American Evangelical Protestantism And European Immigrants 1800 1924

Few topics are as pertinent to the American political scene as immigration. This timely book examines the attitude of American Evangelical Protestants toward European immigration into the United States before the Immigration Act of 1924. Of particular interest are the effects, as seen by evangelicals, that immigration had in the cities, in education, in politics, and in the evangelical quest to win the prohibition of alcohol. It also addresses the rise of the 19th century evangelical's main ethnic opponent, the Irish immigrant, and the Irish dominance of the American Catholic Church. The text is based largely upon the writings, speeches, and sermons of evangelicalism.

A history of mainline Protestant responses to immigrants and refugees during the twentieth century Open Hearts, Closed Doors uncovers the largely overlooked role that liberal Protestants played in fostering cultural diversity in America and pushing for new immigration laws during the forty years following the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. These efforts resulted in the complete reshaping of the US cultural and religious landscape. During this period, mainline Protestants contributed to the national debate over immigration policy and joined the charge for immigration reform, advocating for a more diverse pool of newcomers. They were successful in their efforts, and in 1965 the quota system based on race and national origin was abolished. But their activism had unintended consequences, because the liberal immigration policies they supported helped to end over three centuries of white Protestant dominance in American society. Yet, Pruitt argues, in losing their cultural supremacy, mainline Protestants were able to reassess their mission. They rolled back more strident forms of xenophobia, substantively altering the face of mainline Protestantism and laying foundations for their responses to today’s immigration debates. More than just a historical portrait, this volume is a timely reminder of the power of religious influence in political matters.

The topic of immigration is at the center of contemporary politics and, from a scholarly perspective, existing studies have documented that attitudes towards immigration have brought about changes in both partisanship and voting behavior. However, many scholars have missed or misconstrued the role of religion in this transformation, particularly evangelical Protestant Christianity. This book examines the historical and contemporary relationships between religion and immigration politics, with a particularly in-depth analysis of the fault lines within evangelicalism—divisions not only between whites and non-whites, but also the increasingly consequential disconnect between elites and laity within white evangelicalism. The book’s empirical analysis relies on original interviews with Christian leaders, data from original church surveys conducted by the authors, and secondary analysis of several national public opinion surveys. It concludes with suggestions for bridging the elite/laity and racial divides. Ruth M. Melkonian-Hoover: (Ph.D., Emory University) is Chair and Professor of Political Science at Gordon College, Massachusetts. She has contributed chapters to Faith in a Pluralist Age (2018) and Is the Good Book Good Enough? (2011). She has published in a wide range of journals including Social Science Quarterly, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, Latin American Perspectives, Political Research Quarterly, Comment, and Capital Commentary. Lyman A. Kellstedt: (Ph.D., University of Illinois) is Professor of Political Science (emeritus) at Wheaton College, Illinois. He has authored or coauthored numerous articles, book chapters, and books in religion and politics, including Religion and the Culture Wars (1996), The Bully Pulpit (1997), and The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Politics (2009).

The history of American evangelicalism is perhaps best understood by examining its turning points - those moments when it took on a new scope, challenge, or influence. The Great Awakening, the rise of fundamentalism and Pentecostalism, the emergence of Billy Graham?all these developments and many more have given shape to one of the most dynamic movements in American religious history. Taken together, these turning points serve as a clear and helpful roadmap for understanding how evangelicalism has become what it is today. Each chapter in this book has been written by one of the world's top experts in American religious history, and together they form a single narrative of evangelicalism's remarkable development. Here is an engaging, balanced, coherent history of American evangelicalism from its origins as a small movement to its status as a central player in the American religious story. - from publisher.

