Science, Religion, and the Modern West: The April Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

In the coming week the April 2013 issue of Historically Speaking will be posted to the Project Muse site.  Subscribers can expect it soon in mailboxes.  The issue includes essays on environmental history, ancient religion, teaching, and Harry Truman.It also features interviews with Matthew Bowman on Mormonism in American history, John R. Gillis on seacoasts in history, and turning points of World War I with Ian F.W. Beckett. 

In addition the April issue includes a lively forum on "Scientific Culture in the Modern Era" with intellectual historian Stephen Gaukroger (University of Sydney).  "One of the most distinctive features of Western culture since the 17th century is the gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones," writes Gaukroger in his lead essay. "A particular image of the role and aims of scientific understanding is tied up in a very fundamental way with the self-image of Western modernity. One striking illustration of this is the way that the West’s sense of what its superiority consisted of shifted seamlessly in the early decades of the 19th century from religion to science. From that time on, but particularly in the second half of the 20th century, this self-understanding has been exported as an essential ingredient in the process of modernization."

Roundup: Biography Reviews

Copies of classical Roman busts, the
Scottish National Gallery.  Photo by
Randall Stephens.

Susan Ware, "The challenges and rewards of biographical essays," OUPblog, April 11, 2013

One of the first things I did after being appointed general editor of the American National Biography was to assign myself an entry to write. I wanted to put myself in the shoes of my contributors and experience first-hand the challenge of the short biographical form.>>>

"Paul Johnson reviews 'C.S. Lewis: A Life', by Alister McGrath," Spectator, April 20, 2013

C.S. Lewis became a celebrity but remains a mysterious figure. Several biographies have been written, not to much avail, and now Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology, has compiled a painstaking, systematic and ungrudging examination of his life and works. Despite all the trouble he has taken, his book lacks charm and does not make one warm to his subject.>>>

Jonathan Freedland, "A Man of His Time: ‘Karl Marx,’ by Jonathan Sperber," New York Times, March 29, 2013

The Karl Marx depicted in Jonathan Sperber’s absorbing, meticulously researched biography will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. Here is a man never more passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain “slummy,” and who can be maddeningly inconsistent when not lapsing into elaborate flights of theory and unintelligible abstraction.>>>

Andrew Wulf, "How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore – review," Guardian, January 4, 2013

In June 1769, 21-year-old Thomas Day and his friend John Bicknell went to the Orphan Hospital in Shrewsbury to select a prepubescent girl for Day. This was not a gesture of charity to remove the girl from her destitute situation but an experiment in which Day was trying to create his "perfect wife". >>>

"First Son: The University of Chicago Press Announces the First Biography of Richard M. Daley," Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2013

On September 7, 2010 the longest-serving and most powerful mayor in the history of Chicago -- and, arguably, America -- stepped down, leaving behind a city that was utterly transformed, and a complicated legacy we are only beginning to evaluate. In First Son, Keith Koeneman brilliantly chronicles the sometimes Shakespearean, sometimes Machiavellian life of an American political legend. Making deft use of unprecedented access to key political, business, and cultural leaders, Koeneman draws on more than one hundred interviews to tell an insider story of political triumph and personal evolution. He explores Daley's connections to the national political stage, including his close work with Arne Duncan, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and others with ties to the Obama administration.>>>

John Adams and the Rule of Law in Boston

Heather Cox Richardson

Message boards and blogs are full of angry people calling for Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be tortured or killed. Or both. Immediately. After all, it’s pretty clear he’s guilty,

A Gilbert Stuart portrait
of John Adams, ca. 1821.

right? Why waste tax dollars on this guy with a long, expensive trial?

And anyway, who ever said a terrorist who murders Americans should get a fair trial?

Well, Founding Father John Adams, for one. Right here in Boston.

Adams was a rising lawyer in Massachusetts during the infancy of the American Revolution. On March 5, 1770, eight British soldiers opened fire when someone in a taunting mob threw a rock at them. When the shooting was over, five Americans were dead and others were wounded. Within weeks, a grand jury indicted the soldiers, along with their commander, Captain Thomas Preston. 

