Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Religion And The American West
Download Religion And The American West full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Religion And The American West ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Religion in the Modern American West by : Ferenc Morton Szasz
Download or read book Religion in the Modern American West written by Ferenc Morton Szasz and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Americans migrated west, they carried with them not only their hopes for better lives but their religious traditions as well. Yet the importance of religion in the forging of a western identity has seldom been examined. In this first historical overview of religion in the modern American West, Ferenc Szasz shows the important role that organized religion played in the shaping of the region from the late-nineteenth to late-twentieth century. He traces the major faiths over that time span, analyzes the distinctive response of western religious institutions to national events, and shows how western cities became homes to a variety of organized faiths that cast only faint shadows back east. While many historians have minimized the importance of religion for the region, Szasz maintains that it lies at the very heart of the western experience. From the 1890s to the 1920s, churches and synagogues created institutions such as schools and hospitals that shaped their local communities; during the Great Depression, the Latter-day Saints introduced their innovative social welfare system; and in later years, Pentecostal groups carried their traditions to the Pacific coast and Southern Baptists (among others) set out in earnest to evangelize the Far West. Beginning in the 1960s, the arrival of Asian faiths, the revitalization of evangelical Protestantism, the ferment of post-Vatican II Catholicism, the rediscovery of Native American spirituality, and the emergence of New Age sects combined to make western cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco among the most religiously pluralistic in the world. Examining the careers of key figures in western religion, from Rabbi William Friedman to Reverend Robert H. Schuller, Szasz balances specific and general trends to weave the story of religion into a wider social and cultural context. Religion in the Modern American West calls attention to an often overlooked facet of regional history and broadens our understanding of the American experience.
Book Synopsis Race, Religion, Region by : Fay Botham
Download or read book Race, Religion, Region written by Fay Botham and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2006-09-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Racial and religious groups have played a key role in shaping the American West, yet scholars have for the most part ignored how race and religion have influenced regional identity. In this collection, eleven contributors explore the intersections of race, religion, and region to show how they transformed the West. From the Punjabi Mexican Americans of California to the European American shamans of Arizona to the Mexican Chinese of the borderlands, historical meanings of race in the American West are complex and are further complicated by religious identities. This book moves beyond familiar stereotypes to achieve a more nuanced understanding of race while also showing how ethnicity formed in conjunction with religious and regional identity. The chapters demonstrate how religion shaped cultural encounters, contributed to the construction of racial identities, and served as a motivating factor in the lives of historical actors. The opening chapters document how religion fostered community in Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century. The second section examines how physical encounters—such as those involving Chinese immigrants, Hermanos Penitentes, and Pueblo dancers—shaped religious and racial encounters in the West. The final essays investigate racial and religious identity among the Latter-day Saints and southern California Muslims. As these contributions clearly show, race, religion, and region are as critical as gender, sexuality, and class in understanding the melting pot that is the West. By depicting the West as a unique site for understanding race and religion, they open a new window on how we view all of America.
Book Synopsis Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879–2009 by : Brandi Denison
Download or read book Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879–2009 written by Brandi Denison and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-07 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879–2009 is a narrative of American religion and how it intersected with land in the American West. Prior to 1881, Utes lived on the largest reservation in North America—twelve million acres of western Colorado. Brandi Denison takes a broad look at the Ute land dispossession and resistance to disenfranchisement by tracing the shifting cultural meaning of dirt, a physical thing, into land, an abstract idea. This shift was made possible through the development and deployment of an idealized American religion based on Enlightenment ideals of individualism, Victorian sensibilities about the female body, and an emerging respect for diversity and commitment to religious pluralism that was wholly dependent on a separation of economics from religion. As the narrative unfolds, Denison shows how Utes and their Anglo-American allies worked together to systematize a religion out of existing ceremonial practices, anthropological observations, and Euro-American ideals of nature. A variety of societies then used religious beliefs and practices to give meaning to the land, which in turn shaped inhabitants’ perception of an exclusive American religion. Ultimately, this movement from the tangible to the abstract demonstrates the development of a normative American religion, one that excludes minorities even as they are the source of the idealized expression.
