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The chaotic and reputedly immoral behaviour of the miners who made up the gold rush to the Californian frontier greatly worried the evangelical protestants from the Northeast. They sent missionaries to spread the word and transplant their beliefs. This book is the story of that enterprise.
The chaotic and reputedly immoral society of the California mining frontier during the gold rush period greatly worried Protestant evangelicals from the Northeast, and they soon sent missionaries westward to transplant their religious institutions, beliefs, and practices in the area. This book tells the story of that enterprise, showing how it developed, why it failed, and what patterns of religious adherence evolved in the West in place of evangelical Protestantism. Laurie Maffly-Kipp begins by analyzing the eastern-based religious ideology that underlay the movement westward and by investigating the motives behind the founding of home mission boards dedicated to the spread of Christianity and civility among new settlers. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and journals of hundreds of California "argonauts," Maffly-Kipp describes those missionaries and their wives sent to California after 1848 and the virtually all-male mining society that resisted the missionaries' notions of moral order and in turn created new religious beliefs and practices. Maffly-Kipp argues that despite its alleged immorality, the California gold rush was actually one of the most morally significant events of the nineteenth century, for it challenged and brought into conflict the cherished values of antebellum American culture: a commitment to spiritual and social progress; a concern with self-discipline, moral character, and proper gender roles; and a thirst for wealth fostered by the spirit of free enterprise.
Every California schoolchild's first interaction with history begins with the missions and Indians. It is the pastoralist image, of course, and it is a lasting one. Children in elementary school hear how Father Serra and the priests brought civilization to the groveling, lizard- and acorn-eating Indians of such communities as Yang-na, now Los Angeles. So edified by history, many of those children drag their parents to as many missions as they can. Then there is the other side of the missions, one that a mural decorating a savings and loan office in the San Fernando Valley first showed to me as a child. On it a kindly priest holds a large cross over a kneeling Indian. For some reason, though, the padre apparently aims not to bless the Indian but rather to bludgeon him with the emblem of Christianity. This portrait, too, clings to the memory, capturing the critical view of the missionization of California's indigenous inhabitants. I carried the two childhood images with me both when I went to libraries as I researched the missions and when I revisited several missions thirty years after those family trips. In this work I proceed neither to dubunk nor to reconcile these contrary notions of the missions and Indians but to present a new and, I hope, deeper understanding of the complex interaction of the two antithetical cultures.
Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith shaped struggles over the place of religion in politics. It produced different visions of knowledge and education in an "enlightened" society. It fueled social reform in an era of economic transformation, territorial expansion, and social change. Ultimately, as Christopher Grasso argues in this definitive work, it molded the making and eventual unmaking of American nationalism. Religious skepticism has been rendered nearly invisible in American religious history, which often stresses the evangelicalism of the era or the "secularization" said to be happening behind people's backs, or assumes that skepticism was for intellectuals and ordinary people who stayed away from church were merely indifferent. Certainly the efforts of vocal "infidels" or "freethinkers" were dwarfed by the legions conducting religious revivals, creating missions and moral reform societies, distributing Bibles and Christian tracts, and building churches across the land. Even if few Americans publicly challenged Christian truth claims, many more quietly doubted, and religious skepticism touched--and in some cases transformed--many individual lives. Commentators considered religious doubt to be a persistent problem, because they believed that skeptical challenges to the grounds of faith--the Bible, the church, and personal experience--threatened the foundations of American society. Skepticism and American Faith examines the ways that Americans--ministers, merchants, and mystics; physicians, schoolteachers, and feminists; self-help writers, slaveholders, shoemakers, and soldiers--wrestled with faith and doubt as they lived their daily lives and tried to make sense of their world.
The third in a four-volume series commemorating California's sesquicentennial, this volume brings together the best of the new scholarship on the social and cultural history of the Gold Rush, written in an accessible style and generously illustrated with with black and white and color photographs.
Religion and the American West offers a lavishly illustrated and comprehensive overview of the ways religion has shaped the idea of the American West and how the region has influenced broader religious and racial categories. Starting when the concept of the "American West" emerged in the early nineteenth century and continuing through modern times, Religion and the American West explores the interplay between a wide range of American belief systems, from established world religions to new spiritual innovations. A stunning selection of material and print culture illustrates the varied range of religious expressions across the history of the American West. Taken as a whole, the contributors challenge longstanding definitions of the American West and provide a new narrative that recenters our attention on the lived experiences of diverse peoples and communities. The book also serves as the companion publication for the New-York Historical Society's traveling exhibition "Acts of Faith." Religion and the American West is a story of vibrant innovation and tragic conflict, showcasing how historical actors and modern-day readers wrestle with the meaning of religious belief in the American West.
With a foreword by Edward O. Wilson, this book brings together internationally known experts from the scientific, societal, and conservation policy areas who address policy responses to the problem of biodiversity loss: how to determine conservation priorities in a scientific fashion, how to weigh the long-term, often hidden value of conservation against the more immediate value of land development, the need for education in areas of rapid population growth, and how lack of knowledge about biodiversity can impede conservation efforts. United in their belief that conservation of biological diversity is a primary concern of humankind, the contributing authors address the full scope of global biodiversity and its decline--the threatened marine life and extinction of many mammals in the modern era in relation to global patterns of development, and the implications of biodiversity loss for human health, agricultural productivity, and the economy. The Living Planet in Crisis is the result of a conference of the American Museum of Natural History's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation.
A Companion to the American West is a rigorous, illuminating introduction to the history of the American West. Twenty-five essays by expert scholars synthesize the best and most provocative work in the field and provide a comprehensive overview of themes and historiography. Covers the culture, politics, and environment of the American West through periods of migration, settlement, and modernization Discusses Native Americans and their conflicts and integration with American settlers
Racial and religious groups have played a key role in shaping the American West, yet scholars have for the most part ignored how race and religion have influenced regional identity. In this collection, eleven contributors explore the intersections of race, religion, and region to show how they transformed the West. From the Punjabi Mexican Americans of California to the European American shamans of Arizona to the Mexican Chinese of the borderlands, historical meanings of race in the American West are complex and are further complicated by religious identities. This book moves beyond familiar stereotypes to achieve a more nuanced understanding of race while also showing how ethnicity formed in conjunction with religious and regional identity. The chapters demonstrate how religion shaped cultural encounters, contributed to the construction of racial identities, and served as a motivating factor in the lives of historical actors. The opening chapters document how religion fostered community in Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century. The second section examines how physical encounters—such as those involving Chinese immigrants, Hermanos Penitentes, and Pueblo dancers—shaped religious and racial encounters in the West. The final essays investigate racial and religious identity among the Latter-day Saints and southern California Muslims. As these contributions clearly show, race, religion, and region are as critical as gender, sexuality, and class in understanding the melting pot that is the West. By depicting the West as a unique site for understanding race and religion, they open a new window on how we view all of America.
Frontier Figures is a tour-de-force exploration of how the American West, both as physical space and inspiration, animated American music. Examining the work of such composers as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Arthur Farwell, Beth E. Levy addresses questions of regionalism, race, and representation as well as changing relationships to the natural world to highlight the intersections between classical music and the diverse worlds of Indians, pioneers, and cowboys. Levy draws from an array of genres to show how different brands of western Americana were absorbed into American culture by way of sheet music, radio, lecture recitals, the concert hall, and film. Frontier Figures is a comprehensive illumination of what the West meant and still means to composers living and writing long after the close of the frontier.