Digital Commons Network^™

Response: Are American Christians Persecuted?, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

With an eye toward reuniting the church and the academy, this book focuses on the role that scholarship can play in making good preachers into really great preachers. This is the bridge between scholarly and popular writing that informs the sermon and makes it more powerful and meaningful for the people who regularly listen to sermons. Preachers are challenged to raise the level of their commitment to scholarship as well as overcome any pre-existing prejudices with scholarship. The preacher as scholar is the perfect way for the pulpit to respond to the challenges of a secular, post-modern world that often …

America’S Legendary Ignorance About Africa Persists, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

In an increasingly interconnected and technological global environment, ignorance of Africa is no longer acceptable. This, especially from major political leaders. Yet, examples of such ignorance are evident in the current American presidential campaign. Neither the Republican nominee Donald J. Trump nor the democratic nominee Hillary R. Clinton has articulated any concrete vision for an African policy.

Review: 'Recasting The Region: Language, Culture And Islam In Colonial Bengal', Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

The origins and growth of Bengali Muslim identity have been the center of several studies till date. Most have concentrated on the politics of Muslim separatism in the 1930s with the politicization of the eastern Bengal’s peasantry and subsequent support for the Pakistan Movement. Neilesh Bose, in his Recasting the Region: Language Culture and Islam in Colonial Bengal shifts focus from politics to the Bengali literary sphere where Bengali Muslim intellectuals created a particular regional identity distinct from both mainstream Urdu Muslim and Hindu Bengali culture. This particular Bengali Muslim identity, Bose argues, was produced and established through writings of …

Review: 'Hindu Muslim Riots', Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

Communal violence in India, especially between Hindus and Muslims, have for long been the center of scholarly research. From the 1990s, historians, and anthropologists have innovatively analyzed colonial and Partition related riots to understand why and how they happened and the contextual development of communal identities. Political scientists have put forth thought-provoking paradigms of urban communal rioting in the wake of the Hindu Muslim riots of 1992 and 2002. All, it would seem, owe an intellectual debt to sociologist Richard Lambert’s much-cited dissertation of 1951, now published six decades later. Given that the publication is mostly an unchanged version of …

Review: 'What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books And Everyday Life In Twentieth-Century America', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In this interesting book Erin Smith analyzes popular religious books since the late nineteenth century with an eye toward understanding why – despite the scorn heaped on them by intellectuals -- they have been so beloved by their readers. Rather than being a comprehensive survey, What Would Jesus Read? consists of five case studies: the Social Gospel novels (1880s-1910s), Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1925), post-World War II religious self-help books, Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), and books for “the seeker” from the past twenty-five years. Smith’s focus is on white Protestant readers; working against the …

The Legal Construction Of Whiteness And Citizenship In Maryland, 1780–1820, Patricia A. Reid

History Faculty Publications

In the years before the Missouri Compromise, petitioners who won their freedom suits based upon their ancestral links to white women, with land, could participate in thebody politic. However, as Maryland legislators began to identify with the plantation south, they invented a legal understanding that would deny ambiguously freed blacks freedom, and justices would re-invent proslavery jurispudence, using the attachment clause, which would remand the previously freed into a status worse than before they had petitioned the court. Those who were freed and could claim citizenship in the years immediately after the American Revolution, by 1810, case law …

Review: 'Motoring West: Automobile Pioneers, 1900-1909', John Alfred Heitmann

History Faculty Publications

Motoring West is the first in a projected series that will examine the place of the motorcar in Trans-Mississippi America to 1940. Edited by Peter J. Blodgett, curator of manuscripts at the Huntington Library, the work brings together explanatory historical material that sets a critical and analytical context with a diverse collection of primary sources. The result is an interesting mix of readings that takes us well beyond Dayton Duncan’s Horatio’s Drive and the Ken Burns film sequel.

Review: 'Ellis Island Nation: Immigration Policy And American Identity In The Twentieth Century', Caroline Merithew

History Faculty Publications

Ellis Island Nation develops new arguments about belonging, citizenship, and the social construction of American identity between 1924 and 1965. The book is a political and intellectual history that interweaves discussions of policy debates, public discourse, and educational curriculum to analyze changes in immigration law, societal reactions to immigrants and ethnics, and notions of pluralism. The author's conceptualization of “contributionism” melds two positions that have been at the heart of immigration debates for 200 years. Contributionism, as Fleeglar defines it, “emphasized that the cultural and economic assets of immigrants enriched America by celebrating the unique benefits of immigrants’ native cultures …

Review: 'Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, And The Making Of Modern Evangelicalism', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

It is a fine time to be a historian of fundamentalism/conservative evangelicalism in the United States. Over the past few years a number of outstanding works have appeared, many of which take seriously politics and economics. The best of this scholarship includes: Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt (2011); Kevin Kruse, One Nation under God (2015); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart (2009); Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse (2014); and, Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason (2014).

Now we can add to this list Timothy E. W. Gloege’s Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of …

Review: 'Flights Of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design', Janet R. Bednarek

History Faculty Publications

The advent of powered flight in the early part of the twentieth century brought profound changes to society and culture globally. In her work Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design, Sonja Dümpelmann explores how it influenced the perspective and work of architects, landscape architects, and urban planners and designers, primarily in the United States and Europe. Specifically, the book “deals with those moments during the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries when these professionals developed an aerial imagination and an epistemology based upon aerial vision, and when they realized the opportunities that the new technology offered them in shaping the …

Keynote Address: University Of Dayton's Martin Luther King Jr. Luncheon, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Julius A. Amin, professor of history and Africana studies at the University of Dayton, offered this keynote address at the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. luncheon Jan. 19, 2016, at the University of Dayton.

Why Martin Luther King’S Anti-Racism Crusade Needs To Be Renewed, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was 39 years old when he was assassinated. Schools, streets and children are named in his honor in Africa. In America, he is honored with a public holiday.

All over the world, King is known as someone who fought for human causes. At a time when racial violence and arrogance in the US and elsewhere is experiencing a rapid resurgence, King’s holiday is a reminder that much needs to be done to create a more inclusive global community.

Ordered Eating: Food And Social Structures, Bobbi Sutherland

History Faculty Publications

Article is a review essay of Medieval Tastes: Food, Cooking, and the Table by Massimo Montanari and Food and Identity in England, 1540-1640: Eating to Impress by Paul S. Lloyd.

In the last few decades, food history has gone from being an unusual side-study viewed as outside the realm of academic history proper to one of the most popular sub-fields of social, economic, and cultural history – if not a field in its own right. Pre-modern historians have welcomed this development as one that expands our limited sources by opening new ones to us and providing us another method for …

Paper Rights: The Emergence Of Documentary Identities In Post-Colonial India, 1950–67, Haimanti Roy

History Faculty Publications

This essay contextualises the emergence of a document regime which regulated routine travel through the deployment of the India–Pakistan Passport and Visa Scheme in 1952. It suggests that such travel documents were useful for the new Indian state to delineate citizenship and the nationality of migrants and individual travellers from Pakistan. The bureaucratic and legal mediations under the Scheme helped the Indian state to frame itself before its new citizens as the sole certifier of some of their rights as Indians. In contrast, applicants for these documents viewed them as utilitarian, meant to facilitate their travel across the new borders. …