Book Synopsis Americanism:The Fourth Great Western Religion by : David Gelernter
Download or read book Americanism:The Fourth Great Western Religion written by David Gelernter and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2007-06-19 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to “believe” in America? Why do we always speak of our country as having a mission or purpose that is higher than other nations? Modern liberals have invested a great deal in the notion that America was founded as a secular state, with religion relegated to the private sphere. David Gelernter argues that America is not secular at all, but a powerful religious idea—indeed, a religion in its own right. Gelernter argues that what we have come to call “Americanism” is in fact a secular version of Zionism. Not the Zionism of the ancient Hebrews, but that of the Puritan founders who saw themselves as the new children of Israel, creating a new Jerusalem in a new world. Their faith-based ideals of liberty, equality, and democratic governance had a greater influence on the nation’s founders than the Enlightenment. Gelernter traces the development of the American religion from its roots in the Puritan Zionism of seventeenth-century New England to the idealistic fighting faith it has become, a militant creed dedicated to spreading freedom around the world. The central figures in this process were Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, who presided over the secularization of the American Zionist idea into the form we now know as Americanism. If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square. Gelernter also shows that anti-Americanism, particularly the virulent kind that is found today in Europe, is a reaction against this religious conception of America on the part of those who adhere to a rival religion of pacifism and appeasement. A startlingly original argument about the religious meaning of America and why it is loved—and hated—with so much passion at home and abroad.
Book Synopsis The Gods of Indian Country by : Jennifer Graber
Download or read book The Gods of Indian Country written by Jennifer Graber and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the nineteenth century, white Americans sought the cultural transformation and physical displacement of Native people. Though this process was certainly a clash of rival economic systems and racial ideologies, it was also a profound spiritual struggle. The fight over Indian Country sparked religious crises among both Natives and Americans. In The Gods of Indian Country, Jennifer Graber tells the story of the Kiowa Indians during Anglo-Americans' hundred-year effort to seize their homeland. Like Native people across the American West, Kiowas had known struggle and dislocation before. But the forces bearing down on them-soldiers, missionaries, and government officials-were unrelenting. With pressure mounting, Kiowas adapted their ritual practices in the hope that they could use sacred power to save their lands and community. Against the Kiowas stood Protestant and Catholic leaders, missionaries, and reformers who hoped to remake Indian Country. These activists saw themselves as the Indians' friends, teachers, and protectors. They also asserted the primacy of white Christian civilization and the need to transform the spiritual and material lives of Native people. When Kiowas and other Native people resisted their designs, these Christians supported policies that broke treaties and appropriated Indian lands. They argued that the gifts bestowed by Christianity and civilization outweighed the pains that accompanied the denial of freedoms, the destruction of communities, and the theft of resources. In order to secure Indian Country and control indigenous populations, Christian activists sanctified the economic and racial hierarchies of their day. The Gods of Indian Country tells a complex, fascinating-and ultimately heartbreaking-tale of the struggle for the American West.
Book Synopsis Across God's Frontiers by : Anne M. Butler
Download or read book Across God's Frontiers written by Anne M. Butler and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-17 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roman Catholic sisters first traveled to the American West as providers of social services, education, and medical assistance. In Across God's Frontiers, Anne M. Butler traces the ways in which sisters challenged and reconfigured contemporary ideas about women, work, religion, and the West; moreover, she demonstrates how religious life became a vehicle for increasing women's agency and power. Moving to the West introduced significant changes for these women, including public employment and thoroughly unconventional monastic lives. As nuns and sisters adjusted to new circumstances and immersed themselves in rugged environments, Butler argues, the West shaped them; and through their labors and charities, the sisters in turn shaped the West. These female religious pioneers built institutions, brokered relationships between Indigenous peoples and encroaching settlers, and undertook varied occupations, often without organized funding or direct support from the church hierarchy. A comprehensive history of Roman Catholic nuns and sisters in the American West, Across God's Frontiers reveals Catholic sisters as dynamic and creative architects of civic and religious institutions in western communities.
