American Destiny Research Articles

The freedom narrative and the War on Terror: Civil‐religious idolatry for the 9/11 generation

AbstractThe dominant narrative by which political and military leaders justified the American War on Terror held that America was attacked on 9/11 because America is “the brightest beacon of freedom and opportunity in the world.” Today, an entire generation has been raised in the shadow of 9/11 and steeped in a dualistic and militaristic understanding of American destiny. That view of America's role in Providence is centered on a totem cult of the sacrificial soldier and makes the flag a symbol of American greatness and of freedom itself. This essay examines the “freedom narrative” as a justification of the War on Terror, analyses the cult of the sacrificial soldier as a backstop for a militaristic religious nationalism, and ultimately shows how the dominant narrative legitimating the war represents an idolatrous devolution of a more prophetic and classically republican understanding of American civil religion.

The deliverance of the administrative state: deep state conspiracism, charismatic demonology, and the post-truth politics of American Christian nationalism

ABSTRACT This article uses discourse analysis to explore the intersection of spiritual warfare demonology and Christian nationalism among Trump-supporting neo-charismatic evangelicals. Analysing public materials produced during and after the 2016 US presidential campaign, it demonstrates how demonologies operate discursively to categorise, comprehend, and contest understandings of American identity and destiny. Situating spiritual warfare demonology in relation to narratives of ‘post-truth politics’ as the destabilisation of neoliberal consensus reality, the article explores how charismatic evangelicals position Trump’s election as a divine assault on a demoniac status quo, epitomised in the conspiratorial figure of the ‘Deep State.’ Examining demonologies of the ‘state’ and ‘border’ as joint arenas of epistemic and societal contestation, the article shows how spiritual warfare discourses seek to (re)define sociocultural notions of truth and falsity and thereby (de)legitimise specific gendered, sexualised, and racialised forms of being and belonging.

Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid, by Heather D. Curtis

In Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid, Heather D. Curtis calls attention to the oft-overlooked influence of the Christian Herald, an evangelical newspaper popular during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in developing the human-itarian ideal within American cultural identity, religious practice, and political outlook. Although the paper “ceased publication . . . in 1992,” the association bearing its name continues to this day, supporting numerous charities, including the renowned Bowery Mission in New York City (276). Throughout Holy Humanitarians, Curtis weaves the little-known story of how the newspaper’s editors, Louis Klopsch and Thomas De Witt Talmage, employed creative advertising tactics to raise both awareness and funds for disaster relief around the world, as well as at home in the United States. “Couch[ing] their entreaties in explicitly theological terms,” they sought to cast a vision of humanitarian aid as a key aspect of evangelical faithfulness and of “American destiny” (12, 33, 86). Curtis makes a conscious and largely successful effort to present her archival findings in such a way that amplifies the roles and voices of groups and individuals on the societal and historiographical margins.To a certain extent, Klopsch himself falls into this category, as a former juvenile delinquent “who had been forced to quit school at an early age to help support his struggling immigrant family.” Curtis opines that it is in part Klopsch’s personal experience with the criminal justice system that fuels his compassion for those oppressed and suffering (18). As towering a figure as Klopsch appears in this book, Curtis stops just short of crossing into the territory of “great man theory.” Undeniably the protagonist of the book, Klopsch nevertheless finds a formidable sparring partner in Red Cross leader Clara Barton, as the two organizations vied for recognition as “the nation’s primary instrument for the collection and delivery of international aid” (100, 219).Klopsch’s story, a counternarrative of the history of American historiography of humanitarianism that lays responsibility for large-scale generosity at the feet of a few multimillionaires and secular relief organizations (5), is itself challenged by yet another counternarrative—that told by Indian revivalist Pandita Ramabai, who rejects the overly simplistic storyline in which American evangelicals heroically rush to the aid of helpless Indians suffering from famine. Ramabai, while appreciative of Klopsch’s efforts on her behalf, wants the world to remember the agency of Indians, including “former famine sufferers,” in rallying to support their own compatriots (166).Women and minorities appear in the book not only as antagonists to Klopsch and the Christian Herald, but also as partners in mission. Klopsch so admired Emma J. Wilson, an African American woman who founded a school for black children in North Carolina, that he served as treasurer of her school’s board and praised her strategy as one that empowered black Americans to help themselves (197). Holy Humanitarians is exemplary in demonstrating how World Christianity can serve as a historiographical approach that highlights the experiences of those whose stories the dominant Western narrative has sought to silence or obscure.Curtis dedicates a significant portion of the book to exploring the ways in which Klopsch and the Christian Herald as an organization failed to live up to their own ideals, especially in response to major shifts in American politics and culture. The first such shift corresponded to the government’s abandonment of noninterventionism during the Spanish-American War period and its acquisition of imperial territories. Resultantly, the Christian Herald, which had previously promoted pacifism, suddenly began portraying war itself as a potential channel for humanitarian aid (86). The second entailed the newspaper’s eventual reticence concerning controversial issues of the time—including injustice toward immigrants, African Americans, and Native Americans—due to the editors’ desire to unite their readership in the midst of rampant political division, so as to enable “evangelicals to maintain their position as arbiters of American culture, shapers of the nation’s destiny, and premier providers of humanitarian aid” (211–12).This timely book is at once winsome and subversively political. Just as Arthur Miller ostensibly portrays the barbarism of the Salem witch trials of the late seventeenth century in his classic play The Crucible, while actually constituting an allegorical protest against the eerily reminiscent finger-pointing of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, so Holy Humanitarians depicts American evangelicalism’s twentieth-century moral struggle with matters of race, immigration, and imperialism in a way that unabashedly evokes the continuation of this struggle to the present day. This book is poised to benefit scholars and students of American history, history of Christianity, media studies, and World Christianity.

