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‘God and Mammon’ religious protest and educational change in New England from the Revolution to the Gilded Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Keith Hampson
Keith Hampson*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Extract

I hasten at the start to point out that I am not an ecclesiastical historian, but a historian of America who is interested in church history since the field in which I work - educational history - desperately needs to be studied in a wider historical context. Then, as now, educational ideas, and the functions people ascribe to education, cannot be dissociated from the political, social, and economic background. Of all the many factors bearing upon the evolution of education in New England from approximately the 1780s to the 1880s religion was in several ways of central importance. Most studies have been interested in the religious nature of the mass of colleges founded from 1780 to 1860. My interest here is entirely different. Although the rhetoric naturally changed in emphasis, it seems to me that right from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century religious forces in New England, but of course not just there, used schools and colleges as cardinal agencies in efforts to restrain secularism and a growing materialism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 9: Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest , 1972 , pp. 351 - 364
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1972

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References

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page no 362 note 2 Peabody to Atwood, 20 January 1888; William, Lawrence, ‘The Sermon Preached at the Consecration of St John’s Chapel, Groton School, on Saturday, 13 October 1900’, in [The] Consecration of St John’s Chapel, [Groton School, Croton, Massachusetts] (Boston 1900) p 9 Google Scholar; Peabody, , ‘The Aim of Groton School’, in The Church Militant, III (Boston April 1900) p 3 Google Scholar.

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page no 363 note 2 [Horace Dutton Taft,] ‘Sermon’, 6 January 1935; Taft, H. D., Memories and Opinions (New York 1942) p 260 Google Scholar; ‘Sermon’, 22 September 1935. Horace Taft’s papers are in the school archives.

page no 364 note 1 Briggs, Le Barron R., School, College and Character (Boston 1901) p 11 Google Scholar. The concern of the pre-Civil War colleges for the moral ends of knowledge, embodied in the ‘liberal’ curriculum and collegiate principle, continued after the war more than has usually been recognised, see Peterson, G.E., The New England College in the Age of the University (Amherst 1964)Google Scholar, but on the survival of the older concepts in juxtaposition with new German ideas in the universities there is as yet no satisfactory study.

page no 364 note 2 See Potter, D. M., People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Folwell, W. W., ‘Inaugural 1869’, in University Addresses (Minneapolis 1909)Google Scholar.