Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the Young Men's Christian Association built more than a thousand community centers across the United States and in major cities around the world. Dubbed "manhood factories" by Teddy Roosevelt, these iconic buildings served as athletic centers and residential facilities for a rapidly growing urban male population. In Manhood Factories, Paula Lupkin goes behind the reserved Beaux-Arts facades of typical YMCA buildings constructed in this period to understand the urban anxieties, moral agendas, and conceptions of masculinity that guided their design, construction, and use. She shows that YMCA patrons like J. P. Morgan, Cyrus McCormick Jr., and John Wanamaker hoped to create "Christian clubhouses" that would counteract the corrupting influences of the city. At first designed by leading American architects, including James Renwick Jr. and William Le Baron Jenney, and then standardized by the YMCA's own building bureau, YMCAs combined elements of men's clubs, department stores, hotels, and Sunday schools. Every aspect of the building process was informed by this mission, Lupkin argues, from raising funds, selecting the site and the architect, determining the exterior style, arranging and furnishing interior spaces, and representing the buildings in postcards and other printed materials. Beginning with the early history of the YMCA and the construction of New York City's landmark Twenty-third Street YMCA of 1869, Lupkin follows the efforts of YMCA leaders to shape a modern yet moral public culture and even define class, race, ethnicity, and gender through its buildings. Illustrated with many rarely seen photographs, maps, and drawings, Manhood Factories offers a fascinating new perspective on a venerable institution and its place in America's cultural and architectural history.
American evangelicalism has long walked hand in hand with modern consumer capitalism. Timothy Gloege shows us why, through an engaging story about God and big business at the Moody Bible Institute. Founded in Chicago by shoe-salesman-turned-revivalist Dwight Lyman Moody in 1889, the institute became a center of fundamentalism under the guidance of the innovative promoter and president of Quaker Oats, Henry Crowell. Gloege explores the framework for understanding humanity shared by these business and evangelical leaders, whose perspectives clearly differed from those underlying modern scientific theories. At the core of their "corporate evangelical" framework was a modern individualism understood primarily in terms of economic relations. Conservative evangelicalism and modern business grew symbiotically, transforming the ways that Americans worshipped, worked, and consumed. Gilded Age evangelicals initially understood themselves primarily as new "Christian workers--employees of God guided by their divine contract, the Bible. But when these ideas were put to revolutionary ends by Populists, corporate evangelicals reimagined themselves as savvy religious consumers and reformulated their beliefs. Their consumer-oriented "orthodoxy" displaced traditional creeds and undermined denominational authority, forever altering the American religious landscape. Guaranteed pure of both liberal theology and Populist excesses, this was a new form of old-time religion not simply compatible with modern consumer capitalism but uniquely dependent on it.
Volume 3 of A History of the Book in America narrates the emergence of a national book trade in the nineteenth century, as changes in manufacturing, distribution, and publishing conditioned, and were conditioned by, the evolving practices of authors and readers. Chapters trace the ascent of the "industrial book--a manufactured product arising from the gradual adoption of new printing, binding, and illustration technologies and encompassing the profusion of nineteenth-century printed materials--which relied on nationwide networks of financing, transportation, and communication. In tandem with increasing educational opportunities and rising literacy rates, the industrial book encouraged new sites of reading; gave voice to diverse communities of interest through periodicals, broadsides, pamphlets, and other printed forms; and played a vital role in the development of American culture. Contributors: Susan Belasco, University of Nebraska Candy Gunther Brown, Indiana University Kenneth E. Carpenter, Newton Center, Massachusetts Scott E. Casper, University of Nevada, Reno Jeannine Marie DeLombard, University of Toronto Ann Fabian, Rutgers University Jeffrey D. Groves, Harvey Mudd College Paul C. Gutjahr, Indiana University David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School David M. Henkin, University of California, Berkeley Bruce Laurie, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Eric Lupfer, Humanities Texas Meredith L. McGill, Rutgers University John Nerone, University of Illinois Stephen W. Nissenbaum, University of Massachusetts Lloyd Pratt, Michigan State University Barbara Sicherman, Trinity College Louise Stevenson, Franklin & Marshall College Amy M. Thomas, Montana State University Tamara Plakins Thornton, State University of New York, Buffalo Susan S. Williams, Ohio State University Michael Winship, University of Texas at Austin