American Quest Research Articles

The Banneker Literary Institute of Philadelphia: African American Intellectual Activism Before the War of the Slaveholders' Rebellion

There can be no more effective manner of elevating our people than by a spread of literature, and no more speedy way of demonstrating to those in authority in our government that we are susceptible of the highest degree of mental culture and worthy of the rights which have been so long withheld from us. --Banneker Institute, Call for a Convention of Literary Societies [ca. 1859] (2) To those who have been with us in all our trials and difficulties I would say, persevere...; a bright shall yet dawn upon us and they who are faithful to the end shall at last reap a golden harvest[;] the Banneker Institute will be looked up to as the source from which emanates light and knowledge, and the names of those who have labored to place her in that high position will be handed down with grateful recollections to an enlightened posterity. --Jacob C. White, Jr., Secretary's Report, April 2, 1857 (3) The African American quest for freedom, justice, and equality has long been waged on a variety of fronts. The slave revolts, marches, demonstrations, and rebellions have had their counterparts in the poems, broadsides, treatises and polemical books of a struggling race. The gradual abolition of slavery in northeastern states after the Revolutionary War was closely followed by the emergence of free institutions such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Prince Hall Masons in 1787. The small and embattled literate society that developed plunged with remarkable energy into the arena of intellectual combat as a tool for collective advancement. From Boston to Washington, DC, and environs there quickly developed a network of library companies, literary and debating societies, informal groupings of bibliophiles and historical associations, all harnessing literary and intellectual endeavor to the struggle for racial uplift. The first editorial in African America's first newspaper, New York's Freedom's Journal, provided a manifesto for the movement when it declared in its premier issue of March 16, 1827, We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.' Two years later David Walker of Boston issued his celebrated Appeal, a polemic of great erudition. It is expected,' he wrote, that all colored men, women and children of every nation, language and tongue under heaven, will try to procure a copy of this Appeal and read it, or get someone to read it to them, for it is designed more particularly for them.' The day of our redemption from abject wretchedness draweth near, Walker warned, but there must be a willingness on our part, for God to do these things for us, for we may be assured that He will not take us by the hairs of our head against our will and desire, and draw us from our very mean, low and abject condition. (4) The Banneker Literary Institute of Philadelphia was one of many societies that used intellectual pursuits to test Walker's contention that God would help those who helped themselves. By the time of its formation in 1854, intellectually oriented associations were commonplace in African Philadelphia. (5) In 1860 the city ranked first among northern African American communities both in gross numbers (22,185) and as a percentage (3.9%) of overall population. (6) Philadelphia had helped pioneer free institutions among African Americans, with the Free African Society of 1787. Beginning in 1817 and for many years thereafter, Philadelphia had taken the lead in the National Negro Convention movement, the nearest thing to a quasi-government of African America. (7) The country's oldest African American religious denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, had its roots in Philadelphia. In the Institute for Colored Youth, the city boasted one of African America's most prestigious schools. (8) One of Black America's earliest newspapers, the Demosthenian Shield (1841), was published in Philadelphia, as was one of its two earliest periodicals, the National Reformer (1838). …

To Set an Example

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been emblematic of the African American quest for educational parity and social equality in American society. In addition to having been primarily responsible for the education of African Americans, HBCUs have also functioned as key institutions in the social, political, and economic development of the African American community within the constraints of a racially stratified society. This article maps the evolution of a pioneering tradition of diversity at HBCUs from their beginnings in the late 19th century to the present. The author argues that the social and educational environments that have traditionally supported diversity at HBCUs emerged out of group struggle between Blacks and their allies as well as with those seeking to maintain the larger system of overt, institutionalized racial stratification that dominated American society for much of its history. The article concludes with an examination of trends in diversity at HBCU campuses.

The Military and its Civilian Environment: Reflections on a Theory of Civil-Military Relations

