak systolic (S) and early diastolic (E) velocities of the anterior, septal, lateral, and inferior walls were examined.

Results

Pulsed and color TDI correlated well at rest and after stress. Fifteen patients had a normal response to dobutamine, and 52 patients had inducible ischemia by two-dimensional criteria. In the normal group, there was a significant dose-dependent increase in S and E velocities. Compared with those in the normal group, patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) had lower resting S and E velocities and blunted S wave increase or E wave decrease during DSE.

Conclusions

T-DSE with TDI is a feasible and accurate test for the quantitative assessment of patients with CAD who have impaired augmentation of systolic and diastolic myocardial velocities during dobutamine infusion.