Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Murderous Nation: A Review Of Randolph Roth's 'American Homicide', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In 1863, a cooper in Chillicothe, Ohio, named Schyler Courier angrily responded to a group of boys throwing snowballs at him by firing his shotgun, killing one of the boys. In 1866, in Petersburg, New York, Hiram Coon warned his employer's wife, Mary Laker, to quit taunting him for his criminal past; when she would not stop, he split her head open with an ax. In 1873, an enraged Waiden, Vermont, farmer named James Snow shot peddler John Stanton in the face for the latter's snarky comment to Snow's wife — "I guess you have money, as farmers generally have …

Clear-Eyed: African Immersion, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

Recent events including the World Cup in South Africa have done much to redeem Africa’s global image. Early European visitors wrote about the beauty of the landscape, vegetation, rivers, lakes and mountains, but labeled the inhabitants “natives” and “sub-human.” For too long, the continent was dismissed as an “exotic” place inhabited by “primitive” people considered misfits in the modern world, and as a result, some of the most vicious racial epitaphs have been detonated against them. UD’s immersion experience educates our students and reverses these stereotypes by charging them to discover for themselves firsthand the African people.

Review: Mark Noll's 'The New Shape Of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

It has become commonplace to observe that the center of Christianity has moved from Euroamerica to the global South and East. Still, it is a bit jarring to realize, as Mark Noll notes at the beginning of this compelling book, that "this past Sunday" more "Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined"; more "members of Brazil's Pentecostal Assemblies of God [were] at church than the combined total in the two largest U.S. Pentecostal denominations"; and more people attended the Yoido Full …

Review: 'Storied Independent Automakers: Nash, Hudson, And American Motors', John Alfred Heitmann

History Faculty Publications

Nash, Hudson, and now even American Motors are automobile brands that have largely disappeared from the American memory. Yet, despite riding the twentieth-century economic roller coaster and operating in the shadow of the Big Three, these firms made sustained, significant technological and economic contributions. Charles K. Hyde’s Storied Independent Automakers is the author’s latest foray into the area of automotive business history, following work on the Chrysler Corporation and the Dodge brothers. A professor of History at Wayne State University, Hyde has written a needed critical business history on an important topic that complements the vast amount of “buff” and …

Prescient Pacifists, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

Reviews of two books:

• Patricia Applebaum, Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era.
• Joseph Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy.

The Enlightenment has bequeathed us — Americans more than anyone else — the conviction that history is a story of progress. Such a notion seems ludicrous when one considers the violence of the contemporary world. As the British historian Eric Hobsbawm observes in his brilliant work The Age of Extremes, the 20th century "was without doubt the most murderous century of which we have record, both by the scale, …

Domesticating The Diaspora: Memory And The Life Of Sister Katie, Caroline Waldron Merithew

History Faculty Publications

Three shrines in Illinois honor heroes of the working class: one for the legendary Mother Jones; one for the Virden martyrs, who died for coal mining unionism, and whose memory is kept alive by labor organizers around the world; and one for Catherine (Katie) Bianco DeRorre. Katie's monument, unlike the others, draws few visitors today. But when it was dedicated in 1961, men and women — on the floor of the U.S. Congress, in the neighborhood where Katie grew up, at American universities, in union halls, on the streets of New York City, and in Milan — took notice and …

Not All Autobiography Is Scholarship: Thinking, As A Catholic, About History, Una M. Cadegan

History Faculty Publications

My premise in this essay is that the historian of religion who is a believer has a distinctive need for conscious reflection on this autobiographical connection. Without conscious reflection, it is too easy fall into cheerleading on the one hand or score-settling on the other. is even easier, perhaps, to lapse into self-indulgence-hence the caveat of my title, which is aimed primarily at myself. Thinking about the roots of my work as an historian has made me more consciously attentive to doing the work of the historian, as historian, well. Thinking about where that work has taken me not only …