A Quaker Colonel, His Fiancée, and Their Connections

A Quaker Colonel, His Fiancée, and Their Connections
Author: Richard Upsher Smith
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2023
Genre: History
ISBN: 1611463459

This book contains letters from the Civil War of a Union officer, his fiancée, and some of their connections. The letters witness to their conviction that the pain of their four-year separation and other deprivations would help purify the country from the sin of slavery.

New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650-1800

New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650-1800
Author: Michele Lise Tarter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198814224

New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650-1800 takes a fresh look at archival and printed sources from England and America, elucidating why women were instrumental to the Quaker movement from its inception to its establishment as a transatlantic religious body. This authoritative volume, the first collection to focus entirely on the contributions of women, is a landmark study of their distinctive religious and gendered identities. The chapters connect three richly woven threads of Quaker women's livesRevolutions, Disruptions and Networksby tying gendered experience to ruptures in religion across this radical, volatile period of history. Includes a Foreword by Elaine Hobby.

Suspect Relations

Suspect Relations
Author: Kirsten Fischer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801486791

Over the course of the eighteenth century, race came to seem as corporeal as sex. Kirsten Fischer has mined unpublished court records and travel literature from colonial North Carolina to reveal how early notions of racial difference were shaped by illicit sexual relationships and the sanctions imposed on those who conducted them. Fischer shows how the personal--and yet often very public--sexual lives of Native American, African American, and European American women and men contributed to the new racial order in this developing slave society. Liaisons between European men and native women, among white and black servants, and between servants and masters, as well as sexual slander among whites and acts of sexualized violence against slaves, were debated, denied, and recorded in the courtrooms of colonial North Carolina. Indentured servants, slaves, Cherokee and Catawba women, and other members of less privileged groups sometimes resisted colonial norms, making sexual choices that irritated neighbors, juries, and magistrates and resulted in legal penalties and other acts of retribution. The sexual practices of ordinary people vividly bring to light the little-known but significant ways in which notions of racial difference were alternately contested and affirmed before the American Revolution.Fischer makes an innovative contribution to the history of race, class, and gender in early America by uncovering a detailed record of illicit sexual exchanges in colonial North Carolina and showing how acts of resistance to sexual rules complicated ideas about inherent racial difference.

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean

Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean
Author: Kristen Block
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820338680

Kristen Block examines the entangled histories of Spain and England in the Caribbean during the long seventeenth century, focusing on colonialism's two main goals: the search for profit and the call to Christian dominance. Using the stories of ordinary people, Block illustrates how engaging with the powerful rhetoric and rituals of Christianity was central to survival. Isobel Criolla was a runaway slave in Cartagena who successfully lobbied the Spanish governor not to return her to an abusive mistress. Nicolas Burundel was a French Calvinist who served as henchman to the Spanish governor of Jamaica before his arrest by the Inquisition for heresy. Henry Whistler was an English sailor sent to the Caribbean under Oliver Cromwell's plan for holy war against Catholic Spain. Yaff and Nell were slaves who served a Quaker plantation owner, Lewis Morris, in Barbados. Seen from their on-the-ground perspective, the development of modern capitalism, race, and Christianity emerges as a story of negotiation, contingency, humanity, and the quest for community. Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean works in both a comparative and an integrative Atlantic world frame, drawing on archival sources from Spain, England, Barbados, Colombia, and the United States. It pushes the boundaries of how historians read silences in the archive, asking difficult questions about how self-censorship, anxiety, and shame have shaped the historical record. The book also encourages readers to expand their concept of religious history beyond a focus on theology, ideals, and pious exemplars to examine the communal efforts of pirates, smugglers, slaves, and adventurers who together shaped the Caribbean's emerging moral economy.

Migration and Faith

Migration and Faith
Author: Horst Weigelt
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2017-04-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3647564354

Migrations are a phenomenon that can be traced back to the beginning of the history of mankind. In modern times, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, numerous migration movements took place from Europe to North America. It was also at this time that the migrations of the Schwenkfelders, followers of Caspar Schwenckfeld?s teachings, from Silesia – then belonging to the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy – to Pennsylvania took place. On the basis of their spiritualistic theology as well as their intense, personal piety, they rejected some essential doctrines of Christianity and ecclesiastical institutions. Therefore governmental and ecclesiastical authorities meted out severe punishments to them. However, it was not until the establishment of a Jesuit Mission for their catholicization in 1719 that more than two hundred of them left Silesia for the sake of their faith. They emigrated first to the Electorate of Saxony and several years later to Pennsylvania, where they settled scattered widely northwest of Philadelphia between 1731 and 1737. In this multireligious, multicultural, and multiethnic English colony they become acquainted with other religious beliefs and forms of piety. Here, moreover, they were challenged by other social, political, and cultural circumstances. This monograph is the first to pursue, in detail, the effects of these acquaintanceships and challenges on the faith of the Silesian refugees. These effects ranged – as becomes clear – from declines and multifarious alterations (modifications, changes, or even revisions) to the strengthening and deepening of their traditional faith and piety. However, the study shows, for most of the Schwenkfelders the migrations did not primarily involve risks. Rather they opened up great opportunities for their religious development and their individual and community life. Without doubt, the Schwenkfelder migrations are characterized by uniqueness; nevertheless certain features can also be detected in other religious migrations. Therefore their migrations represent in certain ways a paradigm, for this time and beyond.

Quaker Spirituality

Quaker Spirituality
Author: Douglas Van Steere
Publisher: Paulist Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1984
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780809125104

Simplicity in forms of worship, opposition to violence, concern for social injustice, and, above all, a faith in the personal and corporate guidance of the Holy Spirit are characteristics of the spirituality of the people called Quakers. The author has assembled a comprehensive collection of Quaker writings.