bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Direct Management from Abroad: The Formative Years of the British Columbia Electric Railway
Authors: Roy Patricia E.
Published: April 2006

This is a case study of a London-directed firm that supplied transportation, gas, and electric power in British Columbia. Its history suggests that, in a young and rapidly developing economy, control of a company's activities by outsiders who are chiefly concerned with long-term investment prospects may be of greater benefit to all concerned than critics of absentee management are willing to admit.
Corporate Liberalism in the American Business Community, 1920–1940
Authors: McQuaid Kim
Published: April 2006

Contrasting with the resentment of other power structures, especially corporate business, that democratic governments display is the obvious need of the powerful and the productive for each other in times of stress. Professor McQuaid follows the activities of a group of “corporate liberals” (i.e., big business leaders who believed that intelligent collaboration between business, government, and organized labor was an attainable goal) from World War I through the prosperous 1920s, the despondent 1930s, and the busy and prosperous years of World War II. He concludes that corporate liberal opinion grew more influential in both corporate and governmental circles during and after the period.
The Craftsman as Industrialist: Jonas Chickering and the Transformation of American Piano Making
Authors: Kornblith Gary J.
Published: April 2006

Master craftsmen played a critical role in launching the Industrial Revolution in America. In this case study of artisan entrepreneurship, Professor Kornblith analyzes the career of Jonas Chickering (1798–1853), the foremost American piano manufacturer before the emergence of the Steinways. By revolutionizing the way in which pianos were made, Chickering—with the help of others—turned a modest craft operation into a major industrial enterprise. Yet, Kornblith contends, he remained true to the craftsman's goal of artistic excellence and won the respect of his employees as well as of the public at large. By the force of his example, Chickering contributed to the acceptance of technological change within the trade and, more broadly, to the legitimation of industrial capitalism within American culture.
International Harvester in Russia: The Washington-St. Petersburg Connection?
Authors: Carstensen Fred V. , Werking Richard Hume
Published: April 2006

Diplomatic historians have frequently cast American foreign policy from 1890 to 1915 as handmaiden to the expansion of American enterprise in foreign markets, but the relationship between government and business was neither one-sided nor simple. Government officials had their own agenda of objectives for which they wanted business support, sometimes even trying to use specific firms as their agent. Business itself did not speak with a single voice — policies which one firm might find beneficial, another found detrimental. Moreover, business was only one among various interest groups competing for attention and influence in the policymaking process. This case study of International Harvester's efforts to gain government assistance for the development of a Russian branch factory uncovers these intertwined threads of intersecting and conflicting objectives and interest groups, revealing the tangled complexity of business-government relations in this turbulent era.
Business Manuscripts at Baker Library, 1969–1979
Authors: Lovett Robert W.
Published: April 2006

Last December the Manuscripts Department of Baker Library issued a new edition of its collections guide entitled, Manuscripts in Baker Library, A Guide to Sources for Business, Economic and Social History. Although this is the fourth edition of its List of Business Manuscripts, the changed title reflects what is felt to be the broadened scope of the collections and their more varied use. Earlier editions appeared in 1932 (minus an index), 1951, and 1969. As before, the new volume is a complete listing of holdings, not just a supplement covering additions since 1969. Even with a few removals, additions come to an even 100 collections, for a total of 1403, as compared with 1303 in the previous edition.
Business History and the History of Technology
Authors: Uselding Paul
Published: April 2006

Business enterprise in a market setting is the principal institutional artifact of capitalism, while capitalism itself is the creation of powerful evolutionary forces that were present in the culture of Europe. Those evolutionary forces continue their play into the present, working within the distinctive cultural context determined by an evolving capitalism. Every type and style of history dealing with European society and its offshoots must ultimately face and accommodate this central historical fact if it is to generalize its findings and acquire real intellectual weight and significance.
Business Demand and the Development of the Telegraph in the United States, 1844–1860
Authors: Du Boff Richard B.
Published: April 2006

“The telegraph system in America is eminently characteristic of the national mind. At its very birth, it became the handmaiden of commerce.” So wrote the editor of a telegraph trade journal in 1853. Professor Du Boff describes an antebellum American business community that was as ready for a “revolution” in its size and structure as the dawning science of electricity was ready to make it happen. The result was the telegraph and its enthusiastic adoption in a few short years by a business system that quickly became national in scope and outlook. The railroad may ultimately have changed America even more than the telegraph but, as Du Boff shows, the railroad was originally conceived as a local and regional facility whereas the telegraph was interregional in its impact from its very beginnings.
Image and Reality: The Railway Corporate-State Metaphor
Authors: Ward James A.
Published: April 2006

