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  The Copts of Egypt: Challenges of Modernisation and Identity

  Vivian Ibrahim

  The Copts of Egypt, who consist of 10-15 per cent of the population, have traditionally been viewed as a 'beleaguered and persecuted minority'. Using newly discovered Coptic archival sources Vivian Ibrahim presents a fresh and vivid alternative reading of the community during the twentieth century. Avoiding the established portrayal of a monolithic entity headed by the Coptic Pope, Ibrahim examines the multifaceted dimensions of the Coptic community, assessing Coptic-State relations on one hand and Coptic intra-communal dimensions on the other. Examining the impact of the British Occupation of Egypt on the making of new national identities, she explores the emergence of a new politically active Coptic class; highlighting popular Coptic grassroots mobilisation during the 1919 revolution through the case-study of the Coptic priest Qommus Sergius. She discusses the centrality of the Copt and Wafdist, Makram Ebeid, on constitutional politics, and his role as a whistleblower during the 'Black Book Affair'. Breaking with the portrayal of a defenceless community, Ibrahim also reveals a strong Coptic response to the emergence and threats of Political Islam through the press. She presents and analyses for the first time, the unique satirical 'Ode to the Fezzed Shaykh', aimed at Muslim Brotherhood leader Hassan al-Banna. In 'The Copts of Egypt', Ibrahim also reveals fierce factionalism within the Coptic community in its struggle for modernisation. Examining mass corruption in monasteries and in the run-up to papal election campaigns, she analyses the ways in which the Church used the Egyptian State to bolster its claim to political as well as religious representation over the community. Through the establishment of benevolent and philanthropic societies, Ibrahim argues that Coptic youths were amongst the first to negotiate a role for themselves in post-revolutionary Egypt. Adopting President Nasser's revolutionary rhetoric of tathir, or cleansing, Ibrahim examines how a group of Coptic youths abducted their Pope and forced through their own agenda of religious and political reform. This book will be essential reading for scholars of the Coptic community and Middle East Studies.

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  Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South

  Jarod Roll

  Crossing the color line with revivalism among working-class Southerners In Spirit of Rebellion, Jarod Roll documents an alternative tradition of American protest by linking working-class political movements to grassroots religious revivals. He reveals how ordinary rural citizens in the South used available resources and their shared faith to defend their agrarian livelihoods amid the political and economic upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century. On the frontier of the New Cotton South in Missouri's Bootheel, the relationships between black and white farmers were complicated by racial tensions and bitter competition. Despite these divisions, workers found common ground as dissidents fighting for economic security, decent housing, and basic health, ultimately drawing on the democratic potential of evangelical religion to wage working-class revolts against commodity agriculture and the political forces that buoyed it. Roll convincingly shows how the moral clarity and spiritual vigor these working people found in Pentecostal revivals gave them the courage and fortitude to develop an expansive agenda of workers' rights by tapping into existing organizations such as the Socialist Party, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the NAACP, and the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.

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  The Shadow of Enlightenment: Optical and Political Transparency in France 1789-1848

  Theresa H. Levitt

  This book is the first to place revolutionary advances in light and optics in the cultural context of France in the first half of the nineteenth century. The narrative follows the work and careers of France's two chief rivals on the subject of light: Arago and Biot. Their disagreement began on the subject of technical optics, but expanded to include politics, religion, agricultural policy, education, dinner companions, housing arrangements, photography, railroads, vital forces, astrology, the Egyptian calendar, and colonial slavery. At the heart of their disagreement was always a question of visibility, and the extent of transparency or obscurity they assigned to the world. Optical transparency formed a crucial condition for Arago's vision of a liberal republic governed by reason. Biot's call for strong forms of authority rested on his claims that the world did not offer itself up for universal agreement so easily.

