The Kingdom of God and the American Dream: The Religious and Secular Ideals of American History. Sherwood EddyThe Course of American Democratic Thought: An Intellectual History Since 1815. Ralph Henry Gabriel

Abstract The Progressive years, from the 1890s to 1919, were the last period of American history during which the “national faith” was publicly proclaimed in the political arena. By the 1930s, politicians excused themselves from appearing on platforms with the ministers and the symbols of Christian faith. Protestant clergymen owed their lease on the attentions of the politicians and the voting public of those years to the intellectuals' patience with the liberal preachers ' reinterpretation of the agenda of progress in terms of the imminent, poslmillenial “Kingdom of God.” Meanwhile, the spectacular advance of premillenialism in the ranks of the laity embarrassed the clergy by exposing the gulf between the liberal-philosophic commitments of the learned leadership and the continued investments of the laity in a supernaturalist understanding of the Christian faith. The vehemence of the Social Gospelers ' denunciation of premillenialism is the best clue to their determination not to accept the reality that would henceforth govern the life of the churches: that Christian faith and doctrine no longer belonged in the general culture.

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European Approaches to American History: The Role of Religion in American Intellectual History as Seen from Europe

Reviews in American History ◽

10.2307/2702201 ◽

1986 ◽

Vol 14 (4) ◽

pp. 569

Author(s):

Hans R. Guggisberg

Keyword(s):

Intellectual History ◽

American History ◽

American Intellectual ◽

American Intellectual History ◽

Role Of Religion

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The Challenges of Democracy: James Harvey Robinson, the New History, and Adult Education for Citizenship

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era ◽

10.1017/s1537781400002358 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

pp. 48-79 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Kevin Mattson

Keyword(s):

Intellectual History ◽

Progressive Era ◽

American History ◽

William James ◽

The Political ◽

Intellectual Work ◽

Frederick Jackson Turner ◽

Self Recognition ◽

The Moment ◽

Usable Past

Mention James Harvey Robinson and most students of American history will think two words: “New History.” Robinson tried to articulate what better-known historians of the period – Charles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington – were doing in their research and writing. As Richard Hofstadter explained, the leading historians of the Progressive Era tried “to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment.…They attempted to find a usable past related to the broadest needs of a nation fully launched upon its own industrialization, and to make history an active instrument of self-recognition and self-improvement.” Situated firmly in the “revolt against formalism” that marked Progressive Era intellectual work, historians made their research instrumental, teasing out what William James called the “cash value” of ideas. Historical writing could no longer, in Robinson's own words, “catalogue mere names of person and places which have not the least importance for the reader.” Rather, it had to “help us understand ourselves and our fellows and the problems and prospects of mankind.” In those words and his pioneering (though largely forgotten) work in European and intellectual history, Robinson codified the purpose of what has come to be known as Progressive history.

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