Puritanism and Patriotism

I've just finished re-reading a relatively recent work on the Puritans and how they've impacted American history basically since the beginning of the earliest colonies. Puritans were for reform, and they tended to have a high view of America's covenantal destiny should they live up to their end of their relationship to God. I read this book to get some context for the revision of my dissertation, hopefully for publication. George McKenna noted that a nearly unbroken strain of American Puritanical thought has continued through to the present day, first through the areas the Puritans inhabited in the burned-over district in New York, the Western Reserve of Ohio, and Michigan, as they expanded to look for new lands to inhabit. The Puritan worldview then continued throughout the North during the Civil War and on through the reformers of the Progressive Movement. The Puritan thread then followed through the New Deal, after which it switched to the unlikely amalgam of Catholics and Southern Evangelical Protestants, both of whom took over the idea of the US as a chosen nation.

While McKenna drew upon a wide range of personalities, including such disparate characters as Jonathan Edwards, the Transcendentalist writers of the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Ronald Reagan. The thing that tied these people together was the optimism that things could get better and their reforming impulse. They also tended to have a belief in a messianic destiny for the American nation that could be lost if the people of America did not follow this destiny. McKenna, although not the first to describe it, noted the importance of the political jeremiad in calling the people back to the straight and narrow from their wanderings off the righteous path. McKenna's book is well worth reading and will make the reader think about how much his or her ideas of America might reach way back into the past.

McKenna, George. The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.

Two Years Old--Thoughts on Gilded Age/Progressive Era Baptists

I just thought that I would note that this blog is turning two years old today. Over the past two years, I've posted 126 posts. This one makes the 127th. I have had over 27,000 page views according to the on-site stats.

Some of the things that I've found most interesting are the things that other people are searching for on the internet. Surprisingly, the most popular post that I've had is related to the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. I would not have figured that nearly 1,600 people would have an interest in this relatively narrow topic, although it is pretty interesting because of the fact that it shows that the Puritans were very interested in education and were actually willing to levy taxes to pay for it.

Much of my work on this site has focused on Puritans. I have other interests, and my recently-approved dissertation actually focused upon Gilded Age/Progressive Era North Dakota Baptists. These folks tended to emphasize many of the same things that the general Protestant establishment did. Prohibition, a Progressive Era reform (in spite of the idea that it was a conservative concept), showed up in the minutes of just about annual meeting of the North Dakota Baptist State Convention--even after Prohibition became the law of the land in 1918.

The North Dakota Baptists would have agreed largely with Rudyard Kipling's idea of the "White Man's Burden" as the idea of evangelizing and civilizing seemed to come together and get conflated at the time. Of course, it is interesting to note that Jesus said to make disciples, not Anglo-Americans, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many believed that these two ideas were one and the same. Some would still seem to think that this is the case.

I'll be interested to see what the next two years has in store as I begin the transition from full-time grad student to full-time instructor.

Article Published at Prairie Voices Website

Back in the days of my Masters program, I took a class title "Problems in American History 1877-1917". Seeing that I am really, really interested in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (and the fact that graduate classes that interested me were at times few and far between), I decided to sign up. I hoped that industrialization, unionization, or some other similar topic would be on tap. I checked the book list online and found that this was not to be.

The book list included a wide variety of books about women on the frontier. I have to confess that I generally do not have a big interest in women's or gender history, but seeing the other classes on the schedule that particular semester, I decided to stick it out.

The main paper for the class turned out to be a case study that tested the validity of any claim made by one of the authors we had to read during the class. I was not terrible interested in the assignment, but at least we got to choose the topic ourselves. I proceeded to utilize the texts from the course (as well as some other outside readings) to investigate whether women had more job opportunities open to them in the American West. From what I could find, it seemed that the job opportunities were quite similar with those available in the Northeast or the South. This was the main argument of the paper.

I left the paper alone for about four years. When I began my studies at UND, I decided to send an abstract of the paper to the Northern Great Plains History Conference, which was then being held in Grand Forks. I got on the program and read this paper. I also sent it to Emporia University in Kansas, to see if they would publish it in one of their journals. While I did not get it into the publication I first inquired about, they did agree to post it as an open-access article on their website. While it's not the American Historical Review or The Historian, it is a publication that can go on the CV. The moral of the story is that papers for classes that may not seem to be worth much can actually add to one's professional vitae, which definitely helps in job searches.

