History of Texas Christian University
History of Texas Christian University

Author: Colby D. Hall

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2014-03-31

Total Pages: 706

ISBN-13: 0875655890

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First published by TCU Press in 1947, Colby Hall’s book History of Texas Christian University: A College of the Cattle Frontier is the story of the first seventy-five years of the institution. Tracing the evolution of Add Ran College to Add Ran University, and ultimately to Texas Christian University, Hall shows the struggles and success in the transformation of a frontier college dedicated to educating and developing Christian leadership for all walks of life to a university dedicated to facing the challenges imposed by a new world frontier following World War II. Drawing upon numerous sources, including many unpublished documents, personal correspondence, and the author’s own recollections of his association with the university, Hall provides a detailed account of TCU's history and reveals how its founders' dreams were realized. Hall’s narrative skillfully weaves the development of the school into the history of Texas, at the same time elaborating upon the development of collegiate education in Texas and the establishment of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the state. Recognizing that TCU is much more than an institution, Hall specifically emphasizes the contributions of the people and personalities who helped shape the growth of the school.

The Texas Republic and the Mormon Kingdom of God
The Texas Republic and the Mormon Kingdom of God

Author: Michael Van Wagenen

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9781585441846

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History has until now hidden how close the ambitions of these two men came to carving out a Mormon Kingdom of God in the Republic of Texas.".

Rough Country
Rough Country

Author: Robert Wuthnow

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-04-05

Total Pages: 662

ISBN-13: 0691169306

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How the history of Texas illuminates America's post–Civil War past Tracing the intersection of religion, race, and power in Texas from Reconstruction through the rise of the Religious Right and the failed presidential bid of Governor Rick Perry, Rough Country illuminates American history since the Civil War in new ways, demonstrating that Texas's story is also America’s. In particular, Robert Wuthnow shows how distinctions between "us" and “them” are perpetuated and why they are so often shaped by religion and politics. Early settlers called Texas a rough country. Surviving there necessitated defining evil, fighting it, and building institutions in the hope of advancing civilization. Religion played a decisive role. Today, more evangelical Protestants live in Texas than in any other state. They have influenced every presidential election for fifty years, mobilized powerful efforts against abortion and same-sex marriage, and been a driving force in the Tea Party movement. And religion has always been complicated by race and ethnicity. Drawing from memoirs, newspapers, oral history, voting records, and surveys, Rough Country tells the stories of ordinary men and women who struggled with the conditions they faced, conformed to the customs they knew, and on occasion emerged as powerful national leaders. We see the lasting imprint of slavery, public executions, Jim Crow segregation, and resentment against the federal government. We also observe courageous efforts to care for the sick, combat lynching, provide for the poor, welcome new immigrants, and uphold liberty of conscience. A monumental and magisterial history, Rough Country is as much about the rest of America as it is about Texas.

Through Fire and Flood
Through Fire and Flood

Author: James Talmadge Moore

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781585440764

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The political and military upheaval of 1836 in Texas left Catholics north of the Nueces River cut off from the ordinary ties binding them to the institutions of the church and ushered in an era of reorganization, evangelization, and change unprecedented in the North American Catholic church. James Talmadge Moore engagingly chronicles the history of the Catholic church in Texas from the point at which Carlos E. Castañeda ended his celebrated account up to the present century. Moore deftly integrates local and regional events after the Texas Revolution into the larger social and political history of the young nation and state and shows their relationship to ecclesiastical and philosophical movements in the United States and abroad. He traces the contributions of various religious orders--as missionaries and in establishing schools and hospitals--and shows the evolving institutional complexity of the church as the number of Catholics in Texas grew. Moreover, he shows the character of the people who did the work of the church--many different kinds of people, some courageous and compassionate, others less admirable. All, he concludes, were united in their effort to live their faith in an unquiet age, an age filled with the incessant motion of unprecedented political and demographic change. With full access to the Catholic Archives of Texas as well as other archival and primary sources and supplementing these amply with secondary literature, Moore has given a full and extremely readable account of the various facets of this important part of the state's religious and socio-political life. Scholars of religious history, Western and Southwestern studies, and Texas history will find it a solid corpus of information, while those with more general interests will enjoy the lively description of the church, the times, and the people who made them what they were in Texas.

Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier
Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier

Author: Benjamin E. Park

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1631494872

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Best Book Award • Mormon History Association A brilliant young historian excavates the brief life of a lost Mormon city, uncovering a “grand, underappreciated saga in American history” (Wall Street Journal). In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park draws on newly available sources to re-create the founding and destruction of the Mormon city of Nauvoo. On the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois, the early Mormons built a religious utopia, establishing their own army and writing their own constitution. For those offenses and others—including the introduction of polygamy, which was bitterly opposed by Emma Smith, the iron-willed first wife of Joseph Smith—the surrounding population violently ejected the Mormons, sending them on their flight to Utah. Throughout his absorbing chronicle, Park shows how the Mormons of Nauvoo were representative of their era, and in doing so elevates Mormon history into the American mainstream.

Tejano Religion and Ethnicity
Tejano Religion and Ethnicity

Author: Timothy M. Matovina

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-02-04

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 0292761597

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While the flags of Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the United States successively flew over San Antonio, its Tejano community (Texans of Spanish or Mexican descent) formed a distinct ethnic identity that persisted despite rapid social and cultural changes. In this pioneering study, Timothy Matovina explores the central role of Tejano Catholicism in forging this unique identity and in binding the community together. The first book-length treatment of the historical role of religion in a Mexican-origin community in the United States, this study covers three distinct periods in the emergence of Tejano religious and ethnic identity: the Mexican period (1821-1836), the Texas Republic (1836-1845), and the first decade and a half after annexation into the United States (1845-1860). Matovina's research demonstrates how theories of unilateral assimilation are inadequate for understanding the Tejano community, especially in comparison with the experiences of European immigrants to the United States. As residents of the southwestern United States continue to sort out the legacy of U.S. territorial expansion in the nineteenth century, studies like this one offer crucial understanding of the survival and resilience of Latino cultures in the United States. Tejano Religion and Ethnicity will be of interest to a broad popular and scholarly audience.

Raccoon John Smith
Raccoon John Smith

Author: Elder John Sparks

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2005-12-23

Total Pages: 767

ISBN-13: 0813137268

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The Disciples of Christ, one of the first Christian faiths to have originated in America, was established in 1832 in Lexington, Kentucky, by the union of two groups led by Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone. The modern churches resulting from the union are known collectively to religious scholars as part of the Stone-Campbell movement. If Stone and Campbell are considered the architects of the Disciples of Christ and America's first nondenominational movement, then Kentucky's Raccoon John Smith is their builder and mason. Raccoon John Smith: Frontier Kentucky's Most Famous Preacher is the biography of a man whose work among the early settlers of Kentucky carries an important legacy that continues in our own time. The son of a Revolutionary War soldier, Smith spent his childhood and adolescence in the untamed frontier country of Tennessee and southern Kentucky. A quick-witted, thoughtful, and humorous youth, Smith was shaped by the unlikely combination of his dangerous, feral surroundings and his Calvinist religious indoctrination. The dangers of frontier life made an even greater impression on John Smith as a young man, when several instances of personal tragedy forced him to question the philosophy of predeterminism that pervaded his religious upbringing. From these crises of faith, Smith emerged a changed man with a new vocation: to spread a Christian faith wherein salvation was available to all people. Thus began the long, ecclesiastical career of Raccoon John Smith and the germination of a religious revolution. Exhaustively researched, engagingly written, Raccoon John Smith is the first objective and painstakingly accurate treatment of the legendary frontier preacher. The intricacies behind the development of both Smith's personal religious beliefs and the founding of the Christian Church are treated with equal care. Raccoon John Smith is the story of a single man, but in carefully examining the events and people that influenced Elder Smith, this book also serves as a formative history for several Christian denominations, as well as an account of the wild, early years of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

The First Great Awakening
The First Great Awakening

Author: John Howard Smith

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-12-18

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1611477158

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The First Great Awakening, an unprecedented surge in Protestant Christian revivalism in the Eighteenth Century, sparked enormous of controversy at the time and has been a source of scholarly debate ever since. Few historians have sought to write a synthetic history of the First Great Awakening, and in recent decades it has been challenged as having happened at all, being either an exaggeration or an “invention.” The First Great Awakening expands the movement’s geographical, theological, and sociopolitical scope. Rather than focus exclusively on the clerical elites, as earlier studies have done, it deals with them alongside ordinary people, and includes the experiences of women, African Americans, and Indians as the observers and participants they were. It challenges prevailing scholarly opinion concerning what the revivals were and what they meant to the formation of American religious identity and culture. Cover image: NPG 131, George Whitefield by John Wollaston, oil on canvas, circa 1742. © National Portrait Gallery, London