Unitarian Minister Research Articles

A Source for ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’

Readers have puzzled over the origin of ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ (1868), the tragicomic tale of a baby born in a California mining camp and the first piece of writing to bring national acclaim to author Bret Harte. Biographer George Stewart declared in 1931, ‘The sudden appearance of the Luck was about as close to a miracle as one finds in literary history’.1 Gary Scharnhorst brought the miracle down to earth when he discovered that Bret Harte and his wife had lost an infant son ten months before the story’s publication.2 This fact helped to explain—perhaps—Harte’s choice of subject (a birth) and the sentimental tone that Stewart called a ‘conversion’ from Harte’s satiric early journalism.3 But the archive of California ephemera holds another backstory. A speech given by a California visitor in 1864 anticipated multiple features of Bret Harte’s breakout short story. The connection between the speech and Bret Harte may be traced to Harte’s first appearance on a title page (Figure 1). On 9 September 1864, the San Francisco chapter of the Society of California Pioneers celebrated the anniversary of California’s statehood with a parade, a speech, a commissioned poem, and a reception. The job office of the Daily Alta California printed the speech, the poem, and the newspaper’s account of the day in a thirty-two-page booklet.4 The orator was a five-month visitor to the Pacific coast and Unitarian minister from New York City, Henry Whitney Bellows, known for founding a medical relief society for soldiers’ aid.5 Twenty-eight-year-old Bret Harte contributed the poem. Since Harte’s poem-of-the-day also appeared elsewhere, the booklet would seem to be (for Harte scholarship) a surplus edition of a text already known, merely a proud chapter in the life of a young author, but for the contents of Bellows’s lecture. The seasoned orator engaged his audience with a notable figure of speech—the allegoric figure of an infant California raised by the state’s mining pioneers. ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ echoes this figure of speech as well as other features of Bellows’s text.

The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism

The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism

Martha Sharp Joukowsky, 1936–2022

Martha Sharp Joukowsky, 1936–2022

Creative Christian Inquirers: Herman Melville and Henry Whitney Bellows

This essay offers heretofore unexplored outlooks on the compatibility of newspaper columns by Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows (1814–1882) and the artistic creativity of Herman Melville. I argue that Bellows's effort to reconcile the best features of Unitarianism and Calvinism corresponds to Melville's mercurial literary renderings of liberal and orthodox doctrine. I likewise explore the impact that the New York Christian Inquirer—for which Bellows was lead editor from 1846 to 1850, and a frequent contributor thereafter—had in encouraging Unitarianism to evolve from a sect that rejected the tenets of Calvinism into one that welcomed the best features of pietism. This study therefore has pertinence for scholars of Herman Melville and for students of American church history.

Conflagration: How Transcendentalists Sparked the American Struggle for Racial, Gender, and Social Justice

Conflagration: How Transcendentalists Sparked the American Struggle for Racial, Gender, and Social Justice

Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict

Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict

The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy by Andrew Mangham

Reviewed by: The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy by Andrew Mangham Tabitha Sparks (bio) Andrew Mangham. The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy. Oxford UP, 2021. Pp. xii +191. £58.00. ISBN 978-0-19-885003-8 (ebook). Among the many explanations for England's failure to provide adequate aid during Ireland's infamous potato famine, perhaps none is more chilling than Head of the (British) Registry Charles Trevelyan's description of the famine as a "salutary revolution" befitting a "nation long singularly unfortunate" (Mangham 23). Trevelyan, steeped in Malthusian theory, reflects an extreme version of political economists' view of starvation as a providential corrective to unruly populations. So we learn in Andrew Mangham's concise and engaging monograph, The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy, which disentangles the first two subjects of the title from the last. In jargon-free prose and with assiduous research, Mangham demonstrates how political economists deflected the reality of suffering bodies into abstractions like population growth and reproductive trends, while medical doctors and novelists foregrounded the material experience of starvation and its physical effects. Like novelists Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens, each of whom commands a chapter in Mangham's book, physiologists attended to the actual horror of starving–not the impersonal contemplation of starvation. In his first chapter, Mangham unravels the various scientific, epistemological, and spiritual approaches to starvation from the late 18th through the 19th century. If starvation as a consequence of poverty may be too easily or automatically associated with a broad-strokes economic empiricism, starting with Adam Smith and moving through Malthus and Chadwick, Mangham reminds us that Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) "has very little to say about actual matter such as blood, bones, tissues, and waste" (32). In contrast, medical professionals including William Alison, James Kay, and Thomas Southwood Smith countered such conjectural thinking through painstaking studies of hunger's actual effects, establishing it as a pathological condition rather than one of nature's periodic checking mechanisms. Likewise, the following chapters align the social problem novels of Kingsley, Gaskell, and Dickens with the rise of political interventions against [End Page 471] hunger that hinge upon an increasingly physiological understanding of the starving body. Kingsley's tentative adoption of scientific principles in his novels, poetry, and sermons show the Unitarian minister struggling to reconcile materialism with spiritual and evangelical notions about natural determinism. Alton Locke, Mangham writes, "is most forceful when it focuses on bodies" (70). In his chapter on Gaskell, Mangham depicts how Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1854), and Sylvia's Lovers (1863) vividly wrest starvation from social dilemma to personal experience, facilitated by Gaskell's determination "to really SEE the scenes I tried to describe" (123). One of The Science of Starving's most interesting contributions to the Victorian novel is Mangham's argument that Gaskell's acutely realistic "seeing" and her sentimental plots are co-productive rather than contradictory. How could, for instance, the depiction of a hungry child without emotional investment and pathos be authentic? Mangham's chapter on Dickens cogently compares the novelist's representations of poverty and starvation in novels like Oliver Twist and Bleak House with historical examples, such as an 1848–49 cholera epidemic at the Juvenile Pauper Asylum in Tooting, which killed 126 boys. Criminal responsibility for such acts, Mangham explains, was mitigated by diagnostic ambiguity: the boys died of cholera, but were significantly weakened by their state-supported, subsistence-level diet. So persuasive is Mangham's thesis that at times it appears less argumentative than plucked from the novels themselves. Quotations from Mary Barton and Hard Times, for instance, explicitly castigate abstract and unfeeling political economy and invoke the suffering individual. In Mary Barton, Jeb Legh tells Mr. Carson, "I'm not given to Political Economy, I know that much. I'm wanting in learning, I'm aware; but I can use my eyes. I never see the masters getting thin and haggard for want of food," and in Hard Times we read that "For the first time in her life Louisa had come into one of the...

Practice for the People

January 01 2020 Agency: A Partial History of Live Art Agency: A Partial History of Live Art, edited by TheronSchmidt. London: Live Art Development Agency and Intellect Books, 2019. Claire MacDonald Claire MacDonald Claire MacDonald is a writer and artist, and a Unitarian minister in South London. Her interests combine the arts, faith, and social change through creating conversational space across communities. She has been a Thinker in Residence at The Live Art Development Agency since 2017. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Claire MacDonald Claire MacDonald is a writer and artist, and a Unitarian minister in South London. Her interests combine the arts, faith, and social change through creating conversational space across communities. She has been a Thinker in Residence at The Live Art Development Agency since 2017. Online Issn: 1537-9477 Print Issn: 1520-281X © 2020 Claire MacDonald2020Claire MacDonald PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (2020) 42 (1 (124)): 104–106. https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_r_00515 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share MailTo Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Claire MacDonald; Agency: A Partial History of Live Art. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 2020; 42 (1 (124)): 104–106. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_r_00515 Download citation file: Ris (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 All ContentAll JournalsPAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Claire MacDonald2020Claire MacDonald Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Log Cabin: An American Icon

