Author: Nicholas Guyatt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139466283
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Get Book Here
Book Description
Nicholas Guyatt offers a completely new understanding of a central question in American history: how did Americans come to think that God favored the United States above other nations? Tracing the story of American providentialism, this book uncovers the British roots of American religious nationalism before the American Revolution and the extraordinary struggles of white Americans to reconcile their ideas of national mission with the racial diversity of the early republic. Making sense of previously diffuse debates on manifest destiny, millenarianism, and American mission, Providence and the Invention of the United States explains the origins and development of the idea that God has a special plan for America. This conviction supplied the United States with a powerful sense of national purpose, but it also prevented Americans from clearly understanding events and people that could not easily be fitted into the providential scheme.
Author: Nicholas Guyatt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511350146
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Get Book Here
Book Description
The development, and costs, of the idea that God has a special plan for America.
Author: Mark David Hall
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019992984X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Get Book Here
Book Description
One of leading figures of his day, Roger Sherman was a member of the five-man committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence and an influential delegate at the Constitutional Convention. As a Representative and Senator in the new republic, he had a hand in determining the proper scope of the national government's power as well as drafting the Bill of Rights. In Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic, Mark David Hall explores Sherman's political theory and shows how it informed his many contributions to America's founding. A close examination of Sherman's religious beliefs provides insight into how those beliefs informed his political actions. Hall shows that Sherman, like many founders, was influenced by Calvinist political thought, a tradition that played a role in the founding generation's opposition to Great Britain, and led them to develop political institutions designed to prevent corruption, promote virtue, and protect rights. Contrary to oft-repeated assertions that the founders advocated a strictly secular policy, Hall argues persuasively that most founders believed Christianity should play an important role in the new American republic.
Author: James P. Byrd
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190902795
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 393
Get Book Here
Book Description
"His terrible swift sword" -- "The stone which the builders rejected" -- "The Red Sea of war" -- "This second war I consider equally as holy as the first" -- "A covenant of death" -- "Trust in Providence and keep your powder dry" -- "A holy baptism of fire and blood" -- "Welcome to the ransomed" -- "Without shedding of blood is no remission" -- "The sword of the lord" -- "We cannot escape history" -- "Of one blood all nations" -- "These dead have not died in vain" -- "Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood" -- "Woe to that man by whom the offense cometh" -- "Baptized in the blood of their president" -- Epilogue. "Pyrotechnics of providence."
Author: Richard Carwardine
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 140004457X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 633
Get Book Here
Book Description
The first major account of the American Civil War to give full weight to the central role played by religion, reframing the conflict through Abraham Lincoln’s contentious appeals to faith-based nationalism How did slavery figure in God’s plan? Was it the providential role of government to abolish this sin and build a righteous nation? Or did such a mission amount to “religious tyranny” and “pulpit politics,” in an effort to strip the southern states of their God-given rights? In 1861, in an already fracturing nation, the tensions surrounding this moral quandary cracked the United States in half, and even formed rifts within the North itself, where antislavery religious nationalists butted heads with conservative religious nationalists over their visions for America’s future. At the center of this melee stood Abraham Lincoln, who would turn to his own faith for guidance, proclaiming more days of national fasting and thanksgiving than any other president before or since. These pauses for spiritual reflection provided the inspirational rhetoric and ideological fuel that sustained the war. In Righteous Strife, Richard Carwardine gives renewed attention to this crucible of contending religious nationalisms, out of which were forged emancipation, Lincoln’s reelection, and his second inaugural address. No understanding of the American Civil War is complete without accounting for this complex dance between church and state—one that continues to define our nation.
Author: Douglas A. Sweeney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190687495
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 407
Get Book Here
Book Description
Scholars have long recognized that Jonathan Edwards loved the Bible. But preoccupation with his role in Western "public" life and letters has resulted in a failure to see the significance of his biblical exegesis. Douglas A. Sweeney offers the first comprehensive history of Edwards' interpretation of the Bible.
