Intellectual History Commons^™

Rewriting History: A Study Of How The History Of The Civil War Has Changed In Textbooks From 1876 To 2014, Skyler A. Campbell

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

History textbooks provide an interesting perspective into the views and attitudes of their respective time period. The way textbooks portray certain events and groups of people has a profound impact on the way children learn to view those groups and events. That impact then has the potential to trickle down to future generations, fabricating a historical narrative that sometimes avoids telling the whole truth, or uses selective wording to sway opinions on certain topics. This paper analyzes the changes seen in how the Civil War is written about in twelve textbooks dated from 1876 to 2014. Notable topics of discussion …

Gettysburg College Journal Of The Civil War Era 2018

The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era

No abstract provided.

Helpers In A "Heathen" Land?: An Examination Of Missionary Perceptions Of The Cherokees, Andrew C. Nosti

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

This analysis examines writings left behind by missionaries living among the Cherokees in the early nineteenth century to tease out the missionary perceptions of their Indigenous neighbors. This approach includes a heavy emphasis on decoding the white lexicon employed to discuss Native Americans to elucidate the broader cultural/racial intellectualism of the time. The utilization of this approach deconstructs a conventional “friend or foe” binary viewpoint of the missionaries, conversely constructing a greater complexity within the interracial and intercultural dynamics of the Early Republic, thereby providing a more layered and broader understanding of early America and, by extension, America overall.

Maybe, Maybe Not: The Tao Of History, Kevin P. Lavery

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

Many years ago, I read an old Chinese parable in one of my brother’s books. I haven’t been able to determine its precise origins, but it goes something like this:

One day, a farmer’s only horse broke loose and ran away from his stable. “What bad luck,” the farmer’s neighbors said to him. But the farmer merely replied, “Maybe, maybe not.”... [excerpt]

History Abroad: How Do Denmark And The U.S. Measure Up?, Louis T. Gentilucci

Student Publications

By viewing bias itself as a product of history, educators and scholars can understand it better in their own times. By studying the historical path of the United States and Denmark, scholars can see that the nature of history can have subtle but important impacts on common education. Even when educators are aware of potential bias, history itself warps its dissemination.

Book Review: Lincoln And His Books, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

“I have found no one to speak of Lincoln as a man of either capacity or patriotism,” smirked Confederate general Lafayette McLaws, as the Army of Northern Virginia prepared to march into Pennsylvania on June 28, 1863. His was not, unhappily, an opinion limited to Abraham Lincoln’s enemies-in-arms. Henry Clay Whitney admitted that, at best, Lincoln “had the appearance of a rough intelligent farmer.” Elihu Washburne agreed: meeting Lincoln on the railroad platform in Washington, D.C., on February 23, 1861, Washburne could not help thinking that Lincoln “looked more like a well-to-do farmer from one of the back towns of …

A. Lincoln, Philosopher: Lincoln’S Place In 19th-Century Intellectual History, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century in Europe and America was an era of second thoughts. Those second thoughts were largely about the Enlightenment, which had been born in the mid-1600s as a scientific revolution and blossomed into the Age of Reason in the 1700s, when it seemed that no puzzle was beyond the grasp of scientific rationality. That blossom was snipped all too quickly by the French Revolution, which drowned rationality in human politics in a spray of Jacobin-terrorized blood, then by the revulsion of European art and music from the Enlightenment’s canons of balance and symmetry in favor of the Romantic …

To Waken Fond Memory: Moments In The History Of Gettysburg College, Anna Jane Moyer

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Between 1975 and 1989 Anna Jane Moyer produced a series of essays for the Gettysburg College alumni magazine capturing “moments” on campus and in the town of Gettysburg since 1832. Treating people, places, and notable events over the course of the College’s first 150 years, Moyer’s sketches reached an appreciative audience at the time. But with the Gettysburg College 175th anniversary approaching, it seemed appropriate to make her writing more readily available to alumni, friends of the College, students, and scholars.