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  The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent

  Jeffrey R. Watt

  A fascinating examination of alleged demon possession and witchcraft in a seventeenth-century convent in Carpi, Italy. In 1636, residents at the convent of Santa Chiara in Carpi in northern Italy were struck by an extraordinary illness that provoked bizarre behavior. Eventually numbering fourteen, the afflicted nuns were subject to screaming fits, throwing themselves on the floor, and falling abruptly into a deep sleep. When medical experts' cures proved ineffective, exorcists ministered to the women and concluded that they were possessed by demons and the victims of witchcraft. Catering to women from elite families, the nunnery suffered much turmoil for three years and, remarkably, three of the victims died from their ills. A maverick nun and a former confessor were widely suspected to be responsible, through witchcraft, for these woes. Based primarily on the exhaustive investigation by the Inquisition of Modena, The Scourge of Demons examines this fascinating case in its historical context. The travails of Santa Chiara occurred at a time when Europe witnessed peaks in both witch-hunting and in the numbers of people reputedly possessed by demons. Female religious figures appeared particularly prone to demonic attacks, and Counter-Reformation Church authorities were especially interested in imposing stricter discipline on convents. Watt carefully considers how the nuns of Santa Chiara understood and experienced alleged possession and witchcraft, concluding that Santa Chiara's diabolical troubles and their denouement -- involving the actions of nuns, confessors, inquisitorial authorities, and exorcists -- were profoundly shaped by the unique confluence of religious, cultural, judicial, and intellectual trends that flourished in the 1630s.

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  The Long Reformation

  Jeffrey R. Watt

  Part of the Problems in European Civilization series, this volume includes secondary-source essays organized around the major controversies and interpretations of Reformation history, including The "Successes" of the Reformation and The Reformation of Rituals, with an emphasis on how the effects of the Reformation unfolded over time. The text is suitable for upper-level courses focused exclusively on the Reformation, as well as courses in Western Civilization, early modern Europe, or Renaissance history. Pedagogical tools include chapter introductions, timelines, illustrations, maps, and suggested readings.

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  Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation

  John R. Neff

  By the end of the Civil War, fatalities from that conflict had far exceeded previous American experience, devastating families and communities alike. As John Neff shows, commemorating the 620,000 lives lost proved to be a persistent obstacle to the hard work of reuniting the nation, as every memorial observation compelled painful recollections of the war. Neff contends that the significance of the Civil War dead has been largely overlooked and that the literature on the war has so far failed to note how commemorations of the dead provide a means for both expressing lingering animosities and discouraging reconciliation. Commemoration—from private mourning to the often extravagant public remembrances exemplified in cemeteries, monuments, and Memorial Day observances—provided Americans the quintessential forum for engaging the wars meaning.

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  On the Communion of Damasus and Meletius: Fourth-Century Synodal Formulae in the Codex Veronensis LX, with Critical Edition and Translation Studies and Texts 145

  Lester L. Field Jr.

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  Workers at War: Labor in China’s Arsenals, 1937-1953

  Joshua H. Howard

  This book focuses on the lives, struggles, and contrasting perspectives of the 60,000 workers, military administrators, and technical staff employed in the largest, most strategic industry of the Nationalist government, the armaments industry based in the wartime capital, Chongqing. The author argues that China's arsenal workers participated in three interlocked conflicts between 1937 and 1953: a war of national liberation, a civil war, and a class war. The work adds to the scholarship on the Chinese revolution, which has previously focused primarily on rural China, showing how workers’ alienation from the military officers directing the arsenals eroded the legitimacy of the Nationalist regime and how the Communists mobilized working-class support in Chongqing. Moreover, in emphasizing the urban, working-class, and nationalist components of the 1949 revolution, the author demonstrates the multiple sources of workers’ identities and thus challenges previous studies that have exclusively stressed workers’ particularistic or regional identities.

