The Baha'i Faith is a religion that arose in the Islamic milieu of mid nineteenth century Iran and entered the United States in 1894, after its basic teachings had been defined and the writings of its prophet had been completed. The number of American Baha'is quickly rose to abo…
Surveying the religious landscape of modern East Asia, one is struck by a curious fact: efflorescence of Protestantism in (South) Korea and the absence of such development in the neighboring countries of China and Japan. This is curious since all three countries are heavily shap…
The central argument of this thesis is that football in Scotland has acquired characteristics which make it a nationalistic, political and cultural repository. This has its origins in the post-Reformation period in Scotland, Irish immigration into Scotland and Scotland/Britain's…
It has long been accepted that the Catholic threat posed by Louis X1V played an important role in English politics from the late seventeenth century onwards. The expansionist politics of Louis and his attempts to eliminate Protestants within his sphere of influence enhanced the …
This thesis. looks at a group of texts, that it has identified as English Protestant~ antI-epIscopal martyrologies, in their social context. It examines the dIalogue In print and manuscript between Protestant reformers in Tudor England and the bishops who opposed them. I argue t…
This dissertation explores how seventeenth-century German and Dutch Protestants approached the task of interpreting the Bible according to its literal sense, or sensus literalis. It focuses on two of the most respected and learned Protestant theologians and exegetes active in th…
The historiography on western European Holy Land pilgrimage effectively ends with the fifteenth century, giving the inaccurate impression that early modern western Christians either did not visit Jerusalem or, if they did, they were not true pilgrims. Though pilgrim numbers cert…
9/11 and the wars which followed have called historians of both the United States and the Middle East to seek the origins of America’s relationship with the Islamic world. The prevailing historiographic consensus presents America’s present-day policies in the Middle East as prod…
Cross-national empirical research consistently suggests that, on average, former British colonies are both more democratic and have more stable democratic transitions. I argue that former British colonies are distinct not because Great Britain was a democracy—so were France and …
This dissertation focused on how religious coping has changed for ex-Catholic Latino/a evangelical Protestants after their conversion. The research literature on religious coping for Latino/as indicated that religiosity is an important aspect of Latino/a life and that there is a…
This thesis intends to identify the precise prescriptions for social and economic mobility intended by Horatio Alger Jr. and Russell H. Conwell in their works Ragged Dick and “Acres of Diamonds.” Furthermore, to explain why their prescriptions diverge from one another using the …
This dissertation traces the development and reception of a particular accommodation between scientific knowledge and biblical knowledge, which I have named scientific biblical criticism, in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. My research focuses on …
In this thesis, I will offer three transcriptions from Claude Goudimel’s (1514-1572) Les pseaumes mis en rime Françoise par Clement Marot et Theodore de Beza, mis en musique à quarte parties par Claude Goudimel (The Psalms Set in French Meter by Clement Marot and Theodore Beza, …
This thesis offers the first sustained study of the various ways that English-language authors represented the voice of God during the early modern period. By situating the idea of God’s voice in the context of Protestant anxiety over scriptural usage, I consider how writers wor…
This thesis examines low-ranking British soldiers’ memoirs in the nineteenth century to determine the extent to which they identified with Christianity and how their expressions of faith differed from each other. Using twelve narratives published between 1811–1863, it finds that…
Megachurch business is booming, and still, the Western Church is in decline. For the most part, those who call themselves Christian do not engage in discipleship or spiritual formation or integrate as Christians into their local communities. American teenagers reflect a Western …
This thesis examines the political posturing and rhetoric of two major Protestant denominations in Brazil—Presbyterians and Methodists—during the Vargas Era (1930-1945). During the Vargas years, the Catholic Church saw a renewed period of expansion, consolidation, political acti…
This dissertation explores the intersections of medicine and religion through a rhetorical historiography of nineteenth century birth medicine in the United States. It asks: How did religious sensibilities motivate and shape rhetoric in response to human suffering in the field o…
In 1898, the United States substituted the Puerto Rican government with a military government. From 1990 on, a so-called civil government was established under the authority of the War Department and the President's office. Also a policy was established to Americanize the Puerto…