The sketches now republished in To Waken Fond Memory remind readers that the culture of a liberal arts college …

Ms-066: The Papers Of George Saylor Warthen, Jason M. Kowell

All Finding Aids

This collection is the typed manuscript “A Study of the Rollaid” as well as the handwritten notes by Warthen. The majority of the collection is the manuscript, which consists of four chapters and an appendix. The notes are generally simple lists, mostly of other sources used by Warthen. These notes were for personal use and are for the most part check lists of other works or names.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information about each collection in addition to inventories …

Freedom Of The Will, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The exact nature of the human will is, like the nature of human consciousness, a question so subjective and so interior that no one is ever likely to arrive at a satisfactory judgment about how it functions or even what it is-which may be the best proof that philosophy is not a science, and the best evidence that those social sciences which try to measure, quantify, and control aspects of human consciousness are not sciences either. Still, there is no denying that we are aware of a power or an impulse within us which transJates thought into action, or at …

Ms-055: Papers Of The German Literary Society, Keith R. Swaney, Arthur Mccardle, Michael Ritterson

All Finding Aids

The Papers of the German Literary Society collection consists of manuscripts from the proceedings of the Society from the 1830s to the 1860s. However, there are also three manuscripts that were likely given to the Literary Society at some point during its existence.

The collection contains the constitution and minutes of the Literary Society from its first period of existence during the late-1830s. Researchers will also find the organization’s minute book, dated 1856 to 1860, as well as the 1867 version of the Society’s constitution. These manuscripts, along with the Society’s ledger book, allow one to understand the organization and …

Ms-038: Pen And Sword Society Papers, Christine M. Ameduri

All Finding Aids

The purpose of the Pen and Sword Society was, and is today, to honor those, who by their energy and successful efforts in furthering the prestige of the College in the past, show that they are willing and capable of exerting themselves in a special manner in the interest and welfare of the Alma Mater in the future. The collection consists of the official records of the Society between 1904 and 1943.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information about each …

The Presidency Of Charles E. Glassick, 1977-1989: An Appraisal, Michael J. Birkner

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

On August 1, 1977 Charles Glassick assumed his duties as president of Gettysburg College. With the 25th anniversary of that event approaching, it seemed appropriate to take stock of Glassick's accomplishments. This was an eventful presidency for Gettysburg, as the college began to identify itself less as a worthy, but modest, Lutheran institution of higher learning than as a national liberal arts college. The process of embracing a new identity was not always smooth, but under Glassick's leadership the college prospered. Gettysburg in 1989 remained committed as always to the liberal arts mission it had long espoused, but it did …

Ms-036: Radical Pamphlets, 1965 – 1975, Christine M. Ameduri

All Finding Aids

This collection is divided into two sections. Radical Pamphlets, consists of pamphlets on broad topics such as labor, communism, ecology, poverty, racism and women’s rights. The second series is the Peace Movement and consists of pamphlets, papers, newspaper clippings and correspondence dealing with the Vietnam Conflict and Peace Movement in the United States compiled by David Mozes, a friend of Scott, Nancy and Jim Scott, and Michael J. Hobor, Class of 1969.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information about each …

Ms-018: Robert W. Koons Collection, Christine M. Ameduri

All Finding Aids

Robert W. Koons graduated from Gettysburg College in 1943 with an A.B. in English, earned a B.D. from Gettysburg Lutheran Theological Seminary in 1946 and a D.D. from Susquehanna University in 1958. While a student at Gettysburg College he served at various times as President of the Student Christian Association, Literary Editor of the Mercury, Corresponding Secretary of the Pre-Ministerial Association and Treasurer of Delta Phi Alpha and was a member of various other campus organizations. He received Highest Class Honors in his Freshman and Junior years and Class Honors in his sophomore year.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding …

Ms-023: Papers Of Samuel Simon Schmucker And The Schmucker Family, Jaclyn Campbell

All Finding Aids

The Samuel Simon Schmucker collection is arranged into four series: I. Correspondence of Samuel Simon Schmucker (S.S.), II. Other Schmucker Correspondence, III. Publications and Papers, and IV. Sermons. Series I is primarily comprised of correspondence written by Schmucker. Series II is composed of correspondence written by other Schmucker family members. Series III includes diaries written by Schmucker, a Schmucker family genealogy, lecture notes by Schmucker, a certificate of reimbursement for damage to Gettysburg College during the Civil War, clippings, and an article about Schmucker. Series IV contains the original sermons written by Schmucker.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids …

Ms-010: The Papers Of The Linnaean Association, Melodie A. Foster

All Finding Aids

The Linnaean Association collection is varied in its makeup. Series I consists largely of the published versions of addresses given by association-sponsored speakers between 1844 and 1861. Series II contains a number of copies of the four volumes of the faculty publication The Literary Record and Journal of the Linnaean Association of Pennsylvania College, both bound and unbound. Volume III is in scarcest supply, and many editions are incomplete. Series III contains items from the Library of the Linnaean Association: scientific journals from the 1830s and 1840s and a bound collection of catalogues and scientific articles from various sources.