The study of what has come to be termed civil-military relations has received renewed interest within the last decade and, in my view, it is safe to assume that it is going to attract even more attention in the years to come. This situation may justify talking of nothing less than the renaissance of the study of civil-military relations. The reason for this renaissance seems to be that, in recent years, civil-military relations across the globe have entered a turbulent era, one that challenges – albeit with considerable variation – the established patterns of civil-military relations of the past. In particular, “[t]his renaissance in what some academics once considered a settled issue may be attributed to the emergence of post-cold war democracies in Eastern and Central Europe; to a (mostly) American quest to spread democratic norms throughout the world; to continued problems of imposing civil control over the military in many states, especially those where internal conflict seems endemic; and to a recent, but brief, interlude of American self-doubt about the effectiveness of civil control in the United States.”2 Don Snider and Miranda Carlton-Carew add to these elements some others, such as the changes in the international system caused by the end of East-West conflict, the rapid downsizing of the armed forces that followed, and the increasing use of the military for operations other than war.3 These factors will be dealt with in this article, but prior to this, the talk of the renaissance of the study of civil-military relations leaves the reader with some obvious questions to be answered: What is actually meant by the term “civil-military relations”? To what does the term “established patterns” refer? In which direction are civil-military relations moving? Last but not least, underlying all these other issues is the question of whether there is an explanatory model or even a theory of civil-military relations that is capable of capturing all this. What follows is an attempt to respond to these questions.

The Middle East in the American Quest for World Order: Ideas of Power, Economics, and Social Development in United States Foreign Policy, 1953-1961

Journal Article The Middle East in the American Quest for World Order: Ideas of Power, Economics, and Social Development in United States Foreign Policy, 1953–1961. By Jarmo Oikarinen. (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1999. 277 pp. ISBN 951-710-117-1.) Get access N. Rassekh N. Rassekh Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 1, June 2001, Pages 291–292, https://doi.org/10.2307/2675055 Published: 01 June 2001

National Differences and the NAFTA

NO DOUBT MANY OF THOSE WHO WITNESSED the demonstrations against the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, Washington, in November 1999 gave some second thoughts to where they stand in relation to the seemingly inexorable progress toward worldwide trade liberalization. Certainly many of the journalists commenting on the events in Seattle seemed to conclude that globalization was not perhaps the juggernaut it had been made out to be. Nevertheless, a case can be made that 'one postponed agenda does not a complete reversal make.' More specifically, Canadians in particular are naive if they see too much ground for solace - or indeed alarm, if their sympathies ran more toward 'the suits' than the sea-turtles - in the first meeting in the Millennium Round of trade negotiations.It is well to remember that Canadians, Americans, and Mexicans have already constructed for themselves the 'rule-bound trade regime' that the WTO was attempting to extend across the entire globe. It is called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In fact, few Canadians realize that much of the new agenda for world trade - as well as the recent Multilateral Agreement on Investment, also 'postponed' not long ago - adopted much of NAFTA as a template. Thus, the claim of the Seattle protesters that the WTO was about to homogenize the world should give even longer pause to Canadians: if NAFTA-inspired and NAFTA-based proposals before the WTO had the potential to bring about the 'disappearance of difference' among roughly 125 countries, what is the potential for the 'preservation of difference' in the three countries already governed by NAFTA?An examination of this question should first attempt to place NAFTA and the WTO against the background of the efforts of the United States since the end of the Second World War to make the markets of other countries as accessible as possible to American goods, services, and capital. It should also attempt to show how the kinds of access to the Canadian (and Mexican) markets that the Americans sought and got under the terms of NAFTA have the capacity to undermine Canada's fundamental political and economic traditions. Finally, it should show how the potential for Canadian-American homogenization is already being realized, as some of the NAFTA provisions for policy harmonization among its members come to be implemented.AMERICAN POST-WAR ECONOMIC LEADERSHIPSylvia Ostry recently published an excellent historical overview of the American quest since the Second World War for open access to the markets of other countries.(f.1) Her book, essentially an account of the role of American leadership in both the post-war and post-cold war trading systems, has a lot to say about the fundamental issues that have divided, and continue to divide, the United States from its major economic partners in Europe, Asia, and North America. Even more significantly, it shows clearly what the United States has most wanted to see done about these issues, and how it set about accomplishing its aims.Ostry underscores the deeply rooted and pervasive differences between the United States market system and those of its major trading partners in Western Europe and Asia, and she demonstrates how some of the most serious conflicts among them over the years have flowed from those differences. The disputes have intensified as the main agenda for trade negotiations has shifted away from an emphasis on tariffs and toward the various national policy and regulatory regimes designed primarily in response to domestic concerns. Such asymmetries are not new; they are deeply embedded in the political, social, and cultural differences among the various industrial societies that dominate the world trading system.The bulk of Ostry's book shows how the disjuncture between the American and Japanese market systems at the beginning of the post-war trading regime foreshadowed the principal clashes between the United States and its major trading partners at the beginning of the post-cold war trading system. …

The American quest for quality

The American quest for quality

Past Due: The African American Quest for Reparations

(1998). Past Due: The African American Quest for Reparations. The Black Scholar: Vol. 28, Black Social Issues, pp. 2-17.

