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Full-Text Articles in History
Protestant Experience And Continuity Of Political Thought In Early America, 1630-1789, Stephen Michael Wolfe
Protestant Experience And Continuity Of Political Thought In Early America, 1630-1789, Stephen Michael Wolfe
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
The debate on the continuity of American political thought from the 17th century Puritan settlements to the 18th century American founding assumes a bipolar spectrum, ranging from strong continuity to strong discontinuity. The degree that scholars recognize distinctively Christian, theological, or Protestant ideas operating in the founding era determines where they are placed on the spectrum. The most popular view today is the “amalgam” thesis, which is a moderate view, resulting from decades of debate. Amalgam theorists argue that the founders' political theory relied on a variety of sources, from classical to Protestant. The current debate centers on …
Jews And The Sources Of Religious Freedom In Early Pennsylvania, Jonathon Derek Awtrey
Jews And The Sources Of Religious Freedom In Early Pennsylvania, Jonathon Derek Awtrey
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Historians’ traditional narrative regarding religious freedom in the colonial period and early republic focuses on Protestants and sometimes Catholics to the exclusion of other religious groups; the literature also emphasizes the legal dimensions of freedom at the expense of its cultural manifestations. This study, conversely, demonstrates that Jews, the only white non-Christian minority group in early Pennsylvania, experienced freedom far differently than its legality can adequately explain. Jews, moreover, reshaped religious freedom to include religious groups beyond Protestant Christians alone. But such grassroots transformations were neither quick nor easy. Like most of the Anglo-American world, William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” excluded …