Strange History Research Articles

The strange history of surgical gloves in orthopaedic surgery (part I): from no gloves and no hand washing to the introduction of cotton gloves in orthopaedic surgery.

The goal was to evaluate the advent of surgical gloves during the eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth century. We used first drawings and paintings, then historical photographs identified in books after 1830 (date of discovery of the photography) or in medical reports of surgery and anesthesiologists. The pictures determined the presence or absence of gloves in the period corresponding to the changing understanding of aseptic and antiseptic techniques proposed by Lister and Pasteur. There was an evolution of the material of gloves, but surgeons throughout time remained significantly opposed to gloves for a long period. Concerning materials, the caecum of a sheep, cotton, silk, leather, and crude rubber were used before the introduction of latex by Goodyear. For surgeons, gloves were introduced initially to protect theatrestaff's and surgeon hands from infection and not to protect the patient. Many surgeons contributed to the evolution of surgical gloves, and the use of gloves was an evolutionary process rather than a discovery. The probability that a surgeon had gloves on photographs was 0% in 1860-1870 (period of Lister and Pasteur), 5% in 1890, 28% in 1900, 42% in 1910, 48% in 1920, 58% in 1930, and 75% during the World Word II and reached 100% only in 1950. While some reports suggest that by 1920, the use of gloves in surgery became routine practice, in reality, around 30% of trauma surgeons were not wearing gloves until 1939.

Alluvium and Empire: The Archaeology of Colonial Resettlement and Indigenous Persistence on Peru's North Coast

Alluvium and Empire: The Archaeology of Colonial Resettlement and Indigenous Persistence on Peru's North Coast

THE ENDLESS ACCUMULATION OF HISTORY IN FINANCIAL TIMES

ABSTRACTThis essay engages with Amin Samman's incisive 2019 text, History in Financial Times, which unfolds a philosophy of history for contemporary “financial times.” I turn first to Samman's concept of the strange loops of financial history, and so to the historical turn initiated by the subprime crisis of 2008. Then, I add the concept of strange portraiture to Samman's idea of strange history. Borrowing a metaphor from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, I trace the oscillating appearance of the linked faces of homo historia and homo economicus, which each offer distinct explanatory frameworks “under the sign of finance.” In this way, I suggest that we can also observe how capitalism transformed the meaning and possible trajectories of something like fate from invented origins to imagined destinies. In that frame, I explore how the loops that Samman underscores are also bound to the ways in which history and economics have competed and continue to compete for ascendency as modern sense‐making epistemes with different time‐binding effects.

Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II, by Marc Gallicchio

In American public memory, unconditional surrender by Japan in the Second World War was an uncompromising goal for the entire nation. In this intriguing work, Marc Gallicchio contradicts this view and contends that ‘something has been lost in our understanding’ of the ‘strange history of unconditional surrender’ (p. 2). After Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) declaration at Casablanca, the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers became a significant war policy for America. It required the destruction of the philosophies, not the population, of the Axis powers and meant ‘a reasonable assurance of future world peace’––it was an arduous task. Churchill and presidential advisors alike urged FDR to mitigate his demands, allowing him personally to negotiate with the Vichy French government in North Africa (p. 10). Unconditional surrender sparked a fervent partisan debate in American society. Following Japan’s capitulation, conservatives and liberals changed their positions and contested the method of defeating Japan,...

A Ghostly Closure? The Strange History of Brinkley Female College, Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism, and the Terminal Effects of Sensationalist Journalism