In The Log Cabin Alison K. Hoagland explores the log cabin both as a “seemingly simple structure” and as a symbol freighted with numerous “narratives and counternarratives” (pp. 3, 8). The author's library and field research underscores the cultural complexity and architectural variety of log structures. Hoagland agrees with scholars who have debunked Anglo-American claims that English colonists first built log cabins in America. Lacking definitive evidence on origins, she tentatively supports the consensus view that seventeenth-century Swedes colonizing the Delaware River valley first introduced log cabins. Hoagland's first chapter describing log cabin characteristics appropriates definitions from Thaddeus Mason Harris's Journal of a Tour into the Territory Northwest of the Alleghany Mountains (1805). Referring to “the temporary buildings of the first settlers in the wilds,” Harris contrasted windowless, chimneyless “Cabins,” crudely constructed with unhewn, round logs, with the superior “log-house,” illuminated by glass windows, ventilated by a chimney, and skillfully constructed with squared, hewn logs (Harris quoted by Hoagland, p. 16, emphasis in original). Hoagland identifies Harris as a Boston Unitarian minister but neglects to mention his status as a leading Freemason and chaplain of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. Harris's publications promoted Freemasonry's mythic history of architectural, cultural progress from primitive roughness to polished perfection. Harris's book therefore rejects even the relatively refined log house in favor of “more decent houses” constructed with saw-milled boards (ibid.).

Self-Culture and the Private Value of the Humanities

Self-Culture and the Private Value of the Humanities Kathryn Hamilton Warren (bio) Henry David Thoreau's essay "Life without Principle" opens with a complaint about one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's lyceum lectures: "I felt that the lecturer had chosen a theme too foreign to himself, and so failed to interest me as much as he might have done. He described things not in or near to his heart, but toward his extremities and superficies" (Thoreau 1973, 155). That acts of communication are enriched when their authors bring their full selves to the task is an idea that Thoreau articulated repeatedly in his writing life, as in the opening of Walden, when he reminds readers that even though the "I" is omitted in much writing, "it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking" (2004, 3). We can bury that "I" with the passive voice, mask it with omniscience, or embrace it. Thoreau insisted on the embrace—for his own part and for others. "Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives" (3). Unlike the navel-gazing that fuels so many Facebook feeds, Thoreau's appetite for the immediate and the intimate emerged from a desire to trust in and develop the self outside of the bounds of convention, tradition, and prejudice. Like Emerson and many of the other Transcendentalists, Thoreau believed "self-culture" had a crucial role to play not only in the improvement [End Page 587] of the individual, but also in the betterment of the community and the nation. A term first explored publicly by the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing in an 1838 address, "self-culture" does not refer to a culture of the self or of selfishness, nor to a cult of bootstrap individualism, every man and woman for themselves. The term does not refer to a culture at all, but voices an imperative to cultivate the self: it is "the care which every man owes to himself, to the unfolding and perfecting of his nature" (Channing 1845, 354). For Thoreau, a man who famously declared that he "did not wish to live what was not life," the very substance of being itself was at stake when contemplating the imperative of self-culture (2004, 90). Thoreau's deep investment in the personal came to mind when I was asked, as part of a roundtable at the 2018 meeting of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (C19), to consider how we might adapt certain nineteenth-century practices and attitudes in order to improve the social and political climate in our country. Having recently attended an NEH Institute devoted to Transcendentalism and Reform, I knew I wanted to consider the Transcendentalists as models for bringing the life of the mind to a general audience in order to promote the public humanities. And in two of Transcendentalism's central figures—Emerson and Thoreau—I saw overlapping, but distinct, examples for how to do that. Who speaks, in forums beyond the academy, of the humanities? And who is listening? In the mid-nineteenth century in New England, Transcendentalists such as Emerson, Orestes Brownson, and Theodore Parker delivered lyceum lectures to groups of men and women eager to continue their educations, expand their intellectual horizons, and debate the issues of the day. Though by the 1840s lyceum lectures had helped to foster what we now think of as the public humanities, it's worth recalling that promoting the humanities was not the aim of the movement's organizers. The lyceum movement, which began in the 1820s, was born of local efforts to share knowledge about science and technology, which then meant making practical improvements to farming, husbandry, and manufacturing. Of the 143 lectures given during the first five years of the Concord Lyceum (1828–33), fifty discussed science or technology. If we're looking for parallels between the nineteenth century and our own, one evident analog to the lyceum is the TED Talk (TED standing for technology, entertainment, and design). On its website, the TED organization proclaims its mission to be "spreading...

Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America by Johann N. Neem

Reviewed by: Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America by Johann N. Neem Mark Boonshoft (bio) Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America. By Johann N. Neem. ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. 256. Cloth, $54.95; paper, $22.95.) Historians do not know how to talk about the common school movement. Conservatives spent the last half century deriding "government schools." Meanwhile, from the Left, Michael Katz and the "revisionist" education historians of the 1960s and 1970s cast public schools as institutions bent on controlling the masses. Thanks to Johann Neem's wonderful new book, we are free of this stagnant debate. [End Page 523] In the first two chapters of his thematically organized book, Neem recovers the democratic vision of common school advocates. The push for public education began in the founding era, to be sure. For Neem, though, democratic education really took shape in the late 1830s. The later reformers hoped common schools would not only make citizens, but also enable all boys and girls to develop themselves and live a fulfilling life. The Boston Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing made the most powerful case for this idea in an 1838 lecture called "Self-Culture." Neem borrows Channing's term throughout the book. To Channing, "self-culture was the right and duty of every child" because it was "the essence of being American" (15). It fell to others to bring this liberating experience to the masses, namely Horace Mann, who in 1837 became the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Common schools aimed at "nothing less than democratizing access to imagination" (18). Reformers designed a curriculum to realize their lofty goals. They conceived of knowledge—everything from the three Rs to the classics—as the "building blocks." On this base of knowledge, students "deepened their appreciation of Creation, enriched their experience of the world and their own inner lives, and developed the higher faculties of their minds" (53–54). Even the supposed bastions of an older style of education reinforced these new values. Historians usually argue that the McGuffey Readers—the most popular schoolbooks of the day, the first of which were published in 1836—inculcated values of hard work and patriotism in passive students. To Neem, the McGuffey Readers helped students learn to "reason, imagine, and love" (46). All the while, as Neem argues in the book's final three chapters, idealistic advocates of democratic education confronted the realities of "education in a democracy" (76). First of all, localities were already building schools. Mann and others could hardly be reformers if it were otherwise. Drawing on work by Nancy Beadie, Neem argues that reformers regularly relied on this existing social capital. To them, "localism was a tactic for state building" (70). This is precisely why reform proved difficult. People could and did contest the experts. Jacksonian Democracy raised the question: "What role was there for uncommon sense in an era of the common man?" (33). Similarly, Mann and Channing saw education as counterweight to a degrading capitalist economy. Other Americans embraced schooling to help them get ahead in that very economy. Where the rubber really hit the road was where the ruler hit the knuckles. Reformers envisioned classrooms as temples of self-making. Bored students and undertrained and unsupported teachers alike, though, "saw the schoolroom as a battlefield" (101). Reformers criticized teachers for [End Page 524] continuing to rely on rote memorization and threat of the rod. These complaints undermined their own efforts to make teaching a respected profession through the founding of normal schools. Ultimately, enough Americans built public schools that the question became how to make them truly common in an increasingly diverse society. At first, the challenge was religious. Reformers believed religion had a role in schools. They settled on nonsectarian Protestant teaching as the way forward. That seemed reasonable to most Protestants, though not to the large and growing population of Catholics. Catholics found public schools alienating, especially in the heyday of nativism. So they built other schools for their children. African Americans took a different tack. Recognizing that public schooling had become a prerequisite to accessing citizenship, black Americans demanded inclusion. More generally...