ЗНАЧЕНИЕ ПРОТЕСТАНТСКОГО МИРОВОЗЗРЕНИЯ В ФОРМИРОВАНИИ ИДЕИ «АМЕРИКАНСКОЙ ИСКЛЮЧИТЕЛЬНОСТИ»

The article examines the influence of Protestant ideology on the formation of modern civilizations by the example of the USA. The author shows the close interrelation of Protestantism ideological content and the basic for the American culture idea of the exclusive American destiny, analyzes its historical and cultural backgrounds. The paper traces the interrelation of the globalization concept and Protestantism ethos, identifies how the USSR breakdown influenced the conception of the American national idea, traces the relation between this idea and neo-liberalism, and discovers the importance of Protestant ideology in the formation of the unipolar world.

Not Your Fathers' Revolution: Internationalizing American Independence

Not Your Fathers' Revolution:Internationalizing American Independence Ronald Angelo Johnson (bio) Alan Taylor. American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016. 704 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $37.50. Larrie D. Ferreiro. Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. xxv + 429 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Scholars from across the globe recently marked the fiftieth anniversary of Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). The colloquia were warranted not simply for the work's longevity, but more importantly, for its capacity to expand our view of American revolutionary thinking beyond the conventional wisdom around colonial class struggles. Generations of scholars have since pushed intellectual boundaries to argue that the drive for American independence was founded, in part, upon reasoning and arguments emanating from beyond the taverns and shores of Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston. Since Bailyn's pathbreaking study, however, historians have too often ignored the contemporary developments in Canada, Spanish America, and the West Indies that influenced the early United States. Many books on the Revolution still present a myopic view on the founding story of the United States, particularly the political development of governing institutions. This method relegates existing empires in North America and native peoples who had inhabited the lands for centuries to annoyances that impeded the spread of an American destiny. Recent narratives around the Revolution have attempted to broaden perspectives of that formative period to include more than the pantheon of traditional founding fathers. Even with wonderful works like Mary Beth Norton's Liberty's Daughters (1980), T. H. Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution (2004), and David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), which highlight the importance of women, commerce, and slavery in the founding of the United States, the literature of the American Revolution seems incessantly tethered to the profiles of George Washington, [End Page 14] John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. The United States' creation story can be told beyond the false dichotomy identified by Joseph Ellis as "one featuring the founders as demigods who were permitted to glimpse the eternal truths" or "the other crowded with a cast of villains who collectively comprise the deadest, whitest males in American history."1 Both Alan Taylor and Larrie D. Ferreiro offer thoughtful contributions to this endeavor, adding to our understanding of the international nature and achievements of the American Revolution. Together, these two books show that while we have had—for obvious reasons—lots to say about how Europeans became Americans, we have had less to say about how Europeans established the United States and gave shape to Americans' sense of identity. Alan Taylor's American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 offers a history of the American Revolution that encompasses the broader North American continent, including territories west of the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. It is a fitting sequel to his American Colonies (2001), which presented a continental history of colonial and native experiences. American Revolutions emphasizes the multiple and clashing visions of revolution that diverse peoples of the continent pursued. Taylor shows that the protracted debates over the Revolution—before, during, and after the military actions—by some of the U.S.'s more prolific thinkers bequeathed an ongoing legacy of revolutionary upheavals that have since led to evolving social tensions and political contradictions rather than lasting resolutions. American Revolutions locates its story in the burgeoning continental and global dynamics of rival European empires and Native American civilizations that inhabited North America. Treating the Revolution as a "Continental" experience facilitates the presentation of a diversified human cast of colonial America. In line with scholarship that emphasizes Spanish, French, and Dutch colonies, the work shows that American relations with native peoples were pivotal in shaping colonial regions and U.S. interactions with neighboring empires. Revolutionary events happened across the American continent. White settlers' refusal to coexist on land that already belonged to others in Illinois and Kentucky led to genocidal massacres of Native Americans during the Revolution. The American South takes on a different...