In 1871, Brinkley Female College in Memphis, Tennessee, closed due to a ghost story, regional interest in Spiritualism, and sensationalist journalism that harmed the short-lived academy. Spiritualism—a religio-spiritual movement punctuated by medium-guided communications between the living and deceased—was well-followed, though often contested during the nineteenth century. Spiritualism grew in popularity in the American South due to mass deaths resulting from yearly epidemics and the American Civil War. At the same time, sensationalist print media was widespread, and newspaper firms profited from unchecked accounts of Spiritualist seances and supernatural encounters. In the midst of this, higher education had expanded across the state of Tennessee. In the early years of Memphis-based women’s higher education, newspapers stoked interest in the paranormal by publishing unverified events attributed to a local women’s college. Sensationalist, penny-dreadful newspaper accounts influenced public perceptions, caused enrollment decline at Brinkley Female College, and resulted in institutional closure. As such, this case study recounts an unusual catalytic moment within the context of heightened Spiritualistic belief and uncouth journalistic practices. Ultimately, this study seeks to detail the influence of regional religious practices and sensational journalism on institutional termination.

Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to The Modern by Mary Beard

Reviewed by: Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to The Modern by Mary Beard Mikayla Barreiro Mary Beard, Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to The Modern ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 392 pp., 260 ills. Mary Beard's books have long graced the shelves of both professional and amateur historians; now, room must be made for her latest triumph. Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern takes readers on a delightful journey through artistic representations of Rome's emperors (and, occasionally, its empresses). Beard has curated an exhibit of imperial imagery across time and medium, with 260 vibrant images integrated across 286 pages of body text. She has also, somehow, meticulously researched every piece included, providing those interested with a thorough introduction to these works. Meanwhile, her tight prose clarifies important historical facts for nonacademic readers, without losing the overall flow. Beard has so perfectly balanced her two audiences that this book could be read at the beach, then cited in a dissertation. While Beard mainly leads readers through the enchanting—and sometimes strange—history of imperial art, she also includes a handful of key arguments. "This is a book both about emperors and about 'emperors' in quotation marks," because, as her work so frequently shows, the distinction is often insignificant (7). The book begins and ends with a Roman coffin, once on display in the National Mall, now relegated to the Smithsonian's basement. Historians have concluded that it never interred an emperor, but during the age of Andrew Jackson it was purported to have belonged to Alexander Severus. The true origins were irrelevant to what the object meant to the republican president: "a Sarcophagus made for an Emperor or King" (6). Similarly, Beard reminds readers that traits that modern scholars use to determine the accuracy of a representation were not necessarily important to historical viewers. An image that captures the personality of an emperor does not need to capture the physical appearance of a historical figure, who, in all likelihood, was scarred and misshapen by the mishaps of premodern life. Such ills of premodern life outline Beard's final and overarching argument: modern leaders depicting themselves in the guise of ancient emperors is neither inevitable nor inconsequential. The decisions made in modern artistic representations of imperial power are exactly that, decisions, and they are made for a variety of reasons and understood in a variety of ways. Beard briefly explores some of the motives and receptions of the pieces within her work, but any and all could be the subject of their own monograph. Chapter 2 digs into the topic at hand, providing a simple overview of the emperors to be discussed and their artistic representations in antiquity. Even specialists will learn something new as Beard contributes her own perspective to longstanding debates on whether certain pieces, such as the British Museum's bust of Caesar, should be classified as ancient or modern. Chapter 3 dives into the most common form of ancient representation, coinage, analyzing in particular the modern shift toward considering busts, and not coins, the "most authentic images of those faces of the Roman past" (98). Other overarching themes are present too. Beard contrasts Petrarch and Charles I of England's perceptions of the meaning of ancient coins, and discusses why in the early modern era "Roman emperors ceased to be portrayed as if they were modern rulers, and modern rulers started to be portrayed as if they were Roman emperors" (113). Memory, interpretation, and fact are all fluid in art, granting these imperial representations new and powerful meanings time and time again. [End Page 233] Chapters 4 and 5 delve into the titular "twelve emperors," presenting first their roots in Suetonius, and then deconstructing how the concept of "twelve emperors" was more important than there ever actually being twelve—or at the very least the same twelve—such people. Images could shift and change until "the face of the Roman emperors was now … copies of copies" (182; Beard's italics). The actual historical people were insignificant compared to the idea of these people. Still, even the idea of these people was fluid...