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  From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe

  Jeffrey R. Watt

  In the broadest treatment yet of suicide in Europe during the period 1500–1800, 11 authors combine elements of social, cultural, legal, and intellectual history to trace important changes in the ways Europeans experienced and understood voluntary death. Well into the seventeenth century, Europeans viewed suicide as a terrible crime and an unforgivable sin resulting from demonic temptation. By the late eighteenth century, however, suicide was rarely subject to judicial penalties, and society tended to blame self-inflicted death on insanity rather than on the devil. From Sin to Insanity shows that early modern Europe witnessed nothing less than the birth of modern suicide: increasing in frequency, self-inflicted death became decriminalized, secularized, and medicalized, viewed as a regrettable but not shameful result of reversals in fortune or physical or mental infirmity. The ten chapters focus on suicide cases and attitudes toward self-murder from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries in geographical settings as diverse as Scandinavia and Hungary, France and Germany, England and Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands.

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  Choosing Death: Suicide and Calvinism in Early Modern Geneva

  Jeffrey R. Watt

  In this case study of the Republic of Geneva, Jeffrey R. Watt convincingly argues the early modern era marked decisive change in the history of suicide. His analysis of criminal proceedings and death records shows that magistrates of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries often imposed penalties against the bodies and estates of those who took their lives. According to beliefs shared by theologian John Calvin, magistrates, and common folk, self-murder was caused by demon possession. Similar views and practices were found among both Protestants and Catholics throughout Reformation Europe. By contrast, in the late eighteenth century many philosophies defended the right to take one's life under certain circumstances; Geneva’s magistrates in effect decriminalized suicide; and even commoners blamed suicide on mental illness or personal reversals, not on satanic influences. Watt uses Geneva's uniquely rich and well-organized sources in this first study to provide reliable evidence on suicide rates for premodern Europe. He places his findings within a wide range of historical and sociological scholarship, and while suicide was rare through the seventeenth century, he shows that Geneva experienced an explosion in self-inflicted deaths after 1750. Quite simply, early modern Geneva witnessed nothing less than the birth of modern suicide both in attitudes toward it—thoroughly secularized, medicalized, and stripped of diabolical undertones—and the frequency of it.

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  American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998 (1999)

  Ted M. Ownby

  The dreams of abundance, choice, and novelty that have fueled the growth of consumer culture in the United States would seem to have little place in the history of Mississippi--a state long associated with poverty, inequality, and rural life. But as Ted Ownby demonstrates in this innovative study, consumer goods and shopping have played important roles in the development of class, race, and gender relations in Mississippi from the antebellum era to the present. After examining the general and plantation stores of the nineteenth century, a period when shopping habits were stratified according to racial and class hierarchies, Ownby traces the development of new types of stores and buying patterns in the twentieth century, when women and African Americans began to wield new forms of economic power. Using sources as diverse as store ledgers, blues lyrics, and the writings of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, and Will Percy, he illuminates the changing relationships among race, rural life, and consumer goods and, in the process, offers a new way to understand the connection between power and culture in the American South.

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  Outside the Lines: African Americans and the Integration of the National Football League

  Charles K. Ross

  Outside the Lines traces how sports laid a foundation for social change long before the judicial system formally recognized the inequalities of racial separation. Integrating sports teams to include white and black athletes alike, the National Football League served as a microcosmic fishbowl of the highs and lows, the trials and triumphs, of racial integration. Watching a football game on a Sunday evening, most sports fans do not realize the profound impact the National Football League had on the civil rights movement. Similarly, in a sport where seven out of ten players are black, few are fully aware of the history and contributions of their athletic forebears. Among the touchdowns and tackles lies a rich history of African American life and the struggle to achieve equal rights. Although the Supreme Court did not reverse their 1896 decision of "separate but equal" in the Plessy v Ferguson case until more than fifty years later, sports laid a foundation for social change long before our judicial system formally recognized the inequalities of racial separation. Integrating sports teams to include white and black athletes alike, the National Football League served as a microcosmic fishbowl of the highs and lows, the trials and triumphs, of racial integration. In this chronicle of black NFL athletes, Charles K. Ross has given us the story of the Jackie Robinsons of American football.

