History Commons^™

Shakers And Jerkers: Letters From The "Long Walk," 1805, Part 2, Douglas L. Winiarski

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Throughout the bitterly cold month of January 1805, John Meacham (1770-1854), Issachar Bates (1758-1837), and Benjamin Youngs (1774- 1855), struggled through mud and ice, biting winds, blinding snow, and drenching rains, on a 1,200-mile “Long Walk” to the settlements of the trans-Appalachian West. Traveling south toward Cumberland Gap, the three Shaker missionaries from New Lebanon, New York, were tracking a strange new convulsive religious phenomenon that had gripped Scots-Irish Presbyterians during the frontier religious awakening known as the Great Revival (1799-1805). Observers called the puzzling somatic fits “the Jerks.” Ardent supporters of the revivals believed the jerks were a sign …

Hamilton, Democracy, And Theatre In America, Patricia Herrera

Theatre and Dance Faculty Publications

I, along with University of Richmond professors Lázaro Lima and Laura Browder, received an National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association Latino Americans grant this year to organize the Latinos in Richmond program, which coincided with two classes that we taught this spring: the Tocqueville Seminar “Performing Latino USA: Democracy, Demography, and Equality” and the First-Year Seminar “Telling Richmond’s Latino Stories: A Community Documentary Project.” Since the goal of both courses was to explore how Latinos—the nation’s largest “minority” group in a representative democracy like America­—is also the most underrepresented, I was interested in understanding Hamilton through …

War, Fields, And Competing Economies Of Death. Lessons From The Blockade Of Leningrad, Jeffrey K. Hass

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

War can create a massive amount of death while also straining the capacity of states and civilians to cope with disposing of the dead. This paper argues that such moments exacerbate contradictions between three fields and “economies” (logics of interaction and exchange) – a political, market, and moral economy of disposal – in which order and control, commodification and opportunism, and dignity are core logics. Each logic and economy, operating in its own field, provides an interpretation of the dead that emerges from field logics of normal organization, status, and meanings of subjects (as legal entities, partners in negotiation, and …

[Introduction To] The Columbia Sourcebook Of Mormons In The United States, Terryl Givens, Reid L. Nielson

Bookshelf

This anthology offers rare access to key original documents illuminating Mormon history, theology, and culture in the United States from the nineteenth century to today. Brief introductions describe the theological significance of each text and its reflection of the practices, issues, and challenges that have defined and continue to define the Mormon community. These documents balance mainstream and peripheral thought and religious experience, institutional and personal perspective, and theoretical and practical interpretation, representing pivotal moments in LDS history and correcting decades of misinformation and stereotype.

The authors of these documents, male and female, not only celebrate but speak critically and …

The Rest Of The Dream, Julian Maxwell Hayter

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

I was born roughly 12 years after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his momentous "I Have a Dream" speech. My generation, raised on the first wave of hip-hop music and odes to Malcolm X, was angry with King. We thought his overtures to interracial cooperation were a mid-20th-century brand of "Uncle Tom-ing," what my mother's generation called "shuffling." We found it difficult to reconcile King's dream with the rise of crack cocaine, urban blight and black incarceration.

Many of my childhood friends parlayed that anger into prison, gang life, absentee fatherhood, and what Iceberg Slim called the "poison of street …

Norms And Survival In The Heat Of War: Normative Versus Instrumental Rationalities And Survival Tactics In The Blockade Of Leningrad, Jeffrey K. Hass

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

When war challenges civilian survival, what shapes the balance between normative and instrumental rationalities in survival practices? Increasing desperation and uncertainty can lead civilians to focus on their own material interests and to violate norms in the name of survival or gain—to the detriment of the war effort and of other civilians. Do norms, boundaries against transgressions, and considerations of collective interests and identities persist, and, if so, through what mechanisms? Using diaries and recollections from the 872-day Blockade of Leningrad (1941–1944)—an extreme case of wartime desperation—this article examines how three forms of cultural embeddedness shape variation in the strength …

The Identity Of Late Barbarians: Goths And Wine, Walter Stevenson

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Wine, symbol of civilization in the Mediterranean for millennia and still a profound cultural marker in Europe today, is not often associated with the Goths.¹ But there is evidence allowing us to add this Northern European barbarian people to the tapestry of ancient wine production² at the same time that they were beginning to cultivate the first European barbarian literature with the translation of the Bible into the Gothic language.