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons by Lisa Siraganian

<i>Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons</i> by Lisa Siraganian

Bradley C. S. Watson. Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. Pp. 274. $45.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsBradley C. S. Watson. Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. Pp. 274. $45.00 (cloth).Bob Pepperman TaylorBob Pepperman TaylorUniversity of Vermont Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Political Thought Volume 10, Number 2Spring 2021 Published in association with the American Political Thought organized section of the American Political Science Association and the Jack Miller Center Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/713709 Views: 90Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Observe the Unexpected: A Strange History of Bioprosthesis in a Patient in Dialytic Treatment

A 73-year-old male with a history of right nephrectomy due to cancer in 1996 was referred to our hospital for dyspnea and acute chest pain. In May 2007, the Shelhigh® No-React® valved bioconduit was implanted using the Bentall-De Bono procedure due to the finding of severe aortic valve insufficiency and acute type A aortic dissection. Nine months after discharge, he was placed on chronic renal dialysis. The patient’s condition was followed carefully after being placed on dialysis, and now, thirteen years later the implanted aortic valve is still moving freely without signs of calcification.

The Strange History of the Right to Bear Arms in the French Revolution

Abstract French Revolutionaries shared many of the same beliefs as their American counterparts about the relationship between citizenship and bearing arms. Both nations’ leaders viewed standing armies as a threat to freedom, and both nations required militia participation from a portion of the citizenry. Yet the right to bear arms is a legacy only of the American Revolution. The right to bear arms came up several times in debates in France’s National Assembly. The deputies never approved that right, but they never denied it either. During the first years of the Revolution, the leading politicians were wary of arming poor citizens, a concern that was in tension with the egalitarian language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Moreover, militias thrived during the early years of the French Revolution and became instruments—albeit unstable ones—for maintaining a social domination that played out along class lines. In response to the contradictions in their positions, French revolutionary leaders remained silent on the issue. In France as in the United States, the question of whether or not there was a right to bear arms was less important than the question of who had the right to bear arms.

Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds

Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds

People, Places, and Mobility: The Strange History of Prester John across the Indian Ocean

Abstract The worlds of Central Asia and the Indian Ocean have been seen as discrete, seemingly unconnected except by way of the vertical silk roads descending through feeder routes into port cities situated along the Indian Ocean and its many seas, gulfs, and bays. Before Central Asia lost historical centrality and was regarded increasingly as a blank space on the map, it was a dynamic region. The Indian Ocean world with its spice, cotton, and silk routes was more known, having entered European geographical knowledge— and fantasy—from antiquity. The two worlds—terrestrial and oceanic—have been seen as diametrically opposed, with historiography privileging the latter. This essay links the two worlds by evoking people, places, and mobility through the legend of Prester John, a mysterious Christian monarch and putative ally against Muslims.

