Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review: Jacob Dorn's 'Socialism And Christianity In Early 20th-Century America', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

During the 2004 presidential campaign, there will be much talk by television and radio evangelists of the urgent necessity for "Christian voters" to go to the polls on Election Day. It will be assumed — by the preachers, by their audiences, and by the general media — that these "Christian voters" will vote Republican (implying, of course, that only "non-Christian voters" would even consider pulling the lever for the Democratic candidate).

Jacob Dorn summarizes this state of affairs in his introduction to Socialism and Christianity: "The rise of the Religious Right" has "overshadow[ed] the potential of American Christianity to stimulate …

Review: 'Gods Of War, Gods Of Peace: How The Meeting Of Native And Colonial Religions Shaped Early America', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In this ambitious and interesting book, Russell Bourne, former editor at American Heritage and author of The Red King’s Rebellion: Racial Politics in New England, argues that “the cultural contact between Anglo-Americans and Native Americans ... becomes most understandable when seen as an intrinsically religious encounter” (p. 3) that had “immense consequences for [both] cultures” (p. xii). Bourne covers the two centuries from the 1630s through the 1830s, shedding light on familiar and less familiar religious figures such as Handsome Lake, Hobomock, John Eliot, Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Kirkland, and Shikellamy.

Bourne’s sympathies are clearly with moments and places, including …

Review: 'Hero Of The Heartland: Billy Sunday And The Transformation Of American Society, 1862-1935', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

It is hard to imagine how anyone could write a boring book about the colorful evangelist Billy Sunday. Robert Martin does not disappoint. The University of Northern Iowa historian tells a lively and well-researched story about Sunday's Iowa childhood—his father's untimely death, his family's grinding poverty, his mother abandoning him to an orphanage—as well as his career as a major league baseball player, his conversion at a Chicago mission and his marriage to Helen (Nell), his remarkable success as an entrepreneurial evangelist, and his failures as a father. In all this Martin convincingly depicts Sunday as the quintessential Midwesterner and …

Fundamentalism, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In America fundamentalism is a movement within Protestantism that was organized immediately after World War I in opposition to "modernism," which included liberal theology primarily, and also Darwinism and secularism. A subgroup of evangelicalism, fundamentalism staunchly affirmed with evangelicals "fundamentals of the faith," including the deity of Christ, his virgin birth, his bodily resurrection, and his substitutionary atonement. What distinguishes fundamentalists from other evangelicals is their strident opposition to modernism. They are, to quote George Marsden, "militant anti-modernist evangelicals."

Protestantism And Fundamentalism, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

The term "fundamentalism" has been used to describe a host of religious movements across the globe that are militantly antimodernist, aggressively patriarchal, literalist in their reading of sacred texts, and assiduous in their efforts to draw boundaries between themselves and outsiders. While "Islamic fundamentalism" has received the most attention, particularly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, scholars and journalists have also applied the term to movements within such disparate traditions as Judaism, Sikhism, and Hinduism, as well as to various Christian groups.

There are benefits to understanding fundamentalism as a global movement that grows out of deep-seated and intense …

Making The Italian Other: Blacks, Whites, And The In Between In The 1895 Spring Valley, Illinois, Race Riot, Caroline Waldron Merithew

History Faculty Publications

This essay takes the Spring Valley, Illinois, race riot and observes how blacks, Italians, and other new immigrants attempted to empower themselves and lay claim to status at the "nadir" of race relations ill this country. The events leading up to the riot, the assault on the African-American community, and the aftermath of the attack led to vocal outcries against oppression. What constituted oppression, however, was open to interpretation. Furthermore, no group defined itself, or its other, in isolation. Rather, each side responded to the rhetoric of its "opponents" as well as of middle-class whites who became involved in the …