Narratives Of Development: Models, Spectacles, And Calculability In Nick Cullather's The Hungry World, Nicole Sackley

History Faculty Publications

To describe The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia as a history of the green revolution does not begin to convey the ambition and rewards of Nick Cullather's new book. In less than three hundred pages, Hungry World offers a detailed diplomatic, intellectual, and cultural history that spans more than a century and three continents. Cullather deepens and revises our understanding of the "green revolution" as a history of the Rockefeller Foundation and its "transfer" of agricultural technology from Mexico to Asia, in part by showing how the green revolution's intellectual and political construction involved a …

Religious Experiences In New England, Douglas L. Winiarski

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter examines the shifting language of conversion in New England Congregationalism - the bastion of Puritan culture in North America - from the period of settlement in the 1630s to the eve of the Civil War. Evidence is drawn from a database of more than a thousand church-admission narratives from nearly three dozen communities scattered across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Throughout this period, most Congregational ministers remained committed to a Calvinist theology that emphasized innate human depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace. Yet the importance of conversion - the sacred calculus through which God winnowed saints …

Latino Louisiana, LáZaro Lima

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

When Louisiana became the 18th state of the Union in 1812, the territory was already seeped in the linguistic, historical, and cultural antecedents that had made New Orleans, its most important city at the time, one of the first multilingual, multiracial, and multiethnic cosmopolitan centers in the United States. The origins of Spanish-speaking Latino Louisiana can be traced to the arrival of Alonso Alvarez de Pineda (c. 1492-1520) in 1519. Alvarez de Pineda sailed from Cuba to explore the uncharted territories between the Florida peninsula -- modern-day Arkansas and Louisiana -- and the southern Gulf of Mexico region. The purpose …

The Education Of Joseph Prince: Reading Adolescent Culture In Eighteenth-Century New England, Douglas L. Winiarski

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Among the earliest extant manuscripts composed by a New England adolescent, Prince's commonplace book both confirms and modifies existing studies of the transition from childhood to adulthood in early America. Unlike the night-walking youths who appear in revisionist scholarship, Prince never was haled before the Plymouth County court to answer charges of "frolicking" with his cronies. Instead, this dutiful scion of a wealthy and politically powerful southeastern Massachusetts clan spent most of his free time perusing the books in his father's extensive library. Yet the very act of reading held subversive potential. While his parents sought to hone his religious …

Beschweigen Und Bekennen: Die Deutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft Und Der Holocaust (Book Review), Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Beschweigen und Bekennen is based on the proceedings of a symposium held in Dachau in April 2000. As the title suggests, the aim of the volume is to examine German responses to the Holocaust since the end of World War II. Following a brief introduction by Norbert Frei, the six essays by symposium contributors are organized in roughly chronological order beginning with treatments of the immediate post-war period and ending with the 1990s. The volume concludes with a transcript of the closing podium discussion. The central questions driving both the essays and the discussion are: how does increasing temporal distance …

Sozomen, Barbarians, And Early Byzantine Historiography, Walter Stevenson

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Sozomen, writing in mid-fifth century Constantinople, stands out as an exception proving the rule in Byzantine historiography. He is the first and last Christian Byzantine historian to make a serious effort at ethnography.⁵ When we consider how quickly Christianity was spreading outside the boundaries of the eastern Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries it is striking how little mention barbarians and their evangelization earn in the early ecclesiastical histories.⁶ To illustrate this point I will begin by showing that Sozomen’s predecessors, Eusebius, Rufinus, and Socrates, de-emphasized the natural interest that the historical genre had expressed in ethnography, …

[Introduction To] South To A New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, Suzanne W. Jones, Sharon Monteith

Bookshelf

Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth.

In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains …

Cyberspace, U.S.A., Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

I write not of Thomas Jefferson's town, where I live, nor of the American South to which I have devoted my working life. Rather, I write of a new American place, one we cannot see but whose effects we increasingly feel: "cyberspace." That place, simultaneously metaphorical and tangible, has touched every part of the United States. Information surges along networks of copper and glass, weaving ever tighter webs across the country and the world.

Worrying About The Civil War, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

There is no animosity in any of these historical or practical interpretations of the Civil War. It is clear that the North fought for purposes entirely good--for Union and the end of slavery--but Confederate soldiers also win respect for their bravery, their devotion, and their struggle against long odds. They seem to have been playing historical roles for which they are not to blame. The reenactors, the books in stores, and the battlefield tours generally avoid talking about the cause of the war, focusing instead on the common bravery and hardships of soldiers North and South.

Blues For You Johnny: Johnny Dodds And His "Wild Man Blues" Recordings Of 1927 And 1938, Gene H. Anderson

Music Faculty Publications

Shortly after Johnny Dodd's death Sidney Bechet invited Johnny's brother to join his New Orleans Feetwarmers in a recording honoring Bechet's hometown musical colleague and lifelong friend. Although Baby Dodds pronounced "Blues for You, Johnny," recorded in Chicago on September 6, 1940, a "fine tribute," Down Beat found vocalist Herb Jeffries "from hunger on blues." A more fitting memorial would have been "Wild Man Blues" cut by Bechet a few months previously. Said to be his favorite number, "Wild Man Blues" was recorded by Dodds three times in 1927 and once again in 1938. This study examines Johnny Dodds's style …

Walker John Decker, Farmer, Soldier And Minister Of The Gospel, John Laws Decker

Honors Theses

A biographical piece on Walker John Decker framed through his roles as a farmer, soldier, and minister of the gospel.