This pioneering study sheds new light on racial dynamics in the urban Southwest at a critical juncture in the history of the region and the nation. It focuses upon the experiences of ethnoracial minorities, particularly African Americans and Mexican immigrants in Austin, Texas from the dawn of the Progressive Era to the onset of the Great Depression. Through this lens, McDonald explores the issues of migration, proletarianization, marginalization, adaptation, identity, and community. He reveals how, in response to the exponential growth of the local ethnic-Mexican population, the white elite of the Lone Star State’s capital adapted the city’s bipartite system of segregation, which had traditionally separated blacks from whites, to incorporate Mexicans as a third and separate element, neither black nor white. As well as examining how African Americans and Mexican Americans responded to life in a racially-stratified society, McDonald examines the often fraught relationship between these groups.

This dissertation will examine the attitude of American Evangelical Protestantism towards immigration to the United States from its inception until the Immigration Act of 1924. It will also take into consideration the effect that the Roman Catholic Church had upon the evangelist's thinking on the subject of immigration. The examination will include the formation of the evangelist's ideas during the American antebellum period when evangelism became a primary part of the Protestant ethos. The dissertation's chapters will outline the effect that this basically non-Protestant immigration had on American: cities, politics, and education. It will also deal with the evangelist's chief adversary, the Irish and their control of the American Catholic Church as well as their control of politics in the large urban areas of the Northeast. Chapter four will take the reader through one of the evangelist's primary organizations for recognizing and combating its problems, the Evangelical Alliance. A chapter also treats with an evangelical success; the enactment of a law against alcohol, a problem that the evangelists believed was primarily fostered by the Irish and German immigrants. Finally, the conclusion, which is split into two parts, one giving the necessity for immigration restriction from the viewpoint of the nativist, and the other from the viewpoint of the evangelist, a necessity which has been proven by the words of the evangelists themselves in their writings, speeches, and sermons.

Before the Civil War, Coney Island boasted a beach, a dozen small hotels with ramshackle bathhouses, some chowder stands and a few saloons. After the war, it was taken over by powerful individuals who made its 0.7 square miles a domain of the wealthy. By 1905, with the population of New York City at four million, the city’s amusement park builders designed an entertainment wonderland on the island that even the poor could enjoy, creating a “nickel empire,” where visitors paid five cents for the subway, five cents for a Nathan’s hot dog and five cents for a ride. In 1910, Coney Island saw 20 million visitors—more than Disneyland and Disney World combined could claim 70 years later, adjusted for population growth. Through the decades, the island has seen changes of fortune, floods and fires, cycles of decay and rehabilitation. Yet the ultimate power on the island was and is the government of the city of New York, which—for good or ill—has made Coney Island what it is today.

Nazism remains an enigma. Historians do not know whether to slot Nazism as a phenomenon of the political “right” or “left,” largely because of a misunderstanding of how central eugenics was to the regime. Eugenics, or “racial hygiene,” was at the core of National Socialism’s domestic policy, foreign policy, culture wars, and even Hitler’s obsession with cars, highways, and city planning. Thus, no coherent understanding of the regime is possible without first grasping the nature of eugenics. Eugenics did not originate with Nazi Germany. It was the culmination of a worldwide movement that was widely accepted by the global scientific and academic community. This book traces the origins of the Nazi eugenics state, working backward down the timeline, tracing from leaf down to the root. We investigate this 100-year trajectory from its beginnings in British and American Academia, delving into the conveniently forgotten inner-workings of a scientific era, uncovering previously unpublished manuscripts, professional correspondence, and conveniently forgotten publications. With the centenary of The Holocaust looming, uprooting the web of professional connections that engendered this movement is in order. The seeds of Holocaust denial take root and prosper with misinformation. Clarity and transparency are imperative, as they leave no room for denial theories that would deprive the victims of justice, or rob the living of a future. www.RaceOfMasters.com  NOTE: A preliminary version of this book was circulated amongst academic circles and other interested parties as an Advanced Readers Copy (A.R.C.) in 2015. This version is a part the Eugenics Anthology seven-book series that is currently being completed by A.E. Samaan. Hardbound versions of the books will not be released until the series is complete, and all the puzzle pieces in place. For more information, please visit EugenicsAnthology.com