In 1846 an obscure French schoolteacher, Peter Stewart Ney, died in Rowan County, North Carolina. He served in the various small home schoolrooms scattered among the Presbyterian gentry in Rowan (and to a lesser extent Iredell, Cabarrus and Mecklenburg counties) in...
Miles Smith
Musings on history, politics, religion, and all the other things we take too seriously in the 21st Century.
Evangelicals, Guns, and Church and State in the Early Republic
19th Century ministers regularly preached to men carrying guns. Politicians and military figures in the Nineteenth Century United States publicly and enthusiastically committed to the so-called separation of church and state also regularly ordered government workers, soldiers, and militiamen to attend religious services.
Early Republic Southern Baptists, Education, and Populism
During the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries, North American Baptists joined their Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian counterparts in creating colleges and seminaries institutions to teach and train laypeople and seminarians. Despite a...
Christianity, Education, and Secularism in 1900 America
At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, secularization in Western intellectual and political life led to policy changes in education, particularly in France and in the United States. The American republic’s commitment to a disestablished federal religious regime...
Passion and Constraint in the Early Republic Religious Order
Nineteenth Century Protestant intellectuals embraced a positivistic vision of liberty in the Early Republic. Liberty in the era generally meant the freedom to pursue societal good. This American religious order was not in any meaningful way theocratic, but it was...
Anglicans and Education in the Early Republic
Changes in education remain among the most significant alterations in intellectual life in the United States. The growth of colleges and universities from primarily liberal arts and religion institutions into credentialization bodies chiefly aimed at procuring...
Early Republic Evangelicals, Abortion, and the Culture Wars
In 1823, Hugh Lenox Hodge became a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Hodge hailed from a well-known Philadelphia family. His father, also Hugh, served as a physician in Early Republic Pennsylvania. The elder Hodge’s sons made their family...
More Than Protestant, But Never Less Than Protestant: An Addendum to Timon Cline
Timon Cline has offered a very good piece at The American Reformer on the Protestant foundation of the states that formed the American Union in 1788. It’s a worthwhile piece that touches on a broad range of historical realities in the Early Republic. Cline...
Be for the City: 19th Century Evangelicals and Progressive Urban Theonomy
Nineteenth Century Evangelical Protestant reformers foreshadowed their late Twentieth Century co-religionists by their heavy influence on social and moral reform particularly in northern cities. In his Evangelical Gotham, Kyle Roberts noted that Evangelicals in early...
The Purity of the Church of England
In 1852 the bishop of Exeter charged his chancellor, E.C. Harington, with preaching on the foundations of the Church of England. Harington used the opportunity to proclaim what he believed were the explicitly apostolic and biblical origins of the English Reformation....