The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing GregCarter. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing Greg Carter. New York: New York University Press, 2013.In this seven-chapter history, Greg Carter traces the trajectory of political and philosophical conversations about Americans of mixed race (the term Carter prefers to use rather than multi-racial) since the post-revolutionary era of the United States. Taking inspiration for the book's title from Wendell Phillips's The United States of United Races essay (60), Carter aims to enumerate and examine the statesmen, writers, and other luminaries who praised mixture as a means to bring equality to all, and to fulfill an American destiny (3), a position that Carter suggests has been passed over by other historians (3).To a certain extent, the stakes that Carter outlines above are accurate. fact that Carter's study cites centuries of data regarding race mixture in the United States makes it unique, yet currently, broad considerations of racial mixture are numerous in scholarship. There are many general texts about racial relations as well as those with a specific focus, such as Renee C. Romano's Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (2003), Lauren L. Basson's White Enough To Be American: Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation (2008), and Christina A. Sue's Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico (2013).The recent proliferation of scholarly interest in racial mixture takes impetus, perhaps, as Carter did, from the election of President Barack Obama and Obama's status as a mixed-race American. It would be difficult not to think of the President's genetics in tandem with Carter's discussion, since artist Ron English's fusion portrait Abraham Obama comprises the cover art of the book. work is well-chosen as a segue into the text, for it forces viewers into a visual double-take; mimicking a signature (192) that according to Carter, happens often in the lives of mixed race persons-the moment when asked 'What are you?' occurs (192).Carter differentiates his project by stating the study uncovers a narrative of positive notions just as important as the negative, and puts both the positive and the negative in the historical context, recovering past advocates for or against racial mixture and amplifying the resonances over time (5). Finally, Carter claims not to privilege one kind of racial mixing (for example, black and white) in the book but rather interrogates mixture in any configuration as an engine for positive change (5). …

American Crusade: Catholic Youth in the World Mission Movement from World War I through Vatican II (review)

American Crusade: Catholic Youth in the World Mission Movement from World War I through Vatican II By David J. Endres. [American Society of Missiology Monograph Series, 7.] (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, an imprint ofWipf and Stock Publishers. 2010. Pp. xiv, 197. $23.00 paperback. ISBN 978-1-608-99071-9.) Throughout the nineteenth century America was a mission field for the Roman Catholic Church, a status it retained until 1908. Ten years later, the American Catholic Church became a mission-sending church. This timing is ironic in that the great explosion of American Protestant interest in missions had occurred in the generation before World War I and probably peaked in terms of its visibility in the general culture just as American Catholics were entering the field in the years immediately following the war's end. One of the great engines of this Protestant movement, which saw the number of American Protestant missionaries soar from about 900 in 1890 to perhaps 14,000 in the 1920s, was the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM). The SVM was a recruiting and mobilizing organization for missions that worked on behalf of all the mainline Protestant denominations. American Catholics, marveling at this organizational juggernaut, attempted to create one of their own: the Catholic Students' Mission Crusade (CSMC). The SVM and the CSMC were similar in that they both reached out to youth, adopted the heroic rhetoric of the period, attempted to mobilize youth in an effort to evangelize the world, and were energized by the optimism and belief in a special American destiny that characterized nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century America. Until the 1920s, the SVM reflected a broad Protestant consensus that embraced both evangelical Christianity and the Social Gospel. When this consensus became untenable in the 1920s as the battle between modernism and fundamentalism roared to life, the SVM soon tost its way and ceased to be an effective organization. The CSMC, unencumbered by this crisis of authority in American Protestantism, was rapidly rising in stature just as the SVM was becoming moribund. The CSMC would endure for another half a century, becoming a fixture in American Catholic life. David Endres does an excellent job bringing this history to life, charting the CSMCs story through four generations: the World War I generation that mirrored the Victorian optimism of the SVM; the interwar generation that saw itself as producing Crusaders to conquer the infidel; the post- World War H generation that produced Cold Warriors for Christ; and the generation of the 1960s that alternately gloried in and was mired in the social and ecclesial revolutions of the period. …