Poso Wells by Gabriela Alemán

longer getting ingénue roles. Their arguments echo in the script the narrator is sketching—and in everything else. Nothing is as it should be. The house seems to have extra rooms. Pictures appear where none had been before. And the words “Get away” appear mysteriously in his notebook, even within the script. Low on provisions after a few days, he descends the treacherously serpentine road to the tiny village below and its one general store. As he gathers his items, the surly shopkeeper cryptically asks, “Anything happen yet?” People have been known to mysteriously disappear—lots of dangerous crevasses, and the rescue-service chief is mostly drunk. A woman who overhears this waits by his car and tells him, “Get away quickly.” It’s certainly a narrative tour de force: as Kehlmann deftly demonstrates, a good writer can get his readers to believe pretty much anything. We are obviously to be reminded of Steven King’s The Shining, but the way Kehlmann depicts that lonely road up to the chalet may make us think, too, of the door that Kafka’s doorkeeper shuts. This is the door “before the law” that had been reserved solely for the supplicant; just as the solitary road leads only to that chalet, a chalet had just been newly built, as if expressly for him. We are thus kept in thrall not by some lurking horror but by the skewed qualities of the narrative. We get an inkling of how off-kilter everything is getting when the narrator cannot remember the little white lie he told his daughter the first time she asks where mommy is. As Ross Benjamin conveys it in elegantly straightforward English, this is a writer who has truly gone over the edge. Ulf Zimmermann Kennesaw State University Gabriela Alemán Poso Wells Trans. Dick Cluster. San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2018. 128 pages. Gabriela Alemán weaves noir, feminism, satire, and environmentalism into the strange history of Poso Wells, Ecuador. Poso Wells follows journalist Gustavo Varas as he investigates the disappearance of a prominent presidential candidate. In Poso Wells, women vanishing into nothingness is a common reality, but no one in town seems concerned. The townspeople are Eric Dupont Songs for the Cold of Heart Trans. Peter McCambridge QC Fiction With literary talent as well as peculiar imagination, Eric Dupont has long been hailed as spearheading the Quebecois literary revival, and in this English translation of his runaway bestseller La Fiancée americaine, we can see why. A book with enormous wingspan and a wonderfully dark wit, this novel offers a panoramic view of the twentieth century as the Lamontagne family struggles to adjust, as all families do, to the swiftly passing years. Silvana Gandolfi Run for Your Life Trans. Lynne Sharon Schwartz Restless Books An acclaimed Italian young-adult writer and winner of the Andersen Prize, Silvana Gandolfi has penned a true-to-life thriller portraying the lives of two boys forced to grow up quickly when they are separated from their families. The book provides an unflinching and unromantic portrait of everyday life under the thumb of the Sicilian Mafia, written in an accessible but gripping manner for younger, English-speaking readers. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 77 quiet and fearful as the military remains a constant and aggressive presence. Varas’s investigation leads him into a literal underworld beneath the town. He encounters a mysterious woman named Valentina inside the mucky tunnels and brings her back to the surface with questions he is not sure he wants the answers to. He learns of five blind men who seem otherworldly and powerful. As he investigates further, a story of terror unfolds. Poso Wells is a perfect complement for the current political state of the United States and the hopelessness caused by constant access to terrible news via social media. The story speaks to the delusion and god complex involved in wanting to lead an entire nation and the destructive power of indifference and greed. It also touches on the silence behind the pervasive violence women encounter in their daily lives. Alemán has created a disturbing, absurd, at times heart-wrenching story about the atrocities committed by patriarchs in...

Straight But Not Straight

Book Review| January 01 2018 Straight But Not Straight: The Strange History of Sexual Reorientation Therapy The Straight Line: How the Fringe Science of Ex-Gay Therapy Reoriented Sexuality, Waidzunas, Tom, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 321 pp. Barry Reay Barry Reay Barry Reay is professor of history at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2018) 24 (1): 159–161. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-4254567 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Barry Reay; Straight But Not Straight: The Strange History of Sexual Reorientation Therapy. GLQ 1 January 2018; 24 (1): 159–161. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-4254567 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 Duke University Press2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics by Louis Chude-Sokei