It seemed all Boston was inflamed against the murdering foreign soldiers. The “Boston Massacre” became a rallying cry for those eager to revolt against England. Son of Liberty Paul Revere produced his famous engraving rewriting the event to show the soldiers firing systematically into a peaceful crowd. Few wanted to bother to try the prisoners, and in the end, officials delayed the trial for seven months in the hope that emotions would subside. They didn’t.

The Emancipators: Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and the Politics of 42

Chris Beneke

In a famous photograph of baseball star Jackie Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey, the African American legend prepares to sign his 1948 contract. As he does so, the viewer of this staged scene can make out a small photo hung above Rickey’s head at top right. From that modest rectangular frame, a young, beardless Abraham Lincoln gazes upon the scene.*

Three years earlier, Robinson met Rickey under that same gaze and the two men discussed, among many other things, their shared Christian devotion. During this tense  and seemingly interminable meeting that would lead to the end of baseball’s longstanding prohibition on black players, Rickey had Robinson read a line from Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ: “But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Robinson agreed to turn the other cheek and in April 1947, he joined the Dodgers as the first African American major leaguer in more than half a century. 

There’s no getting around the fact that the latest retelling of Robinson’s epic first season, Brian Helgeland’s film 42, succumbs to Hollywood sentimentality. It’s certainly not a great film, arguably not a good film, and definitely not a subtle one. It aims at a high-level of verisimilitude and mostly achieves it, but too often at the expense of dramatic effect and historical significance. The awkward conflation of events (Dodger scout Clyde Sukeforth appears to apparate, Harry Potter-style, into a Missouri gas station where Robinson has just negotiated his way into a segregated bathroom) and a syrupy musical backdrop (including an Olympian trumpet fanfare to accompany one of Robinson’s exultant trots to home plate) will surely disappoint viewers who were lured by the gritty, thumping Jay-Z-scored trailer.

In Praise of YouTube: Interviews on Civil Rights, Early Modern England, Writing, and Teaching History

Randall Stephens

On a recent browse through the loud, garish halls of YouTube I found several interesting history clips.  Without diminishing the importance of LOL catz videos and the endless Fail compilations, I'd like to praise/point to some of the history gems on YouTube.  In the last 5 years YouTube has served as a go-to source for me.  Interviews, documentary films, and materials on teaching draw me in.  It's been a boon to my teaching and research.

For example . . .

Hear the late esteemed historian and former master of Balliol College, Oxford, Christopher Hill speak about his work on 17th-century England.  He also reminisces on why he became a historian, the nature of revolutions, and more. ("Conversations With Historians: Christopher Hill," BBC Radio 4, October 14, 1991)

In this much more recent video (April 11) see historian Taylor Branch discuss the critical year of 1963 and the context of the black freedom struggle.  Branch pieces together this momentous year with the wisdom of 50 years of hindsight.  He also wonders why historians have not explored some of the major issues of the era. (Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, PBS.)

And finally, Sam Wineburg and others in this clip, speak about "Teaching Students to Think Like Historians," Stanford University, March 4, 2012.  (Several months back I interviewed Wineburg here on a related topic.)  "The first thing that we need to do is to break the stranglehold of the textbook," says Wineburg.  To play on the murder theme a little more, see Jonathan Rees's August 16, 2012 piece on this blog, "Kill Your Textbook."  Do history textbook snuff the life out of history?  Are students in history classes unfamiliar with, as Wineburg puts it, the "variety of voices" from the past?  How can high school and university history instructors better teach about the past?

The Titanic, Time, and the Fragility of Human Life

Heather Cox Richardson

I have been pretty vocal about my inability to understand why people are so gripped by the Titanic disaster. Just a shipwreck, I’ve said. I don’t get it. Why not the Lusitania, which was by a torpedo in the same era, or any of the thousands of disasters that happen every day?

Titanic survivors. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Maybe I get it now.

The RMS Titanic set out from Southampton on April 10, 1912, a luxury ship carrying more than 2,200 passengers. She made port in France and Ireland before heading out to sea on April 11.

I’ve just started experimenting with ways for historians to use Twitter, and for the last several days have been tweeting snippets about the voyage, day by day: the vessel leaving port; the crew member who jumped ship in Ireland; the ten-course dinner of April 14; the radio operator’s determination to send out passenger messages as soon as he could raise the Newfoundland station late in the night of April 14; his brusque dismissal of a nearby ship’s warning of an ice field. As I trawled through little events, what I began to see was just how calm and safe and, well, unremarkable, the experience of the Titanic’s passengers was.

