Intellectual History Commons^™

Butterflies And Rebirth, Meredith E. Brown

Wonders of Nature and Artifice

During the Renaissance, collectors saw Morpho butterflies as beautiful, elegant, and rare creatures. Their exotic origin and sophistication made these fascinating creatures the subjects of scientific observation, decoration, and symbolism. Butterflies of the Morpho genus include a wide variety of marvelous, striking, and beautiful species. Home to South and Central America, Morpho butterflies thrive in the rainforests of Nicaragua, Colombia, and Venezuela. When Renaissance Europeans began exploring American rainforests, they were quickly captivated by these butterflies. Morphos feature vivid blue coloration and iridescence on the dorsal side of their wings as well as a yellow-brown coloration on the other side. …

Seutter Map Of America, Meredith D. Staats

Wonders of Nature and Artifice

The map featured in our show, Novus Orbis sive America, was printed in 1730. The engraving measures 50 x 58 centimeters and is a 1:19,000,000 scale.1 The map was donated by John H.W. and Mary G. Stuckenberg. It shows the “New World,” North and South America; the copy Special Collections owns features hand-colored continents. Different states or regions are colored in yellow, pink, orange, and green. On either side of each continent are islands with trade routes highlighted across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Also present are two text boxes, both in Latin, one in the upper left-hand corner and …

19th Century Miniature Landscape And Seascape, Kathleen C. Paul

Wonders of Nature and Artifice

As a gift to Gettysburg College, known as Pennsylvania College at the time, Johann Heinrich Wilbrand Stuckenberg willed his vast estate including an extensive 17^th-19^th century map collection after his death in London in 1903. J.H.W. Stuckenberg, and his wife Mary, were fond of the college for its progressive curriculum and support of his philosophical endeavors in publication, sociology, religion, and his native politics and culture.Two items that were bequeathed to the college are a pair of small paintings, one a landscape, the other a seascape. [excerpt]

Romanticism And Religion: The Superb Lily, Alexis Marie Michelle Zilen

Wonders of Nature and Artifice

“The Superb Lily,” was donated by Geoff Jackson, class of 1991 and beloved benefactor of Gettysburg College, to Special Collections. This first edition piece was published in the twenty first page of the book, Temple of Flora. This text is considered the greatest and most famous florilegia of the twentieth century due to its accuracy of descriptions and vast size. It contained a total of thirty five floral prints. The publisher, Robert Thornton, produced numerous copies of this book in the same year, however, the exact number of copies is unknown. (excerpt)

Wonders Of Nature And Artifice, Schmucker Art Gallery

Schmucker Art Catalogs

A stuffed blowfish, a meticulously-drawn insect, a ravishing lily, and a rhinoceros horn carved with scenes of plants and animals—these were among the wonders of nature and artifice, the marvels that fueled the Renaissance quest for knowledge. This exhibition explores the intellectual and aesthetic motivations of Renaissance naturalists and collectors, whose wonders of nature and artifice were displayed in elaborate gardens, illustrated books, and remarkable cabinets of curiosities. Collectors were driven by curiosity and a sense of wonder about what seemed to be an ever-expanding world. Students from Prof. Felicia Else’s upper-level art history course and Kay Etheridge’s First Year …

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 …

Invariance: A Tale Of Intellectual Migration, Steven Gimbel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The plotline of the standard story told about the development of intellectual history at the end of the 19th/turn of the 20th century follows the move from absolutism to perspectivalism. The narrative takes us, on the one hand, from the scientism of late Enlightenment writers like Voltaire, Mill, D’Alebert, and Comte and the historical determinism of Hegel, all of which were based upon a universal picture of rationality, to, on the other hand, the relativistic physics of Einstein, the perspectival art of Picasso, and the individualism of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard leading to the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger to and …

Edwards On The Will: A Century Of American Theological Debate, Allen C. Guelzo

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Jonathan Edwards towered over his contemporaries--a man over six feet tall and a figure of theological stature--but the reasons for his power have been a matter of dispute. Edwards on the Will offers a persuasive explanation. In 1753, after seven years of personal trials, which included dismissal from his Northampton church, Edwards submitted a treatise, Freedom of the Will, to Boston publishers. Its impact on Puritan society was profound. He had refused to be trapped either by a new Arminian scheme that seemed to make God impotent or by a Hobbesian natural determinism that made morality an illusion. He …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

4. The Enlightenment Again Under Attack, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XIX: An Analysis of the Contemporary World’s Search for Meaning