Of the innumerable types of business enterprise that flourished in nineteenth-century America, none was more important than the railroads. For the first time in the national experience they provided relatively cheap, dependable transportation into the heartland and created a national market that prompted the growth of so many other aspects of national endeavor. As railroad leaders built what became America's first big business, they also developed a new self-image and with it a vocabulary drawn from their conception of competition as war. It is this new self-image and the lexicon that went with it that form the subject of this article by James A. Ward.
“An Honorable Place”: The Quest for Professional Advertising Education, 1900–1917
Authors: Schultze Quentin J.
Published: April 2006

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw various advertisers embark on a concerted effort to create professional instruction at American universities. They had two objectives. They thought that such instruction might help individual firms determine precisely how advertising worked in the marketplace — and thereby create a science of advertising — and they hoped that university education would transform their business into a full-fledged profession. Yet these efforts brought mixed results. As such instruction came into being, advertisers found that they had little influence over the education they had sought to promote, and they found that such training had chosen to follow one of two divergent paths, neither of which the industry thought wholly acceptable. Even more to their dismay, advertisers found that this education did not in fact convert their business into a profession.
The Courts and the Development of Trade in Upper Canada, 1830–1860
Authors: George Peter , Sworden Philip
Published: April 2006

The centrality of transportation improvements and financial institutions to the economic development of Upper Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century is well known. In this article, Professor George and Mr. Sworden argue that the evolving legal system and legal institutions also played an important role as part of the infrastructure contributing to increased economic efficiency. In support of their thesis, they draw on court decisions on contract and property law, primarily from the judicial career of Sir John Beverley Robinson, chief justice of the Court of Queen's Bench for Upper Canada from 1829 to 1862.
The Kress Library of Business and Economics
Authors: Rogers Ruth R.
Published: April 2006

As the Kress Library of Business and Economics approaches its fiftieth anniversary in 1988, it seems an appropriate time to reflect upon the library's origins. In this essay, Ruth Rogers explains how the foundation of the collection came to the Harvard Business School, what it encompasses, and how it has evolved over the years. Some major changes are evident at the close of the Kress Library's first half-century, but its perspective will always be rooted in the past.
The Black Businessman in the Postwar South: North Carolina, 1865–1880
Authors: Kenzer Robert C.
Published: April 2006

This article uses the R. G. Dun and Company credit ratings to analyze North Carolina black businessmen and their firms in the fifteen years following the Civil War. When combined with data in local histories and in the federal census, the credit ratings reveal how the postbellum black business community, especially the mulatto population, was significantly shaped by antebellum emancipation. Blacks who shared the advantage of prewar freedom employed their superior financial resources and business experience to dominate their local economies after the war. Further, both as individuals and collectively, blacks used their newly acquired political power to foster economic opportunities in ways hitherto unrecognized by both political and business history scholars.
Putting Foreign Consumers on the Map: J. Walter Thompson's Struggle with General Motors' International Advertising Account in the 1920s
Authors: Merron Jeff
Published: April 2006

In the late 1920s and early 1930s the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, fueled largely by a deal with General Motors' international operations, opened thirty-four branch offices in Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, India, Australia, and South America. The overseas branches allowed the agency to sharpen its methods of quantitative research. They also enabled J. Walter Thompson to establish lasting understandings of European markets that proved beneficial for its long-term health.
From Trust to Contract: The Legal Language of Managerial Ideology, 1920–1980
Authors: Kaufman Allen , Zacharias Lawrence
Published: April 2006

Although the managerial function arises out of organizational needs imposed by market competition and technological development, managers' professional status has come in large part from legal conceptions that perceive the managerially run firm as an institutional bulwark for modern democracy. This article examines how the law, through its doctrines of trust and contract, has made and unmade management as a semi-public profession. The article explores the history of tender-offer regulation as a case study of this process.
The Corporation Nobody Knew: Bruce Barton, Alfred Sloan, and the Founding of the General Motors “Family”
Authors: Marchand Roland
Published: April 2006

When Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., assumed the presidency of General Motors, the corporation was little known beyond Wall Street, which recognized GM simply as the holding company that controlled several nearly autonomous automakers and their subsidiaries. The following article describes how Sloan used the imagination and advertising talent of Bruce Barton to create a corporate image for GM, not only in the mind of the public, but among GM's own headquarters staff and division executives as well. Through the metaphor of the corporate “family,” Sloan and Barton finessed a potential public relations liability—the corporation's immense size—into an image of efficient cooperation and internal cohesion.
Patriarch Nikon and the Subjection of the Russian Church to the State
Authors: Spinka Matthew
Published: April 2006