Book Reviews

Chilton, Bruce and Neusner, Jacob Judaism in the New Testament: Practices and BeliefsBarton, Julie S. and Mews, Constant J. (eds) Hildegard of Bingen and Gendered Theology in Judaeo‐Christian TraditionSorensen Zapalac, Kristin Eldyss ‘In His Image and Likeness’: Political Iconography and Religious Change in Regensburg, 1500–1600Mullett, Michael A. John Bunyan in ContextMansfield, Bruce Man on his Own: Interpretations of Erasmus, c. 1750–1920Sullivan, Mary C. Catherine McAuley and the Tradition of MercyHughes, Richard (ed.) The American Quest for the Primitive ChurchHughes, Richard (ed.) The Primitive Church in the Modern WorldNoll, Mark The Scandal of the Evangelical MindRawlyk, George A. and Noll, Mark A. (eds) Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United StatesCarey, Hilary Believing in Australia: A Cultural History of ReligionsLee, Sang‐Taek Religion and Social Formation in Korea: Minjung and MillenarianismScott, James S. (ed.) ‘And the Birds Began to Sing’: Religion and Literature in Post‐Colonial Cultures

The American Quest for the Primitive Church, ed. by Richard T. Hughes, and: The Primitive Church in the Modern World ed. by Richard T. Hughes

BOOK REVIEWS131 It is rare to have soUd information about the evolution of Hungary in principal languages. This is a reason why this volume is to be appreciated. The authors as weU as the pubUsher are aware that some time needs to elapse for the historian to make a scholarly examination; so in this report they wanted to give only a basic evaluation of the facts enumerated from the point of view of contemporaries . The interviews enable us to have an insight into these years and to understand the conditions of Christians under Communist rule. The rawness of this report and the lack of detaüed analysis as weU as imprecise formulations do not reduce the merits of the volume. It is important to reaUze that in the period between 1945 and 1964 three-fourths of the Bishops' Conference were persecuted: two of them kUled, two of them deported, fourteen imprisoned. Three hundred and sixty diocesan priests (10% of the total) were imprisoned or deported, as weU as 940 reUgious priests (66%), 200 reUgious brothers (16%), and 2,200 sisters and nuns (22%). Adam Somorjai, O.S.B. Collegio di Sant'Anselmo Rome American The American Questfor the Primitive Church. Edited by Richard T. Hughes. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1988. Pp. ix, 257. $14.95 paperback.) The Primitive Church in the Modern World. Edited by Richard T. Hughes. (Urbana : University of Illinois Press. 1995. Pp. xviii, 229. $14.95 paperback.) Trying to transform the present through recapturing the strong, pure time of origins—EUade's myth of the eternal return—represents a seductive theme Ui American reUgion. These coUections demonstrate how powerful the puU of primitive purity is from many perspectives. Edited by Richard Hughes, whose career has centered on analyzing primitivist and restorationist dimensions Ui American reUgion, the volumes resulted from conferences at AbUene Christian University (1985) and Pepperdine University (1991). The American Questfor the Primitive Church contains aU the papers and responses from the first; The Primitive Church in the Modern World features most presentations from the second conference. The second volume, more theoretical than the first, is more inteUectuaUy tantaUzing . For example, Scott Appleby and George Marsden both ask whether contemporary fundamentaHsms are properly perceived as efforts to restore an idealized past; both conclude that the label is problematic. Franklin LitteUJohn Howard Yoder, and James WiUiam McClendon look at the Reformation era, par- 132BOOK REVIEWS ticularly its "left-wing" or "radical" side, to probe whether appropriation of an ideal past necessarily denies the value of history. Underlying them is the dUemma of attaching the labels "restorationist" or "primitivist" to any reUgious movement that sees either a time of origins or an idealized past time as models for the present—in terms of beUef, practice, or structure. Other essays in The Primitive Church in the Modem World are case studies of particular traditions popularly classified as restorationist. David E. HarreU looks at the cluster of movements emerging from the Stone-CampbeU matrix (Disciples of Christ, Churches of Christ), Susie Stanley at the Church of God (Anderson), Grant Wacker at Pentecostals, Thomas G. Alexander at later nineteenth-century Mormons, and Theron Schlabach at American Mennonites and Amish. AU insist that despite claims to the contrary, every use of the past is filtered through the present. So they aU Ulustrate how what Stanley caUs "bumping into modernity" has subtly modified the possibiUties ofrestoring any aspect ofthe past or of origins. TheU value is precisely their reminding us that not only historians, but also leaders of reUgious communities are people of theU own times and that even the questions they pose of that mythic primal time emerge from a contemporary context. The older volume, foUowing a more traditional historical approach, echoes the structure of the scholarly conference that gave it birth. Contributors are more insistent that there are restorationist or primitivist features to movements that range from Puritanism (T Dwight Bozeman) to EpiscopaUan evangeUcaUsm (David Holmes). If anything, this coUection reveals how sUppery any use of labels can be. For some, any appropriation of the past legitimates classifying a movement as primitivist or restorationist.When labels become so multifaceted, as HenryWarner Bowden points out, they lose any meaning. One hears...