Ramsden Balmforth on the Reformation and the Evolution of Christianity: A Post-Protestant South African Perspective

Theologians and historians of the Protestant Reformation have often interpreted it in terms that are strongly determined by their own concerns. One such writer was Ramsden Balmforth (1862-1942), a prominent Unitarian minister and public intellectual in Cape Town from 1897 until the late 1930s. An advocate of Darwinian evolutionary thinking, liberal theology, religious freedom, the comparative study of religions, and social reform, this transplanted Yorkshireman perceived the Reformation as an important stage in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, one marked by liberation from the spiritual and intellectual shackles of Catholicism. However, he regarded it as a truncated and ultimately reactionary reform movement which substituted the authority of the Bible and creedal formulations for that of the Roman Catholic power structure. Balmforth called for a “new Reformation” which would resume the liberation of religious life.

Energy in Electromagnetism: The Poynting Vector [Historical Corner

John Henry Poynting (1852-1914) [Figure 1(a)] was born in Lancashire, England, and he was the youngest son of Thomas Elford Poynting, a Unitarian minister who was also the teacher in the local school that young John Henry attended. Poynting later attended Owens College in Manchester, England (1867-1872), where he studied physics under the guidance of Osborne Reynolds (1842-1912) and Balfour Stewart (1828-1887).

Literary criticism from a Cape Town pulpit: Ramsden Balmforth’s explications of modern novels as parables revealing ethical and spiritual principles

Literary criticism evolved slowly in southern Africa. One of the first commentators to write about this topic was the Unitarian minister, Ramsden Balmforth (1861-1941), a native of Yorkshire and Unitarian minister who emigrated to Cape Town in 1897. Eschewing conventional homiletics in its various forms, in dozens of instances he illustrated ethical and spiritual points in his Sunday sermons or ‘discourses’ by discussing their manifestation in literary works. Crucially, these texts did not merely yield illustrations of Biblical themes, but themselves served as the primary written vehicles of moral and ethical principles, and the Bible was rarely mentioned in them. Balmforth’s orations about novels were published in 1912. The following year he preached about selected operas by Richard Wagner, and in the 1920s Balmforth issued two additional series of discourses focusing on dramas. In all of these commentaries he consistently emphasised thematic content rather than narrative and other literary techniques. He extracted lessons which he related to his ethically orientated version of post-orthodox religious faith.

Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era. by Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai

Reviewed by: Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era. by Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai Susan-Mary Grant (bio) Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era. By Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. 263. Cloth, $140.00; paper, $35.00.) The death of Union soldier Charles Russell Lowell at Cedar Creek in the penultimate year of the American Civil War gave rise to sermonizing and soul-searching in almost equal measure across the New England states. For Unitarian minister Cyrus Bartol, Lowell's death was a sacrifice for the Union, and for Edward Waldo Emerson, whose words from his introduction to Lowell's Life and Letters (1907) open this study, it was a sacrifice that Lowell was almost destined to make. For men like Lowell, as for those who commemorated him, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai argues, character was destiny; and in the course of the Civil War, for many of the New England elite, that destiny turned out to be death in the name of the nation. It is these men's lives, however, rather than their deaths, that most interest Wongsrichanalai, and in particular the social rules by which these lives came to be conceptualized, constructed, and, ultimately, commemorated. [End Page 328] Men like Charles Russell Lowell, Wongsrichanalai acknowledges, were hardly typical Union soldiers. They were products of an exclusive, elite environment in which "class, education, and a person's bearing meant a great deal." The scions of what Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. famously defined as the "Brahmin caste of New England," these "New Brahmins" were linked by familial, intellectual, and religious ties—by social, educational, and cultural traditions that formed the pattern for their lives, a pattern shaped around the concept of character, defined as "an idealized internal standard of behavior consisting most importantly of educated, independent thought and selfless action." This regard for character among the New England elite, Wongsrichanalai suggests, should be understood as a "northern variant" of southern honor (2). Shorn of slavery—or at least safely distanced from it—this northern honor code informed the New Brahmin approach to their own lives, to the nation, and, of course, to the Civil War. That it was an ideal that few could live up to, in the end, is acknowledged at the start of this fine and nuanced work, which tracks the evolution of the New Brahmin outlook from college through military camp to Reconstruction. In effect, what Wongsrichanalai is offering here is a modest yet probing generational study that reminds us that questions remain over combat and its consequences during the Civil War, questions that earlier studies of what Civil War soldiers fought for have left unanswered. This is partly because many of those studies concentrate on the war years themselves, and partly because combat motivation is frequently the main focus. Wongsrichanalai, by contrast, is less concerned with motivation than he is with the mentalité of his select—socially very select—group of northern volunteers. By locating his subjects more firmly within their educational and moral milieu before the war, he is better able to examine their conduct during and after it, as the survivors moved into careers and, eventually, leadership positions in the postwar world. In his focus on the inner lives of the Union elite, Wongsrichanalai acknowledges his debt to George Fredrickson's The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965), and Northern Character is in many ways evidence of Fredrickson's deservedly lasting influence and impact. Wongsrichanalai, however, has taken the debate in a different direction. Indeed, he is very much in the vanguard of a fresh wave of scholarship concentrated on the Union: on the home front as much as the battlefield, on the relationships between them, and, most important, on the role that the Civil War played in inculcating stronger nationalist sentiments. One thinks of Lorien Foote's 2010 study of the class clash within Union ranks (The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army), which Wongsrichanalai cites, or Matthew [End Page 329] Gallman's 2015 study of the sense of duty, patriotism, and popular culture...