Book Synopsis Mormon Visual Culture and the American West by : Nathan Rees
Download or read book Mormon Visual Culture and the American West written by Nathan Rees and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the place of art in Latter-day Saint society during the first 50 years of the Utah settlement, beginning in 1847. Nathan Rees uncovers the critical role that images played in nineteenth-century Mormon religion, politics, and social practice. These artists not only represented, but actively participated in debates about theology, politics, race, gender, and sexuality at a time when Latter-day Saints were grappling with evolving doctrine, conflict with Native Americans, and political turmoil resulting from their practice of polygamy. The book makes an important contribution to art history, Mormon studies, American studies, and religious studies.
Book Synopsis American Heathens by : Joshua Paddison
Download or read book American Heathens written by Joshua Paddison and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 19th-century debate over whether the United States should be an explicitly Christian nation, California emerged as a central battleground. Racial groups that were perceived as godless and uncivilized were excluded from suffrage, and evangelism among Indians and the Chinese was seen as a politically incendiary act. Joshua Paddison sheds light on ReconstructionÕs impact on Indians and Asian Americans by illustrating how marginalized groups fought for a political voice, refuting racist assumptions with their lives, words, and faith. Reconstruction, he argues, was not merely a remaking of the South, but rather a multiracial and multiregional process of reimagining the nation.
Book Synopsis Jews on the Frontier by : Shari Rabin
Download or read book Jews on the Frontier written by Shari Rabin and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2017 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies presented by the Jewish Book Council Finalist, 2017 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, presented by the Jewish Book Council An engaging history of how Jews forged their own religious culture on the American frontier Jews on the Frontier offers a religious history that begins in an unexpected place: on the road. Shari Rabin recounts the journey of Jewish people as they left Eastern cities and ventured into the American West and South during the nineteenth century. It brings to life the successes and obstacles of these travels, from the unprecedented economic opportunities to the anonymity and loneliness that complicated the many legal obligations of traditional Jewish life. Without government-supported communities or reliable authorities, where could one procure kosher meat? Alone in the American wilderness, how could one find nine co-religionists for a minyan (prayer quorum)? Without identity documents, how could one really know that someone was Jewish? Rabin argues that Jewish mobility during this time was pivotal to the development of American Judaism. In the absence of key institutions like synagogues or charitable organizations which had played such a pivotal role in assimilating East Coast immigrants, ordinary Jews on the frontier created religious life from scratch, expanding and transforming Jewish thought and practice. Jews on the Frontier vividly recounts the story of a neglected era in American Jewish history, offering a new interpretation of American religions, rooted not in congregations or denominations, but in the politics and experiences of being on the move. This book shows that by focusing on everyday people, we gain a more complete view of how American religion has taken shape. This book follows a group of dynamic and diverse individuals as they searched for resources for stability, certainty, and identity in a nation where there was little to be found.
Book Synopsis God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land by : Todd M. Kerstetter
Download or read book God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land written by Todd M. Kerstetter and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many studies of religion in the West have focused on the region's diversity, freedom, and individualism, Todd M. Kerstetter brings together the three most glaring exceptions to those rules to explore the boundaries of tolerance as enforced by society and the U.S. government.God's Country, Uncle Sam's Landanalyzes Mormon history from the Utah Expedition and Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 through subsequent decades of federal legislative and judicial actions aimed at ending polygamy and limiting church power. It also focuses on the Lakota Ghost Dancers and the Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota (1890), and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas (1993). In sharp contrast to the mythic image of the West as the "Land of the Free," these three tragic episodes reveal the West as a cultural battleground--in the words of one reporter, "a collision of guns, God, and government." Kerstetter asks important questions about what happens when groups with a deep trust in their differing inner truths meet, and he exposes the religious motivations behind government policies that worked to alter Mormonism and extinguish Native American beliefs.
Book Synopsis The North American West in the Twenty-First Century by : Brenden W. Rensink
Download or read book The North American West in the Twenty-First Century written by Brenden W. Rensink and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume takes stories from the "modern West" of the late twentieth century and carefully pulls them toward the present--explicitly tracing continuity with and unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s.
