Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nonviolent Voices: Peace Churches Make A Witness, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

It is not a propitious time to b a pacifist in the United States. Polls inchcat that over 90 percent of Americans continue to support the military campaign in Afghanistan. Indi cations of such support are verywb re, as are the warnings- like the ubiquitous and vaguely threatening "Americans Unite" bump r stickers-that this time of national crisis is not the time for dissent. Not only are there very few voices in the mainstream media expressing doubts about the wisdom of the current military operation, but a number of commentators have waxed apoplectic over any possibility that there may be …

Review: 'Evangelizing The Chosen People: Missions To The Jews In America, 1880–2000', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

As bizarre as all this may seem to the uninitiated, Yaakov Ariel makes clear in Evangelizing the Chosen People that the aforementioned event is simply part of the latest chapter in an ongoing story within American religious history. Going where no scholar has gone before, Ariel recounts the history of Protestant missions to the Jews in the United States. Making good use of missions’ organization records and the writings of Jewish converts to Christianity, Ariel divides his narrative into three parts: evangelizing Jewish immigrants (1880–1920); evangelizing the children of Jewish immigrants (1920–1965); and evangelizing Jewish Baby Boomers (1965–2000). The last …

From Commune To Household: Statistics And The Social Construction Of Chaianov's Theory Of Peasant Economy, David W. Darrow

History Faculty Publications

Categorization plays an integral part in how we see and interpret the world. This is especially true when we attempt to comprehend the complexities of human society, where the heterogeneity of human activity across time and space demands that some criterion (class, gender, age, profession, etc.) be used to reduce the number of variables examined. From the mid-nineteenth century—as statistics evolved from the simple “political arithmetic” of tax collectors and army recruiters into a potential science of human behavior—categorizing the population became a contentious issue that reflected the social and political agendas of data collectors. At the same time, when …

Review: 'Brush With Death: A Social History Of Lead Poisoning', John Alfred Heitmann

History Faculty Publications

Christian Warren's Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning is an ambitious attempt to trace the twentieth-century history of lead poisoning in America. As such, it focuses on a timely and important topic. Yet, despite Warren's claim that he offers a comprehensive social and cultural approach integrating discussions of three different yet interrelated modes of lead exposure -- occupational, pediatric, and environmental (universal) -- this work is uneven, at times superficial, and in several instances interpretively incorrect.

Managing A Merger, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

It was not the sort of place where one would expect to find the folks who produced the More-with-Less Cookbook, but the massive and hermetically sealed Opryland complex in Nashville was where 9,330 Mennonites gathered in early July for a momentous meeting. The two largest Mennonite bodies in the U.S. — the General Conference Mennonite Church (established in 1860) and the Mennonite Church (formally established in 1898, but with roots that go back much further) — voted to merge into one denomination, the Mennonite Church USA, after first finding a way to address the issue of homosexuality.

In Lockdown America: The Corruption Of Capital Punishment, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

Reviews of three books:

• Randolph Loney, A Dream of the Tattered Man: Stories from Georgia’s Death Row.
• Austin Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition.
• Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America.

Author's introduction: I finish this review in the shadow of Timothy McVeigh's execution. But while America's most notorious mass murderer is dead, and while the pundits continue to argue the merits and meaning of his execution, news about capital punishment just keeps coming. Next after McVeigh on the federal death list is Juan Raul Garza, but because …

Faith, History, And The Conference On Faith And History, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

The author notes of this paper, given as a keynote address:

• The talk that I give tonight is not the talk that I was originally planning to deliver at this conference. When I was asked to give the keynote address, I assumed that I would simply present an elongated version of the paper that I was going to give in this morning's session on "Peace, Justice, and Evangelicals"; my paper was to be on the strengths and weaknesses and omissions in the recent literature written by evangelicals on the notion of a Christian approach to history. But the more I …