The …

Ms-005: The Papers Of Charles H. Huber, Class Of 1892, Christine M. Ameduri

All Finding Aids

Charles H. Huber was born June 7, 1871 in Nebraska City, NE, the son of Eli Huber (Class of 1855 and the first professor of English Bible at Gettysburg College), and Mary E. Deibert Huber. Upon graduating from Gettysburg College in 1892, Charles was hired as a tutor at Gettysburg Academy, appointed vice-principal in 1893 and headmaster in 1896. He earned his A.M. from Gettysburg College and Litt.D. from Gettysburg Theological Seminary both in 1895. After the Gettysburg Academy closed in 1935, he was appointed Director of Gettysburg College's Women's Division, and held that position until his retirement in 1941. …

The Return Of The Will: Jonathan Edwards And The Possibilities Of Free Will, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

If certain national cultures seem to own certain great problems of the mind, then freedom of the will seems to be the American problem. This is not just because of the sheet stupifying bulk of what Americans have written on this problem over the past 300 years, from Benjamin Franklin to Daniel Dennett, from Quaker prophetesses in Vermont to prairie lawyers in Illinois. In the most fundamental sense, freedom of the will has been an American possession because it forms a cognate philosophical discourse to that most fundamental of all American ideas, that if political and civil liberty. To speak …

Abraham Lincoln And The Doctrine Of Necessity, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

Abraham Lincoln was a fatalist. That, at least, was what he told many people over the course of his life. "I have all my life been a fatalist," Lincoln informed his Illinois congressional ally, Isaac Arnold. "Mr. Lincoln was a fatalist," remembered Henry Clay Whitney, one of his Springfield law clerks, "he believed ... that the universe is governed by one uniform, unbroken, primordial law." His Springfield law partner William Henry Herndon, likewise, affirmed that Lincoln "believed in predestination, foreordination, that all things were fixed, doomed one way or the other, from which there was no appeal." Even Mary Todd …

Oberlin Perfectionism And Its Edwardsean Origins, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

An impression has very generally prevailed," wrote James Harris Fairchild toward the end of his twenty-three-year presidency of Oberlin College, "that the theological views unleashed at Oberlin College by the late Rev. Charles Grandison Finney & his Associates involves a considerable departure from the accepted orthodox faith." It was an impression that Fairchild believed to be inaccurate, and he would probably be horrified to discover a century later that the prevailing impression the "Oberlin Theology" has made on historians of the nineteenth-century United States continues to be one in which Oberlin stands for almost all the progressive and enthusiastic unorthodoxies …

Calvinist Metaphysics To Republican Theory: Jonathan Edwards And James Dana On Freedom Of The Will, Allen C. Guelzo

Civil War Era Studies Faculty Publications

The Reverend Mr. James Dana, the pastor of the First Church in Wallingford, Connecticut, had never before attempted to pick a quarrel with his old friend and ally, Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College. But in the winter of 1782 what was happening at Yale passed all the bounds of propriety and friendship. "I have understood that Mr. Edwards's book on fatality was laid aside some years since at your university," Dana wrote (not stopping to add what he surely must have thought, and good riddance too); but now, "it gave me pain to hear lately" that the …

Gettysburg College And The Lutheran Connection: An Open-Ended Story Of A Proud Relationship, Harold A. Dunkelberger

College History Publications

"The oldest Lutheran College in America" is a mark of distinction credited to Gettysburg. Just what Lutheran has meant to this institution throughout its century and a half is the subject of this historical essay. This is an open-ended story because the Lutheran connection of Gettysburg College is a live relationship today and gives promise of being a mutually supportive association in the future.

Gettysburg represents not only a high water mark in the history of this nation, but also a place of landmark developments for Lutheranism in America. The College and the Seminary were center stage for these developments, …

1. An Introduction To The Enlightenment, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section X: The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment

The word "Enlightenment" is used to indicate the eighteenth century in the history of ideas of the Western World. It is a word that indicates a sum of ideas about the character of man, his beliefs and activities, and the universe. These ideas have three common assumptions which are at the root of what we mean by the Enlightenment. The thinkers and writers of this period assumed that reason and knowledge will reveal an order inherent in the universe; will disclose the truth about religion, economics, politics, morals - every aspect of life; and, that when man discovers the order …