Patriarch Nikon is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in Russian church history. A zealous, although needlessly harsh and domineering, reformer of the church, forceful to the point of being dictatorial in the exercise of his patriarchal office, his endeavor to make the church independent of the state precipitated a struggle which in the days of Peter the Great culminated in the abolition of the patriarchate and the subjugation of the church.
Robert J. Breckinridge and the Slavery Aspect of the Presbyterian Schism of 1837
Authors: Moore Edmund A.
Published: April 2006

The stories of the great Methodist and Baptist slavery schisms have found a place in the general histories of the United States. That there was, also, a major schism in the decade of the thirties in the Presbyterian church is fairly well known, yet few students of American history have demonstrated much discriminating knowledge of the two large bodies of Presbyterians that existed for thirty years after, and as the result of this schism. The great cleavage in the Presbyterian church, known as the Old School-New School schism, has been presented as the result of a struggle which was concerned almost exclusively with doctrine and ecclesiastical government. The struggle was, to a large degree, of a theological nature. Opposition to the New England influence, operating through the once popular Plan of Union, goes far to account for the fury with which Robert J. Breckinridge and others who represented the Scotch-Irish element in the church battled against more liberal tendencies. The upshot of the fight, the “cutting off” of two-fifths of the church in 1837–38, need not be recounted here.
A Study of the Catechumenate
Authors: Folkemer Lawrence D.
Published: April 2006

A fresh study of early catechetical procedures, and an explanation of the instructions and techniques used in adult baptism in the early Church, are always welcome. Comparatively speaking, little has been done on the subject. This article makes no pretension of being a detailed study of the subject, but is only a partial treatment of it, with special emphasis upon the contributions of St. Augustine. Occasionally, references are drawn from Church canons and other early Church writings on the catechetical practice of the time.
The Doctrinal Interests of Marius Mercator
Authors: Bark William
Published: April 2006

From the middle of the seventeenth until the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century Marius Mercator was regarded by theologians and historians as one of the most valuable extant sources of information concerning both the Pelagian and Nestorian controversies. The basis of the notable reputation which he so long enjoyed was of course the erroneous belief that he was the compiler of the Palatine Collection, a vast and impressive mass of papal and episcopal letters, remonstrances, sermons, confessions of faith, and memoirs used in the two ecumenical councils of the fifth century. This material concerned, almost exclusively, the heresies of Pelagius and Nestorius and apparently had been gathered together for use against the adherents of those two heresiarchs. Though little could be learned about Mercator himself, the available information gave him an impeccable position in the ranks of the orthodox. He was a disciple and correspondent of Augustine, whom he supported by savage attacks on Pelagius and other leaders of the Western heresy, and he was also known to Jerome, who, in a letter sent from distant Palestine to the Roman Donatus in the year 419, included a message to Mercator, encouraging him in his opposition to the Pelagians.
A History of the Presbyterian Party from Pride's Purge to the Dissolution of the Long Parliament
Authors: Carlson Leland H.
Published: April 2006

The period of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth marked a turning point in the development of the English people. With the insight that comes from historical perspective, we can see that the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, the accession of a new dynasty in 1714, the American Revolution of 1776, and even the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, were to a considerable degree influenced by the significant events of the period 1640–1660.
Coverdale
Authors: Moffatt James
Published: April 2006

History knows men who did not begin till they were in the middle of their days. It is only on approaching or entering the forties that some people seem to strike the line of their real achievement. Up to that period they may have been active and useful, but they have not awakened to their vocation; as yet they are unconscious of their true powers. While this does not apply to the spheres of art and music, it is far from being uncommon in politics and literature. There, as any student of biography soon becomes aware, a man may not find himself till he is about forty. Sometimes it is then or thereabouts—nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita—that something happens, and a man of action, a thinker, an author, first gets the chance or the idea of doing what turns out to be the most significant thing in his career.
The American Missionary Spirit, 1828–1835
Authors: Oliphant J. Orin
Published: April 2006

Within the years indicated in the title of this paper, missionary activity in the United States came to be permeated by a spirit of enterprise that was truly remarkable. The enthusiastic outbursts of those years, presently to be noticed, were in truth novel expressions of faith grown militant, but they were not uncharacteristic of the time. Rapid change within a generation had made thoughtful Americans keenly aware of the fact that they were living in a new age, an age distinguished, among other things, for Christian benevolence. As the democratization of American life proceeded, latent energies were released and the mobilization of such energies in associations for the promotion of change was revealing to the common folk of America a new and effective way of social action and was implanting in their consciousness a belief in the idea of progress. By the decade of the 1820's Americans generally were coming to believe that it was possible by united effort to achieve emancipation for the more fortunate many and amelioration of the lot of the less fortunate few. The multiplication of associations revealed an eager striving to attain these aims. In the realm of religious activity the urge to accomplishment took the form of united endeavor for the conversion of the world.
Pilgram Marpeck, Tyrolese Engineer and Anabaptist Elder
Authors: Wenger John C.
Published: April 2006