Globalizing the Nineteenth Century

Joseph L. Yannielli

This is cross-posted from the blog Digital Histories at Yale.

Nineteenth-century Americans viewed themselves through an international lens. Among the most important artifacts of this global consciousness is William Channing Woodbridge’s “Moral and Political Chart of the Inhabited World.” First published in 1821 and reproduced in various shapes and sizes in the decades prior to the Civil War, Woodbridge’s chart was a central and popular component of classroom instruction. I use it in my research and teaching. It forms a key part of my argument about the abolitionist encounter with Africa. And every time I look at it, I see something new or unexpected.

Chart of the Inhabited World:
Exhibiting the Prevailing
Religion, Form Of Government, 1821

Like basketball and jazz, the moral chart is an innovation unique to the United States. The earliest iterations depart from the Eurocentric and Atlantic focus with which modern readers are most familiar. Reflecting the early American obsession with westward expansion, they gaze out over the Pacific Ocean to East Asia and the Polynesian Islands. The chart features a plethora of statistical and critical data. Nations and territories are ranked according to their “Degrees of Civilisation,” form of government, and religion. Darker colored regions are “savage” or “barbarous” while rays of bright light pour out from the Eastern United States and Northern Europe.

Turning it into a Book

Randall Stephens

Over at the Religion in American History blog I have a short piece on publishing.  Here's an excerpt and link to the full piece.

Few could have accused Ernest Hemingway of being too subtle. “The first draft of anything is shit,” he once quipped.  True.  And still we plod on, hoping to spin that dross into gold. We spend hour upon hour crafting, redrafting, proofing, worrying, and rewriting.

Several years back the historian Stephen Pyne wrote in a forum I put together for Historically Speaking that "History is a book culture. We read books, we write books, we promote and award tenure on the basis of books, and at national meetings we gather around book exhibits. We’re a book-based discipline."* 

But figuring out how to land a publisher, what press to go with, and answering a range of other questions can be daunting. 

And so, I was happy when my colleague Brian Ward at Northumbria University organized an afternoon session on publishing last month.  Humanities Publishing in the 21st Century: A Workshop was particularly aimed at early-career historians.  We had the pleasure of hearing from and picking the brains of Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press); Susan Ferber (Oxford University Press); Stephanie Ireland (Oxford University Press); and John Watson (Edinburgh University Press).  We all benefited from their advice and experience.  Plus we got a chance to pepper them with questions.

Read more here>>>

Why History Students Should Love Big Data

Eric Schultz

Spring 1976. Wilson Hall, Brown University. The late, great Professor William McLoughlin has just informed his 85 students in “American Social and Intellectual History” that they are to write their first paper. All he has given us is the title: “The Age of Jefferson and Adams.” We groan. Then he adds: “Keep it to three pages or less. Double-spaced.” We smile. Three pages? How hard can that be?

“If you make the margins too wide,” McLoughlin adds, “I’ll mark you down a grade.”

Needless to say, nobody got an A on that paper, or so the good professor informed us. There may have been a B or two. Not me. It was all I could do to contain my flowery opening paragraph to a single page. Some of us recovered slightly in round two, wherein we committed “The Age of Lincoln and Calhoun” to three, double-spaced pages. Some retreated to organic chemistry and other more reasonable challenges.

Little did I know, but I had just been introduced to Big Data—though it would take 35 years to earn that name. Take an endless, insurmountable, seemingly disconnected pile of information, separate the grain from the chaff (or, as my engineering buddies would say, the signal from the noise), and tell a concise, compelling story about what it all means.

Catholics, Protestants, and Sectionalism in Antebellum American: An Interview with W. Jason Wallace

Conducted by Randall Stephens

W. Jason Wallace is a professor of history at Samford University. He is the author of Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (Notre Dame University Press, 2010). I recently caught up with Jason to ask him some questions about his work on Christianity in pre-Civil War America and to discuss some of the

Wall Street, 1847. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

connections between religion, politics, and historical consciousness in the nineteenth century U.S.

Randall Stephens: What makes the era between 1835 and 1860 such a critical period in American religious history?