La quête américaine d'une science politique démocratique et scientifique

The American Quest for a Democratic, Scientific Political Science. Rogers M. Smith [58-87]. American political science has always been shaped by two often conflicting desires : to serve American democracy and to be a true «science». Today, after an era characterized by the dominance of a «scientific» rational choice theory, it is now entering a period of transition an uncertainty. But certain possibilites for new convergence, specially around a «neo-institutionnalist» approach and a turn back to history, seem on the whole promising. As a conclusion this essay contends that the vocation of political science is not to look for a «grand» theory of politics. It's mission must be to explore in the most rigorous ways ail topics that are arguably politically fondamental, with special attention to those that are predicatbly neglected, both for intellecutal and political reasons.

French Lessons: A Memoir

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. Kaplan begins with a distinctly American quest for an imaginary France of the intelligence. But soon her infatuation with all things French comes up against the dark, unimagined recesses of French political and cultural life.The daughter of a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg, Kaplan grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest. After her father's death when she was seven, French became her way of leaving home and finding herself in another language and culture. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French r, attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover.When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject made history impossible to ignore: French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan's discussion of the de Man affair -- the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press--and her personal account of theparadoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject. Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre's Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.

Independent Neighborhood Schools: A Framework for the Education of African Americans

Reforms in American education over the past few decades have been developed with the expressed intention of including all students and encouraging them to become productive citizens in an increasingly technological society that faces challenges in the global community. Most African Americans have embraced the spirit of these reforms, but many ultimately reach the conclusion that mainstream education can never fulfill this promise because it is designed and controlled by another group to serve that group's own cultural, political, and economic interests. People of African descent have been creating their own educational institutions in America for over 200 years. The history of the African American quest for independent education provides a beginning framework for designing a system of quality education that can meet the needs of the masses of African American youth in the 21st century. These African American independent neighborhood schools continue to meet the educational and employment needs of their students. Their success story, with its classical beginnings, embraces the debate over institutional control, parental choice, and the need to develop a solid foundation of basic and advanced academic skills.

BOOK REVIEWS

Journal Article BOOK REVIEWS Get access The American Quest for the Primitive Church. Edited by Richard T. Hughes. University of Illinois Press, 1988. 257 pages. $32.50 cloth; $12.95 paper. W Glenn Jonas W Glenn Jonas Crawford, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LX, Issue 3, Fall 1992, Pages 556–557, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LX.3.556 Published: 01 October 1992

Conversations with Bernard Malamud (review)