Most of the early leaders of Anabaptism were martyred after a few months or years of activity. Two of the more outstanding exceptions are Menno Simons and Pilgram Marpeck, neither of whom is numbered among the founders of the Anabaptist movement, however. With Menno the world has long been familiar, and the group with which he united now bears his name. His writings in the original Dutch, or in German or English translation, are found in Mennonite homes in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and America. But even Mennonites know little of Marpeck today. This is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that Marpeck labored among the south-German and Swiss Anabaptists, thus sustaining a more direct relationship to the main body of American Mennonites than does the Dutch Menno Simons. The persecution and oppression which the Swiss and south-German Mennonites long had to bear is responsible, at least in part, for the early disappearance of Marpeck's name among his followers. One may add that this was also the fate of Conrad Grebel, the founder of Swiss Anabaptism. Yet Marpeck was the greatest of the south-German and Swiss Anabaptist leaders, and well deserves a closer study.
Jesper Svedberg (1653–1735): Watcher on Sion's Walls
Authors: Block Marguerite Beck
Published: April 2006

This remarkable man (father of an even more remarkable son, Emanuel Swedenborg) is familiar to students of Swedish church history through the works of Tottie,1 Annerstedt,2 Cornelius,3 Pleijel,4 and others, but now he makes himself known to us more intimately through his autobiography, published at long last, and edited by Dr. Gunnar Wetterberg, Librarian of Lund University.5 He tells us that, because “children like to have their ancestors' portraits and see what they were really like,”6 he undertook, in his old age, this “Jesper Svedberg's biography written by himself, truthfully and in detail, and read through annually and augmented, to remind himself of God's good and strange providence. Bequeathed to his children and descendents for the necessary instruction in how to traverse the world happily,—to whom may God give his grace!”7 He states, somewhat naïvely, “No one can know me better than I myself, especially since, with God's grace, I take sufficient care that self-love shall not blind me and lead me astray.”8 (In spite of which “sufficient care,” the work has been disrespectfully described as a biography “written by a onesided, enthusiastic, and uncritical admirer”9!) He made seven copies, one for each of his children, of which four are still extant. To one who has leafed through the 1100 folio pages of the Linköping MS, struggling hopelessly to decipher the faded script, with its peculiar spelling and sentence structure, Dr. Wetterberg's achievement seems nothing short of miraculous!
Churches Under Enemy Occupation Philadelphia, 1777–8
Authors: Rightmyer Nelson Waite
Published: April 2006

When the British Army entered Philadelphia on September 26, 1777, they entered the largest town in the colonies. But Philadelphians of today might be amused by the extent of the great metropolis, Philadelphia proper extended from Vine Street to South Street and westward to Fifth. “There were few houses west of Sixth street and most of these were on Chestnut and Market streets…”1Fifth Street was really the western boundary of the town as we may see from the number of cemeteries along its entire length, For example, at Cherry Street there were two Lutheran graveyards; (diagonally opposite at the northwest corner of Arch was the Presbyterian yard. At the southeast corner of this same street was the Episcopal yard; farther down, just below Market Street, was the graveyard of the Baptists. On the east side of Fifth below Walnut was the Romanists' cemetery and on the west side was that of the Free Quakers. Phjladelphians at least had the grace to remove their graveyards to the extreme limits of the town. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why colonial Philadelphia missed some of the worst epidemics.
Puritanism and the Spirit of Capitalism
Authors: Hudson Winthrop S.
Published: April 2006

Calvinism as an historical movement was exceedingly complex. It was a phenomenon in which theology, economic theory, political philosophy, and a general cultural orientation were inextricably mixed and applied in an intense effort to refashion society into a Holy Commonwealth. In attempting to interpret this movement, as Sidney E. Mead has pointed out, “one is always in danger either of trying to do complete justice to the complexity and landing in a confusing incoherence and lack of clarity, or of seizing upon one interpretative theme in the interest of clarity and landing in over-simplification.” Most of the discussions of Calvinism, in any or all of its various manifestations, have avoided the first alternative—falling into the morass of confusion and incoherence—but many have succumbed to the second—an over-simplification that is definitely misleading.
Ottoman Imperialism and the Lutheran Struggle for Recognition in Germany, 1520–1529
Authors: Fischer-Galati Stephen A.
Published: April 2006

