Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review: 'God's Own Party: The Making Of The Christian Right', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

There has been no end of predictions that the demise of the Religious Right is imminent. Over the past three decades, proof of its impending collapse has included the televangelist scandals, Pat Robertson’s failure to secure the Republican presidential nomination, the election and re-election of Bill Clinton, and the emergence of “young” evangelicals who refuse to toe the Religious Right line (this one keeps popping up).

The latest version involves the notion that economically focused libertarians of the Tea Party will inevitably find themselves in heated conflict with evangelical and fundamentalist social conservatives, thus challenging the power of the Religious …

Portrait Of A Nation: A Review Of Claude Fischer's 'Made In America: A Social History Of American Culture And Character', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

The distinguished University of California sociologist Claude Fischer is unhappy with historians' failure to provide the grand narrative — in this case the grand narrative of American history. But instead of waiting for recalcitrant historians to tie up the "loose threads that comprise the study of American social history,'' Fischer provides his own metanarrative, neatly laid out in the introduction.

Fischer is convinced that there is an American national character that makes America exceptional and that its central feature is voluntarism, defined here as something like individualistic collegiality: We are "sovereign individuals,'' but we love to be in groups that …

Review: 'Wheels Of Change: From Zero To 600 M.P.H.: The Amazing Story Of California And The Automobile', John Alfred Heitmann

History Faculty Publications

Histories of the automobile in America often begin with the all-too-familiar observation that “the Automobile is European by birth and American by adoption.” And while that generalization certainly is useful in explaining things to undergraduate students, it rings particularly true in the case of the state of California, where beginning with the car’s appearance on the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco, late nineteenth-century society and culture were rapidly and markedly transformed into a twentieth-century machine age. Indeed, the automobile is the perfect technological symbol of American culture, a tangible expression of our quest to level space, time, and …

Catholic Studies In The Spirit Of 'Do Whatever He Tells You', Una M. Cadegan

History Faculty Publications

During the University of Dayton's sesquicentennial in the year 2000, the singer-songwriter alumnus who headed the university's Center for Social Concern performed a song he written for the occasion, "Do Whatever He Tells You." At the reception after the celebration, a colleague still fairly new to the university, nonreligious but with an evident affinity for the university's mission and commitments, commented that he thought the song was little odd; hadn't something like "do whatever he tells you" been written over the gates of Soviet labor camps? My first response to the remark, phrased more wittily than I can recall here, …