<em>A New Factor in American Destiny</em>: Visions of Porfirio Díaz and the Politics of “Logical Paternalism”

This essay interprets American representations of dictator Porfirio Díaz in relation to the “economic conquest” of Mexico that took place during his long rule (1876–1911, a period known as the “Porfiriato,” in which Americans invested more than $1 billion). No single person inspired as much attention from travelers, reporters, and photographers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Díaz, and their visions of the President helped to shape perceptions of Mexico as a desirable field in which to expand US capitalism and influence. Travelers clamored to meet him and his sophisticated young wife, and their travelogues were rich with descriptions of such encounters. Reporters, dazzled by the rapid transformation of Mexico during his 35-year rule, described Díaz in such terms as “the Mexican Wizard” and “the maker of modern Mexico” until the very end of his regime. Photographers, working in a relatively new medium, amassed a huge body of works devoted to the dictator; even at an advanced age late in his rule, the President’s image adorned postcards and commemorative cartes-de-visite that posited him in heroic and hypermasculine terms (not unlike those of his US counterpart, Theodore Roosevelt). Ultimately, this essay argues that representations like these reflected American desires for a Mexican body politic that was amenable to economic and social transformation under the inextricable banners of “progress” and US capitalism. Prevailing images of Díaz and his family suggested that Mexico was as friendly to foreign investors as it was to foreign visitors.

Thomas Merton’s Re‐Visioning the New World at Intercultural Borders

Thomas Merton’s Re‐Visioning the New World at Intercultural Borders Malgorzata Poks Much has been written about Merton’s 1958 illuminative experience in downtown Louisville, when he suddenly experienced himself strongly united to the whole of the human race and rejoiced in the secret beauty of every person’s heart. But not many Merton readers realize that this breakthrough moment was in fact a culmination of a long process and that adopting American citizenship was an earlier step toward an awareness of that larger, transcultural identity.1 This may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Merton’s critique of American international and domestic policy. In the last decade of his life he did not spare the United States harsh words, calling it a police state; a mad, totalitarian country; a country under judgment; “a swinish culture”;2“one of the most decadent societies on the face of the earth.”3 He repeatedly accused his adopted country of genocide; of a corrupting love of wealth and power; moral and spiritual blindness. The America of his day appeared to be an epitome of the most explosive of western myths: that of Civitas Christiana, a Christian civilization, which had often served as a mere excuse for exploiting, enslaving, destroying, and inflicting untold suffering on numerous non‐Christian cultures. Given this context, it might sound strange that Merton thought highly of his own American destiny and even adopted the rhetoric of “the Great Vocation of America.”4 The idea of the United States’ divinely ordered Manifest Destiny, used to justify the country’s sometimes reckless westward expansion while downplaying the venture’s enormous human and environmental cost, acquired in the twentieth century additional, equally if not more sinister, connotations. For one thing, with the geographical frontier closed, it was outer space that now seemed to offer possibilities of almost endless expansion and exploitation, for both commercial and military purposes. For another, at the height of the Cold War, this powerful country that had already used the atomic bomb on a “civilian target” assumed the role of the guardian of democracy and was mounting a world‐wide anti‐Communist crusade which was to engage its military forces practically all over the world. Favoring the Big Stick policy, the United States was often perceived abroad as “A wealthy country,/joining the cult of Mammon to the cult of Hercules;/while Liberty, lighting the path/to easy conquest, raises her torch in New York.”5 The critical racial situation within the country completing the picture, one may wonder what “great” vocation Merton was thinking about in mid twentieth‐century and, if he could nonetheless resort to the apparently discredited “chosen land” rhetoric, could we perhaps learn from him to remain hopeful about it despite appearances to the contrary? This article will argue that Merton’s desire to help America to realize its “marvelous” destiny articulates the spiritual consciousness of a New World that has not yet been born. This is an integrated, all‐inclusive consciousness of the new man and woman, a consciousness that accepts the Doppelgänger in itself and thus has the capability to heal the intracultural split.6 In this context it should come as no surprise that Merton’s understanding of America was undergoing revisions, redefinitions and a steady broadening of perspectives, until it became synonymous with a truly new reality: the realized eschatology of the Kingdom that is still coming and, at the same time, has always been “kenotically” present in the confusion of history. Merton never made this equation (between America and the “new” world) explicit, yet this reading seems entirely legitimate. Additionally, in the process of negotiating the oppositional and antagonistic elements within his “American” identity, Merton could hardly avoid critiquing the simplistic essentialist position of traditional notions of identity. In consequence of a series of literal and metaphorical encounters with “other Americans,” through border‐crossings and self‐translations, he was instinctively moving toward the more ambiguous understanding of identity as politics rather than simply inheritance, as roots as well as routes. In Travel and Translation, a book written “at the end of what will surely be the last ‘Western’ millennium,” James Clifford worries about the ways...