The news of the accession of Suleiman the Magnificent to the throne of the Ottoman Empire in 1520 did not seriously alarm contemporary European rulers for he was generally considered to be a weakling completely devoid of initiative. Surprisingly, however, this supposedly weak son of a strong father (Selim I) took the initiative within one year of becoming Sultan. Eager to strengthen the position of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, Suleiman temporarily abandoned his father's policy of conquest in the Middle East and launched a series of powerful attacks against South Eastern Europe: Belgrade fell in 1521 after it had withstood Turkish attacks for over half a century; Rhodes, the main Christian stronghold in the Eastern Mediterranean, suffered a similar fate the following year. The pressure on Hungary, which was increased after the fall of Belgrade, discouraged the Eastern Europeans from an optimistic view of their future. Indeed, the outlook for Eastern Europe was by no means bright.
Comment
Authors: Strauss Leo
Published: April 2006

This meeting, I gather, is concerned with the need for reinterpretation. I am not at all certain that reinterpretation is a universal necessity, i.e., that there cannot be final or definitive interpretations especially in those areas of historical research which are the most important. But I cannot go now into this difficult theoretical subject. I must limit myself to saying that the call for reinterpretation is dangerous practically. That call tells the historian: be original! Originality is very rare and the original historians do not have to be told to be original. As for the large majority of historians, they merely get bewildered by that call. Every one of us is probably flattered by the implication that we could be original if we only tried. This implication draws our attention away from our simple and urgent duties, the duties to be careful and thorough and to think straight. It would be also a great delusion to believe that the demand for novelty has made us more receptive to novel approaches: the resistance to genuine innovations as distinguished from fads is today as great as it was in the most benighted ages.
The Sacraments in Early American Methodism
Authors: Sanders Paul S.
Published: April 2006

In an essay written in 19291 Professor Tillich concluded that the sacraments continue to exist in modern Protestantism largely through historical impetus. The conservatism of custom and a vague awareness that their observance is somehow due to our Lord are apparently sufficient to prevent their total extinction. The last generation has of course witnessed a liturgical revival in our churches; but this new interest is by no means universal and appears on the whole to be superficial. It is less devoted to an understanding of Christian faith which might require liturgical expression than to the ornamentation of the places and procedures of worship. Its activity is rooted less in theology than in aesthetics and psychology, being perhaps more often an expression of cultural sophistication than of any serious appreciation of the sacramental quality of Christian life.
Nineteenth Century Theological and Cultural Influences on Adolf Harnack
Authors: Glick G. Wayne
Published: April 2006

There are growing evidences of a sense of concern with respect to the interpretation accorded Adolf Harnack and his liberal colleagues in the three decades since his death. As a result, appeals have been made for a re-evaluation of liberal theology, and of Harnack in particular. Certainly one of the tasks which is pre-requisite to such a reassessment is a consideration of the historical situation which shaped Harnack's thought and in some measure, at least, determined the options for his own position. Perhaps this article may contribute to this preliminary discussion, and nothing more ambitious than a consideration of Harnack's background and cultural environment, with a concluding characterization of his position, will be attempted here.
Jonathan Edwards' Conception of the Church
Authors: Schafer Thomas A.
Published: April 2006

As the pioneer of the New England Awakening and its literary defender, Edwards has long been associated with revivalism and sectarianism in American Protestantism. Several writers have noted that his Faithful Narrative (1737) of the 1734 Northampton revival, with its many translations and reprints, not only stimulated the Great Awakening of 1740 and later revivals but helped set the pattern of conversion experience in its more “enthusiastic” features. Attention has been called to his involvement in the “hell-fire” preaching of the revival, its emotional excesses, its distorted conception of childhood religion, and its pietistic individualism.
Denominationalism: the Shape of Protestantism in America
Authors: Mead Sidney E.
Published: April 2006

The Christianity which developed in the United States [after 1800] was unique. It displayed features which marked it as distinct from previous Christianity in any other land. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Christianity of Canada most nearly resembled it, but even that was not precisely like it.
The Church of England in the Old Oregon Country
Authors: Jessett Thomas E.
Published: April 2006

Most historians of the Pacific Northwest attribute the beginning of Christian missions in the old Oregon country to the appearance at St. Louis, Missouri, in the fall of 1831 of four Nez Perce Indians. According to Protestant sources these Indians were seeking the “Book of Life;” according to Roman Catholics they sought the “Blackrobes,” as the Jesuit missionaries were known. Some modern historians, unable to account for the Indians' interest in Christianity, have even asserted that they had no religious interest at all. The publicity given this event caused the Methodist Church to send out the Reverend Jason Lee in 1834, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to send out the Reverend Samuel Parker in 1835. As a result of these exploratory trips the Methodists established themselves in the Willamette Valley and the American Board sent Marcus Whitman, Henry Spalding and W. H. Gray in 1836 and Cushing Eells, Elkanah Walker and A. B. Smith in 1838 into the area of eastern Washington and Idaho now called the Inland Empire. The Roman Catholic priests, Fathers DeMers and Blanchet, arrived at Fort Vancouver in the fall of 1838.
Why the Reformation Occurred in Germany
Authors: Ritter Gerhard
Published: April 2006

