Author: Ryan K. Smith
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 080787728X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
Crosses, candles, choir vestments, sanctuary flowers, and stained glass are common church features found in nearly all mainline denominations of American Christianity today. Most Protestant churchgoers would be surprised to learn, however, that at one time these elements were viewed with suspicion as foreign implements associated strictly with the Roman Catholic Church. Blending history with the study of material culture, Ryan K. Smith sheds light on the ironic convergence of anti-Catholicism and the Gothic Revival movement in nineteenth-century America. Smith finds the source for both movements in the sudden rise of Roman Catholicism after 1820, when it began to grow from a tiny minority into the country's largest single religious body. Its growth triggered a corresponding rise in anti-Catholic activities, as activists representing every major Protestant denomination attacked "popery" through the pulpit, the press, and politics. At the same time, Catholic worship increasingly attracted young, genteel observers around the country. Its art and its tangible access to the sacred meshed well with the era's romanticism and market-based materialism. Smith argues that these tensions led Protestant churches to break with tradition and adopt recognizably Latin art. He shows how architectural and artistic features became tools through which Protestants adapted to America's new commercialization while simultaneously defusing the potent Catholic "threat." The results presented a colorful new religious landscape, but they also illustrated the durability of traditional religious boundaries.
Author: Ryan K. Smith
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421439271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
This exploration of Richmond's burial landscape over the past 300 years reveals in illuminating detail how racism and the color line have consistently shaped death, burial, and remembrance in this storied Southern capital. Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, holds one of the most dramatic landscapes of death in the nation. Its burial grounds show the sweep of Southern history on an epic scale, from the earliest English encounters with the Powhatan at the falls of the James River through slavery, the Civil War, and the long reckoning that followed. And while the region's deathways and burial practices have developed in surprising directions over these centuries, one element has remained stubbornly the same: the color line. But something different is happening now. The latest phase of this history points to a quiet revolution taking place in Virginia and beyond. Where white leaders long bolstered their heritage and authority with a disregard for the graves of the disenfranchised, today activist groups have stepped forward to reorganize and reclaim the commemorative landscape for the remains of people of color and religious minorities. In Death and Rebirth in a Southern City, Ryan K. Smith explores more than a dozen of Richmond's most historically and culturally significant cemeteries. He traces the disparities between those grounds which have been well-maintained, preserving the legacies of privileged whites, and those that have been worn away, dug up, and built over, erasing the memories of African Americans and indigenous tribes. Drawing on extensive oral histories and archival research, Smith unearths the heritage of these marginalized communities and explains what the city must do to conserve these gravesites and bring racial equity to these arenas for public memory. He also shows how the ongoing recovery efforts point to a redefinition of Confederate memory and the possibility of a rebirthed community in the symbolic center of the South. The book encompasses, among others, St. John's colonial churchyard; African burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom and on Shockoe Hill; Hebrew Cemetery; Hollywood Cemetery, with its 18,000 Confederate dead; Richmond National Cemetery; and Evergreen Cemetery, home to tens of thousands of black burials from the Jim Crow era. Smith's rich analysis of the surviving grounds documents many of these sites for the first time and is enhanced by an accompanying website, www.richmondcemeteries.org. A brilliant example of public history, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City reveals how cemeteries can frame changes in politics and society across time.
Author: Peter W. Williams
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469626985
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
This cultural history of mainline Protestantism and American cities--most notably, New York City--focuses on wealthy, urban Episcopalians and the influential ways they used their money. Peter W. Williams argues that such Episcopalians, many of them the country's most successful industrialists and financiers, left a deep and lasting mark on American urban culture. Their sense of public responsibility derived from a sacramental theology that gave credit to the material realm as a vehicle for religious experience and moral formation, and they came to be distinguished by their participation in major aesthetic and social welfare endeavors. Williams traces how the church helped transmit a European-inflected artistic patronage that was adapted to the American scene by clergy and laity intent upon providing moral and aesthetic leadership for a society in flux. Episcopalian influence is most visible today in the churches, cathedrals, and elite boarding schools that stand in many cities and other locations, but Episcopalians also provided major support to the formation of stellar art collections, the performing arts, and the Arts and Crafts movement. Williams argues that Episcopalians thus helped smooth the way for acceptance of materiality in religious culture in a previously iconoclastic, Puritan-influenced society.
Author: Sally Dwyer-McNulty
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146961409X
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism
Author: Richard Benjamin Crosby
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142144643X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
A history of Washington National Cathedral and the theory of an American civil religion. In 1792, Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the first city planner of Washington, DC, introduced the idea of a "great church for national purposes." Unlike L'Enfant's plans for the White House, the US Capitol, and the National Mall, this grand temple to the republic never materialized. But in 1890, the Episcopal Church began planning what is known today as Washington National Cathedral. In American Kairos, Richard Benjamin Crosby chronicles the history of not only the building but also the idea that animates it, arguing that the cathedral is a touchstone site for the American civil religion—the idea that the United States functions much like a religion, with its own rituals, sacred texts, holy days, and so on. He shows that the National Cathedral can never be the church L'Enfant envisioned, but it can be a starting point for studying the conflicts over belonging, ideology, and America's place in the world that define the American civil religion. By examining correspondence between L'Enfant, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others, and by diving into Washington National Cathedral's archives, Crosby uncovers a crucial gap in the formation of the nation's soul. While L'Enfant's original vision was never realized, Washington National Cathedral reminds us that perhaps it can be. The cathedral is one of the great rhetorical and architectural triumphs in the history of American religion. Without government mandate or public vote, it has claimed its role as America's de facto house of worship, a civil religious temple wherein Americans conduct some of their highest, holiest rituals, including state funerals and National Day of Prayer services.