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  Piety, Power, and Politics: Religion and Nation Formation in Guatemala, 1821-1871

  Douglas Sullivan-González

  Douglass Sullivan Gonzalez examines the influence of religion on the development of nationalism in Guatemala during the period 1821-1871, focusing on the relationship between Rafael Carrera amd the Guatemalan Catholic Church. He illustrates the peculiar and fascinating blend of religious fervor, popular power, and caudillo politics that inspired a multiethnic and multiclass alliance to defend the Guatemalan nation in the mid-nineteenth century. Led by the military strongman Rafael Carrera, an unlikely coalition of mestizos, Indians, and creoles (whites born in the Americas) overcame a devastating civil war in the late 1840s and withstood two threats (1851 and 1863) from neighboring Honduras and El Salvador that aimed at reintegrating conservative Guatemala into a liberal federation of Central American nations. Sullivan-Gonzalez shows that religious discourse and ritual were crucial to the successful construction and defense of independent Guatemala. Sermons commemorating independence from Spain developed a covenantal theology that affirmed divine protection if the Guatemalan people embraced Catholicism. Sullivan-Gonzalez examines the extent to which this religious and nationalist discourse was popularly appropriated.Recently opened archives of the Guatemalan Catholic Church revealed that the largely mestizo population of the central and eastern highlands responded favorably to the church's message. Records indicate that Carrera depended upon the clerics' ability to pacify the rebellious inhabitants during Guatemala's civil war (1847-1851) and to rally them to Guatemala's defense against foreign invaders. Though hostile to whites and mestizos, the majority indigenous population of the western highlands identified with Carrera as their liberator. Their admiration for and loyalty to Carrera allowed them a territory that far exceeded their own social space. Though populist and antidemocratic, the historic legacy of the Carrera years is the Guatemalan nation. Sullivan-Gonzalez details how theological discourse, popular claims emerging from mestizo and Indian communities, and the caudillo's ability to finesse his enemies enabled Carrera to bring together divergent and contradictory interests to bind many nations into one.

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  America’s Feeble Weapon: Funding the Marshall Plan in France and Italy, 1948-1950

  Chiarella Esposito

  Unlike earlier studies of the Marshall Plan, this volume concentrates not on events in Washington, but on those in France and Italy--the second and third largest beneficiaries of the Plan. Using U.S., French, and Italian sources, the author analyzes the impact of the Plan on French and Italian economic policy between 1948 and 1950. Taking neither a realist nor revisionist stance, the author argues that massive American aid to Western Europe was a perceived political necessity--that American, French, and Italian governments shared with Truman the strategic-ideological goal of Communist containment. Yet, not all of the philosophy embedded in the Plan could be implemented, and American ideology did not, therefore, have a decisive influence in reshaping postwar French or Italian economic policies. The book's introduction discusses the goals of the Marshall Plan and how postwar political circumstances led France and Italy to dissimilar economic recovery paths that would often clash with American goals. The following seven chapters analyze how American officials sought to influence French and Italian economic policies. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 cover the French case; chapters 5, 6, and 7, the Italian. The concluding chapter provides a direct comparison of the French and Italian experiences and suggests implications for current historiographical debates.

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  Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (1990)

  Ted M. Ownby

  The Praying South and the Fighting South are two of our most popular images of white southern culture. In Subduing Satan, Ted Ownby details the tensions between these complex--and often opposing--attitudes. "Ownby's re-creation of male recreation is rich and fascinating. He paints the saloon and the street, the cockfighting and dogfighting rings as realms of distinctly male vices, enjoyed lustily by men seeking to escape the sweet virtue of the Southern Christian home."--Nation "A bold new thesis. . . . [Ownby] gives us guideposts in the ongoing search for the meaning of southern history."--Journal of Southern History "I suspect that for many years ahead Ted Ownby's Subduing Satan will serve as the standard guide on how to write religious social history."--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida "This is one of the freshest and most interesting books written about the American South in years. By focusing on the cultural conflicts of everyday life, Ownby gets us right to the heart of white culture in the South between Reconstruction and the 1920s."--Edward L. Ayers, University of Virginia

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  The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchâtel, 1550-1800

  Jeffrey R. Watt