Until recently, and especially in the United States, Western Civilization has been dominated by Enlightenment thought, tempered by the criticisms of the nineteenth century. One of the current questions is whether this strand of thought is adequate to cope with the problems of the age of anxiety. Those who believe that the Enlightenment ideas are still basically sound suggest the giving up of transcendent or long-term goals in favor of more immediate aims. Equality and freedom are, in such a context better when they apply to more people than when they apply to fewer. According to this way of thinking, …

1. Carl Becker On Progress, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XXIV: Historical Meaning

The first selection was written by Carl L. Becker (1873-1945), for many years professor of history at Cornell University (1917-1941), and one of the most highly respected members of his profession. One of his particular interests was the Enlightenment, about which he wrote a famous book: The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1932). But while he clung to his fascination with the Enlightenment, Becker was in revolt against the "scientific history" which it had largely fostered. The ideal of scientific history, he thought, was noble enough, but unattainable and useless. Influenced by pragmatism, Becker asked the question: Can …

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 …

4. The Ideals Of 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

Among the ideals of the Enlightenment were nature, science, humanitarianism, cosmopolitanism, toleration, and progress. The ideals of any age are those ideas and principles to which men give their allegiance, and consequently ideals are a key to understanding what an age is like in terms of its hopes and aspirations, and to some extent its practices. [excerpt]

3. The Shaking Of The Foundations, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XIX: An Analysis of the Contemporary World’s Search for Meaning

The internal reactions of our ideas and feelings, while less obvious, are of even greater significance than the changes which have occurred in our institutions. So great have these internal changes been that one writer has described them as the shaking of the foundations. This characterization reminds is of what has been of major importance to Western man: his ideas and ideals. Throughout his history it has been these ideas which have supplied both his standards and his motivations, whether they referred to something beyond nature as Augustine's City of God, something beyond the present as More's Utopia, something within …

2. The Modern State, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XIX: An Analysis of the Contemporary World’s Search for Meaning

Nothing manifests the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary institutions more than the modern national state. Because in this country it reflects the demands of all the people and at the same time affects them and all their other institutions, it is the prime example of institutional growth. It is not an exaggeration to say that all other institutions serve but partial ends, no matter how total they may try to be in their relations with their members. Designed to be small, it has become huge. Once limited to action which was mainly negative, it has become more and more …

Xxiv. Historical Meaning, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XXIV: Historical Meaning

Philosophers and theologians have not been alone during the present age of crisis in trying to solve, or at least to illuminate, the riddle of human existence. In their attempts to find meaning for the life of man, they have been joined by many historians who are convinced that it is also an essential part of their task to discover some clue to whatever destiny might be in store for the human species. As a result, the past quarter of a century has seen the appearance of a host of books, pamphlets, and articles devoted to the subject of meaning …

2. Toynbee And The Cyclical Pattern Of History, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold L. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section XXIV: Historical Meaning

There has been recently a return on the part of some writers to the Greek theory that the course of history follows a cyclical pattern. An important motivation for this return is the conviction that neither the theory of progress nor the classical Christian understanding of history can explain the setback which has befallen Western culture. One of the most famous explanations of the current dilemma to employ this pattern was that offered by the German writer, Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), in the Decline of the West (1918-1922). Drawing his analogy from biology, Spengler argued that each civilization has a life …

1. The Goliard Poets, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section IV: The Medieval Ferment

One aspect of medieval variety was a love of this world and of nature. This naturalism had many bases in addition to the fact that man has always found nature unavoidable. It was due also, in part, to the pronounced emphasis on the other world, and arose as an understandable reaction to the prevailing concern for things spiritual. It was also due in part to the fact that, according to Christian teachings, this world of nature was in and of itself good because it had been created by a good God. Therefore it was not to be despised. Naturalism was …

10. The Political Thought Of Machiavelli, Robert L. Bloom, Basil L. Crapster, Harold A. Dunkelberger, Charles H. Glatfelter, Richard T. Mara, Norman E. Richardson, W. Richard Schubart

Section V: The Rise of Capitalism and the National State to 1500

The national state in Western Europe was a new institution, without precedent in the European World. Its rise and almost immediate conflict with the Church challenged political theorists to reexamine the assumptions of a universal church in a universal empire upon which the theory of the two swords was based. These assumptions were so generally accepted that they were not easily abandoned. In the fourteenth century Marsiglia of Padua, for all his disinterest in the two swords, had arrived at his conclusions without denying either the existence of a universal church or the validity of the traditional morality. Other writers …