Reviewed by: The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics by Louis Chude-Sokei Paul Youngquist Louis Chude-Sokei. The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2016. 268 pp. $27.95. Say you’ve been sent to planet Earth, emissary of a wise and beneficent post-human people. Your mission: to solve the old race problem that causes earth-lings so much misery. Your base of operations: the heart of the Imperium, twenty-first-century America. Your weapon: black technopoetics, a disruptor set to “stun.” You’d be following the secret agenda Louis Chude-Sokei advances in The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics. I say secret because this agenda doesn’t appear with complete clarity until near the book’s end. But Chude-Sokei wants to change the way race works both to differentiate black people from the norm of the (white) Human and justify their subjection to it. He pursues this mission, unexpectedly and with flashes of brilliance, by using the science fiction to challenge cultural stereotypes by way of the future they presume. “To combine race,” he writes, “with a futurism is to subject blackness to the vagaries of temporal transformation” (207). Chude-Sokei wants a blackness open to continuing transformation: “necessarily mutable, contingent, and therefore subject to going beyond itself ” (198). A fantasy? Only fantasy can tell. Science fiction (generically allied to fantasy, as the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores attest) builds futures out of the detritus of contemporary dreams. Chude-Sokei shows how deeply such dreams come stained by histories of racial subjection and colonialism in the West. It’s a gorgeous, sobering insight: science fiction, the escapist pabulum of white geeks, has been about race all along. Chude-Sokei can make it because he approaches science fiction in broadly cultural rather than textual terms as a displaced allegory of social relations that provides an armature for dreaming the future. For him the fundamental feature of the genre, the one that places race front and center, is its obsession with technology, or more colloquially, machines. This emphasis allies science fiction with Italian futurism, a contemporaneous modernism whose celebration of machine aesthetics served an obvious ethnic chauvinism. Here’s the “tell” Chude-Sokei observes and interprets: machines in science fiction mediate social relations between whites and blacks. To sustain this claim, he works back about a century to document an abiding cultural association between blacks and machines. It isn’t simply that as enslaved labor, transported Africans resembled the machines that would eventually replace them. Chude-Sokei establishes that, culturally speaking, blacks could pass for machines—and vice versa. Minstrelsy opens up this possibility by staging blackface performance as the liminal and empty other to the Human in a way that mimes the otherness of machines. A black automaton would clinch the point. Chude-Sokei finds one in the strange history of Joice Heth, the allegedly 161-year-old “mammy” of George Washington whom P. T. Barnum purchased in 1835 for public display, launching his spectacular career. Heth’s extreme age, her rigidity and blindness, made it hard to distinguish her from an automaton—source of her initial public renown. Barnum later heightened Heth’s uncanny appeal by billing her as an [End Page 76] automaton passing for human: a black machine. It would be hard to invent a more powerful instance of the assimilation of machines and blacks, a cultural fantasy that finds fulfillment in 1930 with the Westinghouse Electric Corporation’s design and manufacture of Mr. Rastus Robot, the Mechanical Negro. These material instances of mechanical blackness give heft to the claim that the conflation of blacks and machines becomes a pervasive motif in science fiction. Chude-Sokei shows how the nineteenth-century writing he calls “Victorian proto-science fiction” advances this association to the point of inevitability. He treats familiar authors in unfamiliar ways to reveal their displaced preoccupation with race and slavery. Herman Melville’s story “The Bell Tower” (1856) assimilates a critique of slavery to an account of a machine slaying its human master. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), in Chude-Sokei’s words, “features the discovery of a superior and technologically...

The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination, by Dominic Sandbrook

The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination, by Dominic Sandbrook

Fang blennies wield a painless venom with a strange history

Fang blennies wield a painless venom with a strange history

Beyond the Black Atlantic: Pacific Rebellions and the Gothic in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

While previous investigations of the black-white racial dichotomy in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” have taught us an incalculable amount, paying attention to the complex modalities of Orientalism, rebellion, and transpacific migration in the novella makes even more relevant previous analyses of the story’s engagement with transatlantic slavery and the Haitian Revolution in a global arena. This study proposes that Melville’s narrative of a transatlantic slave mutiny—punctuated by phantom Orientalist references to East Asia and the South Pacific—suggests the indispensable role that the Atlantic revolutions played in framing European and American imaginings of East Asia and the South Pacific. Melville’s employment of the gothic as an expression of incipient racial and cosmopolitan anxieties, along with his unique adaptation of the travelogue’s “prolonged promise” and temporality, expresses East Asia and the South Pacific as a foreboding source of racial alterity and links his East Asian–Pacific and African populations through an Orientalist frame. Conversely, Melville’s comparative juxtapositions of West African slaves and villainous Malay characters—figures associated in the antebellum US with Muslim origins—craft an alternative, cross-Islamic community identification for imperial resistance in his “strange history” of the Pacific. While postcolonial critics positively read Melville’s pluralistic collectivity in Moby Dick, Melville’s rebellious Malay phantoms in “Benito Cereno” and Moby Dick betray moments of Islamic racialism and the problems of a republic built on slavery and the imperialism of the Asia Pacific, as seen in the Philippine–American War and other future imperial endeavors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The strange history of polarised neutrons in Australia