At the end of the Middle Ages, the moral prestige of the old papal church was severely shaken in all the countries of Europe. Open criticism of its moral shortcomings and its organizational defects had been going on for centuries. To the diverse splinter-movements of heretical sects (which were never wholly suppressed) had been recently added the great reform movements of the Wyclifites and the Hussites. But even they had brought about no lasting and widespread upheaval. Ultimately the old hierarchy had always prevailed. Why then did the Germans, a people slow to be aroused, fond of order, and faithful to the church, take it upon themselves to carry out the most prodigious revolution in the church? And why did only their revolt against the papal church have such vast and enduring consequences?
D. F. Strauss' Life of Jesus Revisited
Authors: Harvey Van A.
Published: April 2006

An issue that inevitably appears in discussion concerning historical method is the degree to which a historian's philosophical presuppositions influence his historical work. It is not surprising that the matter is most heatedly discussed in the realm of New Testament interpretation, although the principles involved concern all historical work.
Neglected Aspects of Roger Williams' Thought
Authors: Calamandrei Mauro
Published: April 2006

The object of this article is to suggest an interpretation of Roger Williams' thought different from that which is found in most of the literature on the founder of Providence, and to point out some neglected and important aspects of his system of ideas. To summarize it briefly, this interpretation holds that far from being a humanist Roger Williams believed in the radical depravity of man and the necessity of Grace; that far from being a rationalist Williams was a Biblicist; that far from being an optimist in history, Williams was a Millenarian; and rather than being a democratic Baptist Williams believed in the prophetic ministry free from any congregational limitations—in short, that rather than being a man of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment Roger Williams was a Puritan. The orthodox attitude to Roger Williams is misleading because it either distorts, or overlooks, or denies a primary religious concern in his thought and life, as a review of the historiography will readily show.
Zwingli Study Since 1918
Authors: Thompson Bard
Published: April 2006

This bibliographical review of works on Ulrich Zwingli is partial evidence of a quarter-century of considerable scholarly activity directed toward the history of the continental Reformed churches. At first glance, the memorial volumes commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Zurich Reformation (1519–1919) and of the Reformer's death at Kappel (1531–1931) would seem to account for the inordinate number of Zwingli studies since 1918; but an equal volume of scholarship devoted, without such promptings, to Martin Bucer, or the Weber Thesis, or the Reformation in the Netherlands confirms the trend toward intrested historical inquiry, stimulated perhaps by the return to the mainstream of Reformation thought.
Christian Socialism and the First Church of Humanity
Authors: Crowe Charles
Published: April 2006

The decline of Calvinist orthodoxy worked an intellectual revolution in the minds of several million Americans during the period between the eighteen twenties and the eighteen forties. The social ferment of that generation produced a variety of effects including social perfectionism, theological liberalism, millennial sects, and new waves of revivalism. To multitudes of men and women a new earth seemed as close as a new heaven. Working hand in hand with the theological rebellion which insisted on the possibility of universal salvation and the actuality of great freedom for the will, social circumstance provided an environment rich in economic abundance and freedom for social experiment. America seemed so close to social perfection, religious salvation so near for so many, the inner and outer human worlds so plastic and pregnant with possibility, that the pursuit of either piety or social reformation promised spectacular results. The Mormons and other new sects with evangelical and millennial overtones absorbed many advocates of “the newness,” but an important minority regarded the old and the new sects as almost equally intolerable. It was not easy for these unchurched rebels to find a niche in American society; they inherited religious sensibilities which made them feel uncomfortable with both militantly secular social reformers and the scattered theological rebels who clung to the label of “Deist” or “Agnostic.”
On Toleration in Massachusetts
Authors: Holifield E. Brooks
Published: April 2006

On a December day in 1676, Thomas Shepard, minister of the Church of Christ in Charlestown, passionately “discoursed of Reformation,” bemoaning the inability of the ministers and magistrates to unite against the disorderly mob of Quakers and Anabaptists. If the Quakers were suppressed, he argued, maybe the recalcitrant magistrates would “see reason to handle” the troublesome Anabaptists. His sympathic audience, Mr. Rowlandson, the Lancaster minister, Mr. Willard, pastor of the Old South Church, and Mr. Sewall, their host, listened quietly. It had not always been like this. Magistrates had once been reliable champions of the “Congregational Way.”
The Spanish Church and The Revolutionary Republican Movement, 1930–1931
Authors: Sánchez José M.
Published: April 2006