Reviewed by: Conversations with Bernard Malamud Daniel Walden Lawrence Lasher , ed. Conversations with Bernard Malamud. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991. 156 pp. $29.95. Bernard Malamud, who died in 1986, won a National Book Award for The Magic Barrel, another National Book Award for The Fixer, as well as a Pulitzer, and many other prizes, yet, as Joseph Wershba said, he was "America's least known writer of the first rank." Known to be reticent and a very private person, he gave more than thirty interviews over his writing career, most of which are reproduced here. Malamud's purpose in life, he once said, was "to keep civilization from destroying itself." Or as he was paraphrased on another occasion, the freedom of all men depends on the freedom of the least of men—every one who was born a loser and knows it. Malamud was known to most people as a Jewish writer, in the same way that "Bellow, Malamud, and Roth" were known; his way of explaining his approach was to say "I write about Jews because I know something about them and they move me. I don't live a Jewish life in the religious sense, though I have been influenced by their concern with morality." He added at an earlier time, "I try to see the Jew as universal man. Every man is a Jew though he may not know it." That is, he told Helen Benedict in 1983, "All men are Jews, except that they don't know it." I think it's an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men. Significantly, it was in his last (unfinished?) novel, The People, that Malamud reverses his usual process by which a Christian such as Frank Alpine, in The Assistant, becomes a Jew, by having a Russian Jewish peddler move into the essence of an Indian chief. Why? Evelyn Avery notes that perhaps, says Malamud, Indian life appealed to Yozip, as a member of the lost tribe of Jewish Americans searching for their identity in the new world, a quintessentially American quest. This is an exceptionally useful book. Obviously Malamud had a difficult time protecting his privacy, as all public figures do. Uneasy with interviews, he stuck to the point in his answers, and then said "Don't take it personally." He disliked explaining his fiction, as he once told the Fields, because by describing the intent he might in effect betray his work. He was definite in asserting that to be a writer one must have talent and discipline. He himself was a noted reviser. What he saw in the writing act was a moral act, in constantly seeking the highest opportunities [End Page 752] to do well: in God's Grace, he told Leah Garchik, he had intended to sound a warning, to prod, to force the reader to come to his own conclusion, surely a moral act. Many people identify Malamud with suffering, especially suffering Jews. When Ji-moon Koh asked him why he took such a deep interest in suffering, Malamud replied "if you go through an experience, the worst thing that can happen to you is not to understand it, not to react to it, not to feel for it. If the experience is as intense as suffering, then it's wasted on the human being if he doesn't get something out of it that causes him to reflect upon his values and to reflect upon the significance of his life." In short, "once suffering educates them, obviously, they have gained something that they didn't have before." Near the end of his life, perhaps because of his illnesses, Malamud became testy on occasion when asked if he was a Jewish writer. On the other hand, he often quoted Camus, that "the purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself," and he had a vision that still rings loud and clear. As he told Wershba, "My premise is for humanism—and against nihilism. And this is what I try to put in my writings." Indeed, Malamud as moralist, although not as preacher, comes through the body of his work. The...

The American Quest for the Primitive Church. Edited by Richard T. Hughes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. vii + 257 pp. $32.50 cloth; $12.95 paper. - Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875. By Richard C. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xviii + 296 pp. $29.95.

The American Quest for the Primitive Church. Edited by Richard T. Hughes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. vii + 257 pp. $32.50 cloth; $12.95 paper. - Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875. By Richard C. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xviii + 296 pp. $29.95.

The American Quest for the Primitive Church.

The American Quest for the Primitive Church.

The American Quest for the Primitive Church.

The American Quest for the Primitive Church. Ed. by Richard T. Hughes. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. x + 257 pp. Cloth, $32.50; paper, $12.95.) and Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630–1875. By Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xviii + 296 pp. $29.95.) Get access Jonathan M. Butler Jonathan M. Butler Riverside, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 77, Issue 1, June 1990, Pages 277–279, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078671 Published: 01 June 1990

Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus

Book reviewed in this article:Development of Class Structure in Eastern Europe: Poland and Her Southern NeighboursKilling Time, Losing Ground: Experiences of the UnemployedBecoming an EX: The Process of Role ExitUncommon Property: The Fishing and Fish‐Processing Industries in British ColumbiaMax Weber and his ContemporariesWorkers, Capital, and the State in British Columbia: Selected PapersRural Canada: Structure and ChangeSociology and Scientism ‐ The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880–1940Land and Community: Crisis in Canada's CountrysideWomen and Education: A Canadian PerspectiveGenocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass DeathState and Society: Canada in Comparative Perspective, vol. 31, pp. 130, $12.95 and The State and Economic Interests, vol. 32, pp. 335, $20.95. In the Collected Research Studies of the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for CanadaThe University Means BUSINESS. Universities, Corporations and Academic WorkEthnic Groups in Canada. Scarborough: Nelson Canada, 1989. Preface, Introduction, 310 pp. plus bibliography and indexSport, Leisure and Social RelationsFractured Focus: Sport As A Reflection of SocietyMax Weber, Rationality and ModernityEthnic Studies in Chicago, 1905‐45

The American Quest for the Primitive Church. Richard T. Hughes

<i>The American Quest for the Primitive Church</i>. Richard T. Hughes

The American Quest for the Primitive Church. Edited by Richard T. Hughes, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875. By Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen and To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism. By Theodore Dwight Bozeman

The American Quest for the Primitive Church. Edited by Richard T. Hughes, Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875. By Richard T. Hughes and C. Leonard Allen and To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism. By Theodore Dwight Bozeman