An American "myth of Innocence" and Contemporary Pauline Studies

AbstractRichard Hughes discusses the "Myths America Lives By," including myths of national innocence and national destiny. Hughes' discussion is particularly relevant to the American context of Pauline studies after the Shoah, where "American" values of inclusiveness and "universalism" are opposed to ethnic intolerance. Ironically, in some versions of the so-called "new perspective on Paul," the latter is usually identified with the "Jewish exclusivism" that Paul opposed.Increasing criticisms have been raised against this construal of Paul's theology. Efforts to rehabilitate Paul by opposing him to Jewish ethnocentrism rely on caricature and stigmatize fundamental Jewish identity and observance. In contrast, an explicitly political reading, attending to aspects of counter-imperial dissent in Paul's letters, however uncongenial to the mythology of American innocence and destiny, may provide deeper insight into the contours of Paul's interaction with alternative Jewish discourses under Roman rule.

‘Toward Our Common American Destiny?’ Hemispheric history and pan American politics in the twentieth century

In early December 1992, in a brief address to the Annual Conference on Trade, Investment and Development in the Caribbean Basin held in Miami, U.S. President-Elect Bill Clinton, proclaimed that ‘today we face an unprecedented convergence of ideals’ and ‘together, we can construct a genuine hemispheric community of democracies’. This post-Cold War manifestation of Pan Americanism reached new heights at the Summit of the Americas in Miami in late 1994, where the idea of continued political and economic convergence (with an emphasis on the latter) was celebrated and encouraged. By the time of the second summit, which was held in Santiago, Chile in April 1998, enthusiasm for regional integration had waned somewhat. Nevertheless, Clinton reassured the heads of government assembled in the Chilean capital (and representing all the governments of the region except for Cuba which, as in Miami in 1994, was not invited) that the Americas had experienced a ‘profound revolution in the last few years, a revolution of peace and freedom and prosperity’. Central to the ‘Plan of Action’ agreed to at the meeting was a reiteration of a commitment, mapped out at the first summit in Miami, which set early 2005 as the deadline for the completion of the negotiation of a hemispheric free-trade zone (Free Trade Area of the Americas-FTAA).

God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Edited by Conrad Cherry. Rev. and updated ed. Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xii + 410 pp. $49.95 cloth; $18.95 paper.