Author: John T. McGreevy
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691183104
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
How American Jesuits helped forge modern Catholicism around the world At the start of the nineteenth century, the Jesuits seemed fated for oblivion. Dissolved as a religious order in 1773 by one pope, they were restored in 1814 by another, but with only six hundred aged members. Yet a century later, the Jesuits numbered seventeen thousand men and were at the vanguard of the Catholic Church’s expansion around the world. This book traces this nineteenth-century resurgence, showing how Jesuits nurtured a Catholic modernity through a disciplined counterculture of parishes, schools, and associations. Drawing on archival materials from three continents, American Jesuits and the World tracks Jesuits who left Europe for America and Jesuits who left the United States for missionary ventures across the Pacific. Each chapter tells the story of a revealing or controversial event, including the tarring and feathering of an exiled Swiss Jesuit in Maine, the efforts of French Jesuits in Louisiana to obtain Vatican approval of a miraculous healing, and the educational efforts of American Jesuits in Manila. These stories reveal how the Jesuits not only revived their own order but made modern Catholicism more global. The result is a major contribution to modern global history and an invaluable examination of the meaning of religious liberty in a pluralistic age.
Author: Zachary Schrag
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691215480
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first century The Princeton Guide to Historical Research provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian's craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries. Zachary Schrag begins by explaining how to ask good questions and then guides readers step-by-step through all phases of historical research, from narrowing a topic and locating sources to taking notes, crafting a narrative, and connecting one's work to existing scholarship. He shows how researchers extract knowledge from the widest range of sources, such as government documents, newspapers, unpublished manuscripts, images, interviews, and datasets. He demonstrates how to use archives and libraries, read sources critically, present claims supported by evidence, tell compelling stories, and much more. Featuring a wealth of examples that illustrate the methods used by seasoned experts, The Princeton Guide to Historical Research reveals that, however varied the subject matter and sources, historians share basic tools in the quest to understand people and the choices they made. Offers practical step-by-step guidance on how to do historical research, taking readers from initial questions to final publication Connects new digital technologies to the traditional skills of the historian Draws on hundreds of examples from a broad range of historical topics and approaches Shares tips for researchers at every skill level
Author: Sherin Wing
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317755898
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Sacred spaces exemplify some of the most exciting and challenging architecture today. Designing Sacred Spaces tells the inside story of seven architecture firms and their approaches to designing churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, monasteries and retreats. Twenty beautifully illustrated case studies located in Asia, Europe, and North America are showcased alongside discussions with the designers into concept and design development, materiality, and spatial analysis. Complementing these are essays on the cultural, historical, and theoretical meaning and importance of sacred spaces. By exploring the way we see religion and how we understand secular and sacred space, Designing Sacred Spaces reveals how we see ourselves and how we see others. A tour-de-force of first-person narratives, research, and illustrations, this book is a vital desk reference.
Author: Kyle B. Roberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638828X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
At first glance, evangelical and Gotham seem like an odd pair. What does a movement of pious converts and reformers have to do with a city notoriously full of temptation and sin? More than you might think, says Kyle B. Roberts, who argues that religion must be considered alongside immigration, commerce, and real estate scarcity as one of the forces that shaped the New York City we know today. In Evangelical Gotham, Roberts explores the role of the urban evangelical community in the development of New York between the American Revolution and the Civil War. As developers prepared to open new neighborhoods uptown, evangelicals stood ready to build meetinghouses. As the city’s financial center emerged and solidified, evangelicals capitalized on the resultant wealth, technology, and resources to expand their missionary and benevolent causes. When they began to feel that the city’s morals had degenerated, evangelicals turned to temperance, Sunday school, prayer meetings, antislavery causes, and urban missions to reform their neighbors. The result of these efforts was Evangelical Gotham—a complicated and contradictory world whose influence spread far beyond the shores of Manhattan. Winner of the 2015 Dixon Ryan Fox Manuscript Prize from the New York State Historical Association
Author: David Morgan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000158306
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
This is the history of the relationship between mass produced visual media and religion in the United States. It is a journey from the 1780s to the present - from early evangelical tracts to teenage witches and televangelists, and from illustrated books to contemporary cinema. David Morgan explores the cultural marketplace of public representation, showing how American religionists have made special use of visual media to instruct the public, to practice devotion and ritual, and to form children and converts. Examples include: studying Jesus as an American idol Jewish kitchens and Christian Parlors Billy Sunday and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the anti-slavery movement. This unique perspective reveals the importance of visual media to the construction and practice of sectarian and national community in a nation of immigrants old and new, and the tensions between the assimilation and the preservation of ethnic and racial identities. As well as the contribution of visual media to the religious life of Christians and Jews, Morgan shows how images have informed the perceptions and practices of other religions in America, including New Age, Buddhist and Hindu spirituality, and Mormonism, Native American Religions and the Occult.