W. Jason Wallace: Between 1835 and 1860 most aspects of American social, political, and economic life reached something of a ferment.  Religion, and especially Christianity, underwent substantial trials as well.  Religious disestablishment was then, and still is, a young phenomenon in the scope of world history.  Unlike European churches, American churches had to compete in the marketplace of ideas for adherents.  People had choices.  Religious affiliation was not simply a matter of genealogy or geography.  As a result, in Nathan Hatch’s great phrasing, the democratization of the churches began in earnest.  With the First Great Awakening the confessional boundaries established over the course of a century or so after the Reformation slowly lost influence.  The Second Great Awakening all but ended the confessional church tradition in America.  Revivalism combined with broad conceptions of evangelicalism to create new Protestant identities.  By the middle decades of the nineteenth century many Protestant traditions that valued creeds and liturgy found themselves overwhelmed by evangelical sentiment.  Doctrine became less important than the individuals’ personal relationship with God, and behavior and public virtue came to be seen more and more as marks of “genuine” Christianity.  In some ways these theological shifts made evangelicalism valuable to the growing country because it gave sanction to the importance of virtue and morality for national life.  In other words, Christianity provided a code of behavior that could benefit everyone.  But for Christianity to be useful it had to be contained.  If disputes over theology and doctrine spilled into public life then Christianity could become divisive and socially destabilizing.  In part, this is exactly what happened in the debate over slavery. 

Promises Made

Eric Schultz

Brian Williams recently featured a story on the NBC Nightly News about the bureaucratic nightmare that has more than 900,000 American veterans awaiting disability benefits from the government. The Veterans Administration is promising to have the backlog cleared by the end of 2015, but for now, the average wait time is 273 days.

After hearing this I had a flashback of sorts and walked downstairs into the basement, past the water softener and over by the Christmas ornaments to find the musty blue Rubbermaid tubs filled with my King Philip’s War notes from over twenty years ago. 

Sure enough, there was the file marked “Veterans.”  I began leafing through it. In December 1675, 696 Massachusetts Bay soldiers mustered on Dedham Plain, thought to be the present Hyde Park section of Boston. They were to march south and meet with soldiers assembling in Plymouth and Connecticut colonies to form a thousand-man army and attack the Narragansetts in their large fort at today’s South Kingston, Rhode lsland. It would become one of the most deadly and controversial events of the war, in part because both sides suffered so many casualties and in part because the Narragansetts had remained scrupulously neutral.

Visual Learners and Historical Myopia

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

On my first day as a brand new assistant professor a student came up to me, introduced himself, and announced, “I am a visual learner.” The class was a reading and writing intensive freshman seminar with a predetermined syllabus. I knew we had a problem, but I had limited agency to remedy the situation. 

This year I decided to see if I could match my long-since graduated student’s need for visual stimulus with my own desire to make students delve deep into the documents that reveal the mental landscape of the past. I integrated video presentations into the middle portion of each three-hour seminar.

The visual interlude fixed one pedagogical problem and revealed another. Although academic historians of colonial America know that all the world was not New England, word has yet to reach the filmmakers. Three Sovereigns for Sarah captures Salem’s witchcraft crisis and Mary Silliman’s War strips the romantic Revolutionary myths away from a tense civil war in Connecticut. When I wished to illuminate my own area of expertise, the colonial mid-Atlantic, I came up short. No film of which I am aware follows Conrad Weiser through Penn’s Woods or brings to life the ascetic world of the Ephrata Cloister. In the realm of video pedagogy,  the years between witches and independence and the geography between Puritans and plantations cease to exist. 

The Long Career of Immigration Control in America

Hidetaka Hirota

A detail of Carol M. Highsmith's aerial view of the Ellis
Island immigration station. Courtesy of the
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div.

The recent publication of books on Ellis Island in New York and Angel Island in California—Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins, 2009); Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford University Press, 2010)—reminds us of aspects of the American immigration experience that cannot be overlooked.

At these landing stations immigrants were inspected and often detained under the provisions of federal immigration law. Those of undesirable character, such as paupers, people “likely to become a public charge,” and “feeble-minded persons,” were denied landing and ordered to return to their countries of origin. To Chinese immigrants, a separate set of exclusion and deportation laws applied between 1882 and 1943.