God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Edited by Conrad Cherry. Rev. and updated ed. Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xii + 410 pp. 18.95 paper. - Volume 68 Issue 4

American Exceptionalism: An idea That Will Not Die

The end of American exceptionalism has long been anticipated or proclaimed. As early as 1949, for example, Harold Laski was writing in The American Democracy that 'no one now taltes seriously the legend of a special American destiny.' Yet like one of its more enduring fellow travelers, American liberalism, the concept of American exceptionalism has proven a great survivor. No sooner proclaimed dead and buried in one place, it reappears, alive and lticking, in the next: apparently prepared, as the twentieth century comes to an end, to continue its odyssey across the nation's material and imaginary landscapes well into the twenty-first.' In recent years, the scholarly landscape in particular has witnessed a renewal of interest in this most enduring of ideas. In 1991, Byron Shafer edited a selection of papers by distinguished social scientists from a Nuffield College conference under the title Is America Diffeerent? A New Look at American Exceptiorzalism. Three years later, David Adams and Cornelius van Minnen co-edited Reflections on American Exceptionnlism, the proceedings of the inaugural European Historians of the United States conference held in 1993 at the Roosevelt Study Center, Middleburg, Holland. In 1996, Seymour Martin Lipset added to his Nuffield College lteyn'ote address a full-length study, American Exceptionalism: A

Decoding the Imperial Masquerade

Anders Stephanson, best known as the author of a Bernath-Prize winning book on George F. Kennan, has written a provocative analysis of the ideology of American expansionism. In a manner reminiscent of Albert Weinberg's classic text of the same title, Stephanson conceives of Manifest Destiny not just as a phenomenon of the 1840s but also as an elaborate, evolving justification of the American nation and its presumed mission to remake the world in its image. Disclaiming an attempt to define “the meaning of America,” Stephanson nonetheless argues that “manifest destiny is of signal importance in the way the United States came to understand itself in the world and still does” (p. xiv). Central to this perception was the nation's belief in a “providentially assigned role …to lead the world to new and better things” (p. xii). At the same time, the imperative to choose good over evil – the “empire of right” referred to in the title – continually confronted the nation. Stephanson emphasizes that the idea of an American destiny contained a tension between a dominant impulse to serve as “an exemplary state separate from the corrupt and fallen world” and a countervailing desire to “push the world along by means of regenerative intervention” (p. xii, emphasis in original).

Continental Union

The Conservative years under Prime Minister Brain Mulroney, 1984-93, marked a watershed in the history of Canada-U.S. relations. During this period, Canada dismantled its long-standing pillars of nationalism and openly embraced continentalist economic policies. The country's two solitudes, Quebec and English Canada, had always been vigilant in securing their identities. Quebec feared assimilation by English Canada, and English Canada, by the United States. While Quebec kept up the fight through the 1980s, upping the ante on nationalism, English Canada drew down its protectionist curtain. Thus one solitude's identity is secured; the other's, more vulnerable than ever before. As evidenced by support for free trade in the 1988 election and the absence of opposition to new levels of Americanization since that time, English Canadians appear more and more willing to embrace the American way and, perhaps, an American destiny. With the turn south in the Mulroney years secured by landmark treaties, treaties that the new Liberal government has ratified, a de facto economic union is being formed. Economic unions, by definition, argue for joint political management. Canada's borderline will increasingly become a formality. The country, should member parts not seek American annexation in the meantime, will eventually find membership in a North American federation of some kind.

The Church and American Destiny: Evangelical Episcopalians and Voluntary Societies in Antebellum America

The study of evangelical moral reform has become one of the most fruitful areas of research in American religious history. By looking at reform, particularly voluntary societies, social and political historians have acknowledged the cultural importance of religion. Thus, nineteenth-century evangelicals have been recognized for their positive, negative, or ambiguous contributions to American society. Often with great success, historians have expounded and promoted interpretations of social control, capitalist expansionism, and neo-Marxism regarding evangelical social action. Yet, in spite of differing nuances, many of these interpretations follow much the same story line: antebellum evangelicals attempted, however nobly or misguidedly, to impose their standards of piety and morality on the American public. They feared the chaos released by the American and French revolutions.

The Church and American Destiny: Evangelical Episcopalians and Voluntary Societies in Antebellum America

The study of evangelical moral reform has become one of the most fruitful areas of research in American religious history. By looking at reform, particularly voluntary societies, social and political historians have acknowledged the cultural importance of religion. Thus, nineteenth-century evangelicals have been recognized for their positive, negative, or ambiguous contributions to American society. Often with great success, historians have expounded and promoted interpretations of social control, capitalist expansionism, and neo-Marxism regarding evangelical social action. Yet, in spite of differing nuances, many of these interpretations follow much the same story line: antebellum evangelicals attempted, however nobly or misguidedly, to impose their standards of piety and morality on the American public. They feared the chaos released by the American and French revolutions.