Horace Holley: Transylvania University and the Making of Liberal Education in the Early American Republic by James P. Cousins

Reviewed by: Horace Holley: Transylvania University and the Making of Liberal Education in the Early American Republic by James P. Cousins Timothy J. Williams Horace Holley: Transylvania University and the Making of Liberal Education in the Early American Republic. By James P. Cousins. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. Pp. [viii], 297. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-6857-9.) The American West seldom appears in histories of early-nineteenth-century higher education. The region, characterized by its untamed wilderness and its settlers' rugged independence, has eluded most scholars in the field, including myself, who have focused on more established institutions east of the Appalachians. The subject of this biography, Horace Holley, was, at first, no different. According to James P. Cousins, "Horace, like many of his peers, came to see the world outside New England as a violent, chaotic, and uncivilized place where democracy had been corrupted by vulgar politics and despicable avarice" (p. 6). Holley declined offers to lead Transylvania University in Kentucky twice before accepting the job in 1818. In this lively, interesting biography, the author follows Holley's journey to Transylvania and explores his consequential impact on higher education in Kentucky. Although Cousins situates his work largely in conversation with earlier biographies rather than with southern history or education history, at times he illuminates broader "intellectual trends in the young nation" such as the development of medical education (p. 6). This well-crafted biography reflects Cousins's expert engagement with institutional records, private manuscript collections, newspapers, and biographies. The book's six chapters follow Holley's life and career from his birth in 1781 to his death at the age of forty-six in 1827. Chapter 6 focuses briefly on the efforts of his wife, Mary Austin Holley, to write, with the assistance of Transylvania professor Charles Caldwell, a memoir about her late husband. The resulting book, A Discourse on the Genius and Character of the Rev. Horace Holley (Boston, 1828), received mixed reviews due to Horace Holley's politically and religiously divisive career as a liberal Unitarian minister with little interest in "the hard rules and divisive creeds of Christian denominations" (p. 215). This tension seemed to matter little to Holley, who focused on developing Transylvania and establishing its medical school. Cousins's study of Horace Holley's intellectual formation in chapter 1 is especially noteworthy because it underscores how a microhistorical approach could potentially enrich studies of education. As a child, Holley benefited from his merchant father's substantial wealth. He was educated privately and began his higher education at Williams College before leaving to attend Yale University. There, Holley embraced the classical liberal arts curriculum and developed his compositional and rhetorical skills under the guidance of Timothy Dwight, Yale's president. Cousins's engagement with education is at its finest in this chapter, as he mines manuscript sources pertaining to the Yale curriculum. While the book's narrative is compelling, Cousins's approach to biography is not as unique as he claims. He writes in the introduction that Holley's "story is best told and most useful when filtered through the methods of the 'biographical turn,'" which Cousins characterizes as "a recent historiographic shift away from uncritical or superficial personal [End Page 952] histories" (pp. 4–5). Critical biography, however, is not a recent approach. Consider Drew Gilpin Faust's James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge, 1982) or Rhys Isaac's Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (New York, 2004). Engagement with the methods of works like these and broader intellectual histories of the antebellum South would have produced a far more critical biography. In terms of critical biography, gender is perhaps the most notable place for development because it is a category of identity that bears significantly on one's experiences with education, politics, and religion. Horace Holley was, after all, in the business of men's higher education—creating an environment in the southern backcountry for nurturing men of letters and restraint. Mary Austin Holley's agency is implied throughout the text but unanalyzed. Although Cousins notes her feelings about moving to Kentucky, her reactions to the area...