Few subjects in recent history have lent themselves to such heated polemical writing and debate as that concerning the Spanish Church and its relationship to the abortive Spanish revolution of 1931–1939. Throughout this tragic era and especially during the Civil War, it was commonplace to find the Church labelled as reactionary, completely and unalterably opposed to progress, and out of touch with the political realities of the twentieth century.1In the minds of many whose views were colored by the highly partisan reports of events in Spain during the nineteen thirties, the Church has been pictured as an integral member of the Unholy Triumvirate— Bishops, Landlords, and enerals—which has always conspired to impede Spanish progress. Recent historical scholarship has begun to dispel some of the notions about the right-wing groups,2but there has been little research on the role of the clergy. Even more important, there has been little understanding of the Church's response to the radical revolutionary movements in Spain.
Socialism and Catholicism in Ireland
Authors: Larkin Emmet
Published: April 2006

There is no man or movement in modern Irish history that can be intelligibly discussed apart from the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. That Church had for centuries been intimately bound up with nearly every phase of Irish life. Taking the measure of so complex and venerable an institution is an enormous task. Since there is no general history of the Church in Ireland, the main difficulty is in maintaining perspective. In confining the discussion to the narrower limits of the relations between the Irish Labour movement and the Church, an obvious distortion is attendent. Seeing the Church in microcosm is not seeing it whole and constant, if indeed such a thing is possible. Examining it with regard to Irish Labour is actually taking liberties with its historical context. Two unequal figures are in contention on the Irish stage, and the Church, which is certainly the larger of the two, suffers proportionately by having to play so limited a role.
Newman Smyth and the Congregational-Episcopal Concordat
Authors: Gowing Peter G.
Published: April 2006

At the Sixtieth General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, held in Detroit, Michigan, in September of 1961, the Bishop of West Florida moved, the Bishop of California seconded, and the Convention voted a radical revision of Canon 36 of the Church's Constitution and Canons. The revision of Canon 36 marked the end of a slow death for the “Concordat” painfully hammered out between 1919 and 1922 by representatives of the Episcopal Church and the National Council of Congregational Churches.
Some Repercussions of the Act of Union on the Church of Ireland, 1801–1820
Authors: Brynn Edward
Published: April 2006

William Pitt's decision to seek the abolition of the independent Irish parliament and the union of the established churches in Ireland and England ended a quarter century experiment in Irish legislative independence. During this brief period the penal system had been substantially modified, and the traditional Protestant ascendancy partially dismantled by liberal Protestants themselves. The Church of Ireland, however, had not shared in the enthusiasm of this Irish “renaissance”; parliamentary spokesmen had demanded abolition of the tithe, enforcement of clerical residence, endowment of the Roman Catholic clergy and elimination of abuses in ecclesiastical patronage. Anticlericalism had increased, tithe resistance had infected even Protestant tenants, and pamphlets condemning the Church of Ireland as the unholy wonder of Christendom were penned by Protestants themselves. The alarm of Irish churchmen only too aware of the fundamental weaknesses of the established church, the clamor of British peers with large Irish landholdings and the outbreak of rebellion in 1797, finally convinced British statesmen that the crisis could be relieved only by the abolition of the Irish legislature.
A Reappraisal of William Tyndale's Debt to Martin Luther
Authors: Trinterud L. J.
Published: April 2006

The colorful and powerful figure of Martin Luther dominates all study of the early years of the Reformation. Inevitably the first pages of the history of the Reformation in any region will begin with an effort by the author to trace the manner in which Luther's influence reached that area. In the study of the English Reformation one of the common ways of showing Luther's influence is to point to the work of the Bible translator William Tyndale. Numerous books on the English Reformation, on the history of the English Bible, and on Tyndale himself, have made of him a follower and an interpreter of Luther who played a major role in introducing the thought of the great reformer into England. A careful study of Tyndale's works, however, will show that his debt to Luther, and the “Lutheranism” of his views, has been over-stated. Tyndale, like many early sixteenth century religious reformers, made much use of Luther's name, fame, and works but without becoming a follower of those distinctive ideas of the German reformer which set him off from the other advocates of reform at the time. Tyndale's greatest debt was first to Christian humanism and then to the German-Swiss reformers of Zurich and Basel.
The Problem of the History of Religion in America
Authors: Ahlstrom Sydney E.
Published: April 2006