The history of polarised neutrons in Australia is unusual firstly because of the particular access that individuals in universities had to the facilities at the reactor site and because this resulted in the experiments being done almost all being with polarisation analysis. Two instruments were initially available. One was a conventional instrument albeit with a tilting counter. The other was a primitive polarisation analysis instrument purpose built for diffuse scattering. This latter instrument evolved over more than thirty years and produced results ranging from the separation of magnetic and nuclear diffuse scattering, for which it was conceived, to the isolation of magnetic features in inelastic spectra.

Religious Faith and the Virtues: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Psychology has a strange history of appearing to be more interested in what is wrong with humans than what is right with us. Likely inspired by Freud's early focus on pathology and the many pitfalls of growing through his psychosexual stages, psychology has been eager to define and remedy the illnesses of the psyche. Even though it seems inconsistent to spend so much time defining and remedying ills when we do not really understand what mental health looks like, psychologists carried on, producing an abundance of therapies whose goal generally was to alleviate symptoms rather than to promote an idea of health or wholeness. Maslow's (1970, 1999) focus on self-actualization is a rare exception to this trend. Happily, during the latter years of the 20th century, as psychological researchers began to explore the characteristics of healthy mental lives, there was a paradigmatic shift out of which the field of positive psychology developed. Focusing on the positive aspects of human life, or flourishing as is the more common term today, required an entirely new vocabulary. This drove the originators of the scientific study of the virtues back to ancient philosophy and religion (e.g., Peterson & Seligman, 2004; Snyder, Lopez, & Pedrotti, 2011) to find the common virtues to which humans aspire. In their search, researchers consulted a variety of philosophical and religious traditions, including Judeo-Christian, Eastern, and Islamic perspectives (Peterson & Seligman, 2004; Snyder et al., 2011). Across religious sources, the common focus in the study of virtues is human flourishing and altruism. Peterson and Seligman (2004) still drew from the idea of a of disease to develop a nosology of character strength and virtues; though, it is better called a classification (or a manual of the sanities [p. 3] as they cleverly title one of their chapters). Their mission was to find categories to shape research in the nascent field. To do so, they conceptualized virtues, or character traits, as similar to personality traits, in that they are both stable, yet susceptible to environmental influence and subject to change over time. Peterson and Seligman (2004) developed six major categories of character strengths from their research. These include wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity (including love, kindness, etc.), justice, temperance, and transcendence. Additional virtues may be drawn from philosophy and religion, empirically analyzed to understand their nature and practical usefulness, and categorized under these major headings for study. Yet religion, and specifically Christianity, places a Godward-focus on the virtues. Although we are to be kind, wise, fair, temperate, and spiritually-minded, it is not in the service of other or of our own flourishing; rather, those manifestations of the virtues flow from the One who is truly virtuous. Early philosophers saw eudamimonism as the key to the virtues--that is, they served to yield a life of happiness and, thus, were pursued in service of that goal. In contrast, Saint Augustine (e.g., 1960) refuted this idea in the fifth century. Arguing primarily against the Stoics who found the virtues to yield tranquility, he contended that only that which does not change can produce tranquility. Though altruism and greater happiness tend to characterize the lives of the virtuous (see Sisemore, 2015), virtue needs a more stable source than the individual. From a religious perspective, virtue stems from God who is True Virtue and who is unchangeable; virtue reflects his character. Therefore, it is reasonable to devote an issue of the Journal of Psychology and Theology to considering the religious, and particularly Christian, context of virtues. People of faith have discussed the virtues longer than psychologists, and the Godward-orientation of some virtues may increase the length of a religious list of virtues over those found in secular psychological sources. …