D. L. Moody's Revivals

I'm currently reading up on religion during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era for an independent study class that I am taking. One of the major figures that inevitably comes up when dealing with the Gilded Age is the great revivalist D. L. Moody. I recently read God's Man for the Gilded Age by Bruce J. Evenson.

Moody got his start in Christian work around the Civil War era in Chicago's inner city. Along with his partners at the local YMCA, Moody built the largest Sunday Schools in the nation. His work was so well-known that it even earned a visit from none other than the sixteenth president, Honest Abe himself. Moody's main ministerial emphasis at this time was among the poorest of the "urchins" that wandered the city streets.

In the early 1870s, Moody took a trip to England that started out quite inauspiciously, with only 6 people attending one mid-day service. What led to Moody's success in the British Isles and later in America was his ability to draw most conservative and moderate Protestants together while also utilizing the local news media to draw attention and create excitement about his meetings. Evenson emphasized the part that the newspapers had in spreading the news about the revival.

One of the things that I found most interesting about the Moody's American stops was the description of what was going on at the time in America. The Panic of 1873 (actually an economic depression) was still causing widespread deprivation among the wide majority of Americans. The people who actually supported the revival financially were the well-to-do. In New York, people as wealthy as Cornelius Vanderbilt attended the meetings, in which Moody claimed that the main problem with America was the emphasis on obtaining wealth in this life. Interestingly enough, at this same New York revival, the papers complained that the people who most needed it--the poor--were not present, and that the revival would not be as successful as it otherwise would have been. This statement is quite ironic considering where Moody got his start, and it also shows that good Christianity in Gilded Age American church history was for many people associated with middle class success.

Teaching US History to 1877

I've started my latest semester and have a week under my belt. I'm taking an independent study course in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, which is the general time-frame of most of my research. I also have six hours of research credit this semester that is going to go toward my final scholarly project. The Doctor of Arts program that I am in does not have a traditional dissertation, but rather a project that involves primary research (like a dissertation) and a pedagogical component (somewhat like an EdD, I think). My research is going to focus on the local religious landscape during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I've noted some of my work previously on this site.

In addition to my own work, I am again teaching a section of History 103, The US to 1877. I utilize Tindall and Shi's America: A Narrative History for the course. I like this book well enough as a political narrative, but think that it has the same weakness that many of the other textbooks I've reviewed have. They pretty much have a handful of pages on the pre-Columbian Americans and something similar for the background of Columbus's voyages to the New World. This gives enthusiastic college freshmen the idea that the history of the New World began with exploration in the late fifteenth century.

There were millions of people in the New World before Columbus, and I think it's important to note them. I give my first major lecture on the topic of the American Indians. I then move to the buildup to Europe in 1492. I try to answer questions about the economic system and the changes that were going on at this time and the major reasons for European exploration and expansion--religion was one of them. I think that this gives the students a better background for understanding what took place after the initial contact between Columbus and his Native American hosts in the Bahamas in 1492.

Summer Gig--Internship

As of last Friday night, when I turned in the final grades from my section of "The United States since 1877" my first year as a doctoral student officially came to an end.  I really enjoyed being a full-time student again, and also enjoyed the opportunity to teach a college class on a college campus.  My assistantship ended with the semester, however, and I was left with the question of what to do with the summer.  While I am not against working at Wal-mart or some other similar job (I've worked in both the fast food and grocery industries in my day),  I wanted something that would be beneficial to my academic and career goals.

I found the perfect job, an internship with the Theodore Roosevelt digital library, which actually has North Dakota ties because of Roosevelt's time in Dakota Territory.  The first presidential library was set up for Herbert Hoover.  TR's second term ended about twenty years before Hoover's lone term began.  Therefore, there is no presidential library for Roosevelt.  One really cool thing about this job is that I get to read all sorts of old documents on all sorts of (sometimes) random topics related to one of my favorite presidents.  As an aspiring historian, this is the type of work that provides ammo for articles and, hopefully, books.  Regardless of whether any publications come from this work, it nonetheless provides a great learning experience and helps me understand more about one of the past eras that I find especially interesting.

One of the topics that I have already had an opportunity to notice is religion.  Various correspondents have discussed Catholicism, Methodism, and Protestantism in their letters and other communications with the Progressive Era president.  One of the interesting letters mentioned Protestantism and Americanism in the same context (actually the same phrase of the same sentence).  Some of my previous reading and research shows that many Americans from this era viewed the terms nearly synonymously.  I am only in the first week of this job, and I've already seen several of these interesting notes.  I'm hoping to see many more since my major research project is going to focus upon Progressive/World War I era Christianity.