Half a year before this paper was read before a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion (26 October 1969), the program committee had requested an essay dealing in some comprehensive way with the field of American religious history. Because I would in any case have to be thinking about the introduction to my own “religious history of the American people,” I agreed.The title was sufficiently broad; and goodness knows the problems of this subject area are sufficiently large.1 Aside from innumerable large and small questions of fact there are the countless questions of emphasis and interpretation, not to mention the problem of discerning an overarching theme. I also confess great sympathy with Max Lerner's comment on the ten years he spent on America as a Civilization (1957). “I found when I came to the end of the decade,” he said, “that a number of things I had written about America were no longer valid. The American civilization had been changing drastically right under my fingertips as I was writing about it.”2 The present-day historian's predicament is, if anything, more difficult than Lerner's in that the sixties, by contrast with the fifties, have experienced a veritable earthquake of revisionism which has profoundly altered our interpretation of the entire course of American history. By reason of its screaming moral dilemmas, moreover, the decade had an especially rude impact on long accepted views of religious history. But enough of this: let us consider the substantive questions.
Mitre Without Sceptre: An Eighteenth Century Ecclesiastical Revilution
Authors: Mills Frederick V.
Published: April 2006

The American revolution caused the Anglican churches in America to separate from their parent body: the Church of England. This threw the Episcopalians upon their own resources to rebuild their church. In the process of reorganization, the former Anglicans accomplished an ecclesiastical revolution in respect to episcopacy. For the first time since the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Episcopalians in America made a bishop of a major religious body the elected official of a convention of clergy and laymen. In the second place, the office of bishop in a major denomination was completely separated from the state for the first time since Emperor Constantine officially recognized Christianity in 313 A.D.
Methodist Newspapers and the Fugitive Slave Law: A New Perspective for the Slavery Crisis in the North
Authors: Keller Ralph A.
Published: April 2006

Nineteenth-century denominational newspapers, relatively unavailable to historians until recently, constitute an important untapped source of information regarding public attitude toward national issues. Unlike the more commonly cited religious quarterlies and convention records, the weekly newspapers sought to provide their readers with regular news and comments about secular events. To be sure, articles on doctrine and evangelism seldom relinquished the prominence of page one. But news of the latest steamboat disaster, the new moldboard plow and last week's congressional proceedings were regularly mixed with local church items on pages three and four. And as the nation faced crises of significant proportion, editors often felt it their duty to offer their prescriptions in lengthy editorials on page two. Nowhere in the church apparatus was there a more obvious place for secular concerns to receive religious scrutiny. Widely circulated, welcoming reader response and edited by clergymen responsible to the denomination as a whole but particularly to the churchmen of their respective regions, the papers provide the best running account of religious response to troubles of the nation. For an age still steeped in the discourse and habit of churchly practice, they provide a perspective which historians can ill afford to neglect.
Johannes Brenz and the Problem of Ecclesiastical Discipline
Authors: Estes James M.
Published: April 2006

Ecclesiastical discipline is the one area of church order in which Johannes Brenz, one of the most important architects of the sixteenth-century Lutheran territorial state church, signally failed to achieve his purposes.1During his career in Schwäbisch Hall (1522–1548) and later in Württemberg (1550–1570) Brenz tried repeatedly, but ultimately without success, to establish an order of ecclesiastical discipline which would include effective use of the penalty of excommunication. An examination of the reasons for this failure may throw some light on the limits of what could be achieved within the context of the state church.
True or False Socialism: Adolf Stoecker's Critique of Marxism from a Christian Socialist Perspective
Authors: Massanari Ronald L.
Published: April 2006

Adolf Christian Stoecker (1835–1909) has been remembered as a court preacher in Berlin (1874–1890), the founder of the Christian Socialist Workers' Party in 1878, a conservative member of the Reichstag for most of the last thirty years of his life, an ardent nationalist, an early anti-Semitic voice, a prime mover in the Berlin City Mission, a prolific journalist, a powerful preacher and a leader in the freie Volkskirche movement. One significant aspect of this controversial political pastor that has been neglected is his critique of Marxist socialism.1 It should be noted that the significance of this critique is due as much to the fact that it was among the first to be formulated from within an explicitly Christian perspective as to the content of the critique itself.2
The Christology of the Council of Antioch (268. C.E.) Reconsidered
Authors: Sample Robert L.
Published: April 2006

Paul of Samosata, who succeeded Demetrianus as bishop of Antioch in 260 C. E., faced heresy charges early in his career and formal interrogations in 264 and 268 at synods in Antioch. The second of these condemned him. This study seeks to reinterpret the Christological position of the faction opposing Paul and to analyze its implications for the later development of eastern Christian thought. Of course, the bishops and presbyters who met at Antioch in the 260s to discuss the morals and doctrines of Paul did not represent a unified doctrinal position. Gathered from various regions, they revealed a diversity of motives and concerns. Even the label “Origenists,” often used to characterize the group, is misleading. Although many of the attending prelates followed Origen and his school, there is no record of conscious appeal to the writings of the Alexandrian master.