Re Forming History

Does the discipline of history need a reformation? How should Christian faith shape the ways historians do their work? This book, written for students, considers the “how” of doing history. The authors first examine the current “liturgies” of the historical profession and suggest that the discipline is in crisis. They argue for “re-formed” Christian practices and methodologies for history. The book asks important questions: why do we do history, and for whom? How should faith shape how we do our research and tell stories? What do we owe the dead? How should Christian historians practice “dangerous memory”? And how can Christian historians do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God? How might we rethink, reform, renew, reimagine, and re-practice the study of the past? Christian historians must be sentinels of hope against the world’s forgetfulness, the authors argue, and this book offers some pathways for rethinking our practices from a Christian perspective.

The slave experience was a defining one in American history, and not surprisingly, has been a significant and powerful trope in African American literature. In Re-Forming the Past, A. Timothy Spaulding examines contemporary revisions of slave narratives that use elements of the fantastic to redefine the historical and literary constructions of American slavery. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, postmodern slave narratives such as Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Charles Johnson's Ox Herding Tale and Middle Passage, Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories, and Samuel Delaney's Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand set out to counter the usual slave narrative's reliance on realism and objectivity by creating alternative histories based on subjective, fantastic, and non-realistic representations of slavery. As these texts critique traditional conceptions of history, identity, and aesthetic form, they simultaneously re-invest these concepts with a political agency that harkens back to the original project of the 19th-century slave narratives. In their rejection of mimetic representation and traditional historiography, Spaulding contextualizes postmodern slave narrative. By addressing both literary and popular African American texts, Re-Forming the Past expands discussions of both the African American literary tradition and postmodern culture.

While many accept that math is a universal, culturally indifferent subject in school, this book demonstrates that this is anything but true. Building off of a historically conscious understanding of school reform, Diaz makes the case that the language of mathematics, and the symbols through which it is communicated, is not merely about the alleged cultural indifference of mathematical thinking; rather, mathematical teaching relates to historical, cultural, political, and social understandings of equality that order who the child is and should be. Focusing on elementary math for all education reforms in America since the mid-twentieth century, Diaz offers an alternative way of thinking about the subject that recognizes the historical making of contemporary notions of inequality and difference.

In this revelatory account of the people who founded the New England colonies, historian David D. Hall compares the reforms they enacted with those attempted in England during the period of the English Revolution. Bringing with them a deep fear of arbitrary, unlimited authority, these settlers based their churches on the participation of laypeople and insisted on "consent" as a premise of all civil governance. Puritans also transformed civil and criminal law and the workings of courts with the intention of establishing equity. In this political and social history of the five New England colonies, Hall provides a masterful re-evaluation of the earliest moments of New England's history, revealing the colonists to be the most effective and daring reformers of their day.

Does the discipline of history need a reformation? How should Christian faith shape the ways historians do their work? This book, written for students, considers the "how" of doing history. The authors first examine the current "liturgies" of the historical profession and suggest that the discipline is in crisis. They argue for "re-formed" Christian practices and methodologies for history. The book asks important questions: why do we do history, and for whom? How should faith shape how we do our research and tell stories? What do we owe the dead? How should Christian historians practice "dangerous memory"? And how can Christian historians do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God? How might we rethink, reform, renew, reimagine, and re-practice the study of the past? Christian historians must be sentinels of hope against the world's forgetfulness, the authors argue, and this book offers some pathways for rethinking our practices from a Christian perspective.

Compares the processes leading to market reform experiments and its political effects in Latin America and Europe

Highlighting the crucial yet largely overlooked role played by society's middle layers in the historical development of Latin America, Patrick Barr-Melej provides the first comprehensive analysis of the rise of Chile's middle-class reform movement and its profound impact on that country's cultural and political landscapes. He shows how a diverse collection of middle-class intellectuals, writers, politicians, educators, and bureaucrats forged a "progressive" nationalism and advanced an ambitious cultural-political project between the 1890s and 1940s. Together, reformers challenged the power of elite groups and sought to quell working-class revolutionary activism as they endeavored to democratize culture and fortify liberal democracy. Using sources that range from archival documents and newspapers to short stories, novels, and school textbooks, Barr-Melej examines the reform movement's cultural ideas and their political applications, especially as they were articulated in the areas of literature and public education. In the process, he provides a new framework for understanding Chile's cultural and political evolution, as well as the complicated place of the middle class in a society experiencing the swift changes inherent in capitalist modernization.

People tend to place the Reformers on a pedestal and act like they completed the revolution, but they did not. Why was the Protestant Reformation only a partial restoration? It was because they used the literal method of interpreting the Bible selectively. Ever Reforming will guide the reader to understand all that needed to be reformed, how the Reformers started the process, and the way in which that led to Dispensational Theology and the full recovery of the literal method of interpreting God's Word.