Book Synopsis Religion in American Life by : Jon Butler
Download or read book Religion in American Life written by Jon Butler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Quite ambitious, tracing religion in the United States from European colonization up to the 21st century.... The writing is strong throughout."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "One can hardly do better than Religion in American Life.... A good read, especially for the uninitiated. The initiated might also read it for its felicity of narrative and the moments of illumination that fine scholars can inject even into stories we have all heard before. Read it."--Church History This new edition of Religion in American Life, written by three of the country's most eminent historians of religion, offers a superb overview that spans four centuries, illuminating the rich spiritual heritage central to nearly every event in our nation's history. Beginning with the state of religious affairs in both the Old and New Worlds on the eve of colonization and continuing through to the present, the book covers all the major American religious groups, from Protestants, Jews, and Catholics to Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, Buddhists, and New Age believers. Revised and updated, the book includes expanded treatment of religion during the Great Depression, of the religious influences on the civil rights movement, and of utopian groups in the 19th century, and it now covers the role of religion during the 2008 presidential election, observing how completely religion has entered American politics.
Book Synopsis Religion in America to 1865 by : Bryan F. LeBeau
Download or read book Religion in America to 1865 written by Bryan F. LeBeau and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The text provides an introduction to the history of religion in America from colonisation to the Civil War. The principle themes are growth, diversity and adaptation. Coverage includes native American religion and religion in the colonial period, the eve of the American Revolution, the early republic, the age of reform, and the Civil War. The topics are ordered chronologically, following the time lines of the secular history of America, allowing connection to be made between religious and secular history.
Book Synopsis The Spirit Moves West by : Rebecca Y. Kim
Download or read book The Spirit Moves West written by Rebecca Y. Kim and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spirit Moves West examines the phenomena of Korean missionaries in America. It delves into why and how Korean missionaries pursued missions in the United States and evangelized Americans and illuminates how a non-western mission movement evolves over time in the West.
Book Synopsis Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879–2009 by : Brandi Denison
Download or read book Ute Land Religion in the American West, 1879–2009 written by Brandi Denison and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A regional history of contact between Utes and white settlers, from 1879-2009, that examines the production of an idealized American religion in the American West through the intersection of religion, land, and cultural memory."--Provided by publisher.
Book Synopsis A Foreign Kingdom by : Christine Talbot
Download or read book A Foreign Kingdom written by Christine Talbot and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-12-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The years from 1852 to 1890 marked a controversial period in Mormonism, when the church's official embrace of polygamy put it at odds with wider American culture. In this study, Christine Talbot explores the controversial era, discussing how plural marriage generated decades of cultural and political conflict over competing definitions of legitimate marriage, family structure, and American identity. In particular, Talbot examines "the Mormon question" with attention to how it constructed ideas about American citizenship around the presumed separation of the public and private spheres. Contrary to the prevailing notion of man as political actor, woman as domestic keeper, and religious conscience as entirely private, Mormons enfranchised women and framed religious practice as a political act. The way Mormonism undermined the public/private divide led white, middle-class Americans to respond by attacking not just Mormon sexual and marital norms but also Mormons' very fitness as American citizens. Poised at the intersection of the history of the American West, Mormonism, and nineteenth-century culture and politics, this carefully researched exploration considers the ways in which Mormons and anti-Mormons both questioned and constructed ideas of the national body politic, citizenship, gender, the family, and American culture at large.
Book Synopsis Brigham Young, Colonizer of the American West: Diaries and Office Journals, 1832-1871 by : George D. Smith
Download or read book Brigham Young, Colonizer of the American West: Diaries and Office Journals, 1832-1871 written by George D. Smith and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining Brigham Young's legacy requires an understanding of his raw ambition and religious zeal. A formidable leader in both his church and country, Young's abilities coincided with the colonizing zeitgeist of nineteenth-century America. Thus, by 1877, some 400 Mormon settlements spanned the western frontier from Salt Lake City to outposts in Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, and California. As prophet of the LDS Church and governor of the proposed State of Deseret, Young led several campaigns for Utah statehood while defending polygamy and local sovereignty. His skillful and authoritarian leadership led historian Bernard de Voto to classify him as an "American genius," responsible for turning Joseph Smith's visions "into the seed of life." Young's diaries and journals reveal a man dedicated to his church, defensive of his spiritual and temporal claims to authority, and determined to create a modern Zion within the Utah desert. Editor George D. Smith's careful organization and annotation of Young's personal writings provide insights into the mind of Mormonism's dynamic church leader and frontier statesman.