“A for Abolition”: Hawthorne's Bond-servant and the Shadow of Slavery

In his 1862 essay Chiefly about War-Matters Hawthorne, in the guise of Man, devotes as much of his attention to the plight of poor Southern whites as he does to the immediate motive for war: the condition of enslaved blacks. In fact, he writes that [t]he present war is so well justified by no other consideration as by the probability that it will free this class of Southern whites from a thraldom in which they scarcely begin to be responsible beings.1 The Civil War is represented as a sign of the imminent regeneration of the entire brutalized Southern race and, further, as ushering in the long-promised age of genuine American democracy. This essay, in which Hawthorne's sentiments are so deeply buried beneath layers of irony, signifies unambiguously, if nothing else, the pervasiveness of a pro-slavery mentality that has little to do with the geographical division of North and South. His Peaceable Man takes pains to establish the historical status of American slavery as a phenomenon of very long standing and so makes us privy to historical circumstance, known to a few, that connects the children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia, in a very singular way. From the first settlement of New England, alternative destinies have been foreshadowed for the New World: in contrast to the Cittie upon a Hill which Puritan leaders interpreted as the glorious destiny of their experiment, ominous tokens of human depravity have suggested an American destiny that is no more than a repetition of Europe's mistakes. Hawthorne uses the vocabulary of typology to stress the historical determination of these alternative visions of national identity and to underline the inescapable nature of the consequences that follow from the choice between them. Together with his concern over the psychological enslavement of white Americans by the ideology of slavery, this passage sets out Hawthorne's attitude towards slavery as a national evil which demands a national penance.

Postcolonial Discourse in Latin American Theatre

American history. Since independence from Spanish rule, divergent prospects for the future of the newly created nations kindled bitter battles in an ongoing war. In this process, irreconcilable views converged towards two distinct poles. One foresaw a Latin American born of the internalization of foreign models: Europe and the United States. The other, more willing to define within the specificity of their own processes, defended the dignity of its cultures, of its own uncharted destiny. As a consequence of this bipolarity, exile and death have been tightly woven into the fabric of Latin American history. New nations were born free of Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century only for many to find that once again, exile from the newly acquired homeland was the only alternative to execution. The birth of national literatures, in many cases, found their more eloquent artists writing abroad, already unable to live in the land they were struggling to form. Under these circumstances, nation and literature were born together, and it is not surprising that literature ascribed to the social project of inventing a collective imaginary. It is at this moment of prospective being that the conceptual image of the future underwent a radical split. Two contradictory visions took form regarding a Latin American destiny. These contradictory visions have become deeply ingrained in a collective imaginary that still marks the development of the continent. I am referring to the divergent social projects which are at the core of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's and Jos6 Marti's writings. Sarmiento ascribed to the notion of progress through the implementation of European and United States models. He defended this view both in works such as Civilizaci6n y Barbarie (1845) and in the office of his presidency in Argentina (1868-

The Influence of the Past - Metamorphosis in Willa Cather's 'Heroines'

Of Past, what do we surrender future? This question confronted and puzzled Willa Cather throughout her long, productive life. As an impressionable young child on wild prairies of Nebraska, she often witnessed her hardworking European immigrant neighbors, repudiate their rich cultural past for brash demands of a raw, callow frontier in their desperate struggle adjust a new country. Cather knew, loved, and feared hold these broad lands and their people had on her imagination, emotions, and memory. She consciously based her life within limited structures of tradition, preferring old values and virtues changing standards of her day. Cather once remarked, The world broke in two about 1920, and 1 belonged former half.' She further commented, Our present is ruined - but we had a beautiful past.2 Consequently, in both her life and in her fictional worlds, Cather characterized the tensions of American existence in nineteenth and twentieth ~enturies,~ betraying present in her nostalgic search recapture irrecoverable. Rooted in past and reverencing its solidity, yet reluctantly ,sensitive promise of future, Cather was torn between memory and desire. Arising out of her passion for pioneer West, her most significant works are an imaginative restructuring of that country . . . happiness and curse of her life.4 Cather tells us: The ideas for all my novels have come from things happened around Red Cloud when I was a ~hild,~ but for her to heep past so precious, it was necessary she romanticize it and also validate childhood.. . It01 let memory filter its experience through screen of n~stalgia.~ With deep moral intensity and with serious concern for realization of an authentic American destiny, Willa Cather drew consistently