FORECASTING THE FUTURE OF RELIGION IN THE 1920s: RAMSDEN BALMFORTH’S POST-ORTHODOX PROGNOSTICATIONS

Standing at the apogee of post-Protestant theological liberalism, the scholarly Unitarian minister Ramsden Balmforth, who served the Unitarian Church in Cape Town from 1897 until 1937, responded to a broad spectrum of issues affecting South African religious, political and economic life. Having been moulded by Fabian socialism in his native Yorkshire, however, and informed by the theology of such denominational fellows as Joseph Estlin Carpenter during his student years in Oxford, he remained relatively marginalised on the ecclesiastical landscape of South Africa. Despite this quasi-isolation, Balmforth sought in the late 1920s to predict the future of Christianity or religious life generally not only in his adopted homeland, but also on an international scale. In the present article his conceptualisation is analysed in the historical context of his theological liberalism generally, and a critique of his prognostications is offered which highlights Balmforth’s failure to come to grips with the fact that his liberalism, which he regarded as a virtually inevitable product of cultural history, had failed to make nearly any inroads on the increasingly complex kaleidoscope of South African Christianity.

Forecasting the future of religion in the 1920s: Ramsden Balmforth's post-orthodox prognostications

Standing at the apogee of post-Protestant theological liberalism, the scholarly Unitarian minister Ramsden Balmforth, who served the Unitarian Church in Cape Town from 1897 until 1937, responded to a broad spectrum of issues affecting South African religious, political and economic life. Having been moulded by Fabian socialism in his native Yorkshire, however, and informed by the theology of such denominational fellows as Joseph Estlin Carpenter during his student years in Oxford, he remained relatively marginalised on the ecclesiastical landscape of South Africa. Despite this quasi-isolation, Balmforth sought in the late 1920s to predict the future of Christianity or religious life generally not only in his adopted homeland, but also on an international scale. In the present article his conceptualisation is analysed in the historical context of his theological liberalism generally, and a critique of his prognostications is offered which highlights Balmforth’s failure to come to grips with the fact that his liberalism, which he regarded as a virtually inevitable product of cultural history, had failed to make nearly any inroads on the increasingly complex kaleidoscope of South African Christianity.

Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

The first scholarly South African interpretation of Wagner? Ramsden Balmforth's Fabian analysis of the Ring and Parsifal

2013 marks both the bicentenary of Richard Wagner's birth and the centenary of performances of his Ring cycle in Cape Town, which contemporary critics hailed as a noteworthy advance in the cultural life of the Mother City. In that year the first South African to write a book about Wagner, the transplanted Yorkshireman Ramsden Balmforth, crafted his Drama, Music-drama, and Religion. It is argued in the present article that his interpretation relied to an appreciable degree on George Bernard Shaw's 1898 The Perfect Wagnerite, but also incorporated Balmforth's own Fabian socialist and post-orthodox Christian notions which he perceived in both the Ring cycle and Parsifal. Balmforth's interpretation further reflected the influence of his many years in South Africa, where he served as a Unitarian minister and engaged indefatigably in social reform efforts, which generally meshed with the ideological precepts he had brought from England. To a significantly greater extent than Shaw he delved into individual traits of Wagnerian characters rather than perceiving them almost exclusively as manifestations of social classes.