Author: John Lauritz Larson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812296672
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Get Book Here
Book Description
After humble beginnings as faltering British colonies, the United States acquired astonishing wealth and power as the result of what we now refer to as modernization. Originating in England and Western Europe, transplanted to the Americas, then copied around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this process locked together science and technology, political democracy, economic freedom, and competitive capitalism. This has produced for some populations unimagined wealth and material comfort, yet it has also now brought the global environment to a tipping point beyond which life as we know it may not be sustainable. How did we come to endanger the very future of life on earth in our heedless pursuit of wealth and happiness? In Laid Waste!, John Lauritz Larson answers that question with a 350-year review of the roots of an American "culture of exploitation" that has left us free, rich, and without an honest sense of how this crisis came to be. Larson undertakes an ambitious historical synthesis, seeking to illuminate how the culture of exploitation grew out of the earliest English settlements and has continually undergirded U.S. society and its cherished myths. Through a series of meditations on key concepts, the story moves from the starving times of early Jamestown through the rise of colonial prosperity, the liberation of the revolutionary generation, the launching of the American republic, and the emergence of a new global industrial power by the end of the nineteenth century. Through this story, the book explores the rise of an American sense of righteousness, entitlement, and destiny that has masked any recognition that our wealth and success has come at expense to anyone or anything. Part polemic, part jeremiad, and part historical overview, Laid Waste! is a provocative and bracing account of how the development of American culture itself has led us to today's crises.
Author: D. H. Robinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019260788X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 634
Get Book Here
Book Description
In The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, Dan Robinson presents a new history of politics in colonial America and the imperial crisis, tracing how ideas of Europe and Europeanness shaped British-American political culture. Reconstructing colonial debates about the European states system, European civilisation, and Britain's position within both, Robinson shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards American identity and America's place inside - and, ultimately, outside - the emerging British Empire. Taking in more than two centuries of Atlantic history, he explores the way in which colonists inherited and adapted Anglo-British traditions of thinking about international politics, how they navigated imperial politics during the European wars of 1740-1763, and how the burgeoning patriot movement negotiated the dual crisis of Europe and Empire in the between 1763 and 1775. In the process, Robinson sheds new light on the development of public politics in colonial America, the Anglicisation/Americanisation debate, the political economy of empire, early American art and poetry, eighteenth-century geopolitical thinking, and the relationship between international affairs, nationalism, and revolution. What emerges from this story is an American Revolution that seems both decidedly arcane and strikingly relevant to the political challenges of the twenty-first century.
Author: Elizabeth A. Pritchard
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804788871
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Get Book Here
Book Description
John Locke's theory of toleration is generally seen as advocating the privatization of religion. This interpretation has become conventional wisdom: secularization is widely understood as entailing the privatization of religion, and the separation of religion from power. This book turns that conventional wisdom on its head and argues that Locke secularizes religion, that is, makes it worldly, public, and political. In the name of diverse citizenship, Locke reconstructs religion as persuasion, speech, and fashion. He insists on a consensus that human rights are sacred insofar as humans are the creatures, and thus, the property of God. Drawing on a range of sources beyond Locke's own writings, Pritchard portrays the secular not as religion's separation from power, but rather as its affiliation with subtler, and sometimes insidious, forms of power. As a result, she captures the range of anxieties and conflicts attending religion's secularization: denunciations of promiscuous bodies freed from patriarchal religious and political formations, correlations between secular religion and colonialist education and conversion efforts, and more recently, condemnations of the coercive and injurious force of unrestricted religious speech.
Author: Duncan Bell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691235112
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 484
Get Book Here
Book Description
How transatlantic thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted the unification of Britain and the United States Between the late nineteenth century and the First World War an ocean-spanning network of prominent individuals advocated the unification of Britain and the United States. They dreamt of the final consolidation of the Angloworld. Scholars, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and science fiction writers invested the “Anglo-Saxons” with extraordinary power. The most ambitious hailed them as a people destined to bring peace and justice to the earth. More modest visions still imagined them as likely to shape the twentieth century. Dreamworlds of Race explores this remarkable moment in the intellectual history of racial domination, political utopianism, and world order. Focusing on a quartet of extraordinary figures—Andrew Carnegie, W. T. Stead, Cecil J. Rhodes, and H. G. Wells—Duncan Bell shows how unionists on both sides of the Atlantic reimagined citizenship, empire, patriotism, race, war, and peace in their quest to secure global supremacy. Yet even as they dreamt of an Anglo-dominated world, the unionists disagreed over the meaning of race, the legitimacy of imperialism, the nature of political belonging, and the ultimate form and purpose of unification. The racial dreamworld was an object of competing claims and fantasies. Exploring speculative fiction as well as more conventional forms of political writing, Bell reads unionist arguments as expressions of the utopianism circulating through fin-de-siècle Anglo-American culture, and juxtaposes them with pan-Africanist critiques of racial domination and late twentieth-century fictional narratives of Anglo-American empire. Tracing how intellectual elites promoted an ambitious project of political and racial unification between Britain and the United States, Dreamworlds of Race analyzes ideas of empire and world order that reverberate to this day.
