This book argues against the conventional idea that Protestantism effectively ceased to play an important role in American higher education around the end of the 19th century. Employing Princeton as an example, the study shows that Protestantism was not abandoned but rather modified to conform to the educational values and intellectual standards of the modern university. Drawing upon a wealth of neglected primary sources, Kemeny sheds new light on the role of religion in higher education by examining what was happening both inside and outside the classroom, and by illustrating that religious and secular commitments were not neatly divisible but rather commingled.
Anyone wishing to know what has been written on the Pennsylvania Germans will welcome the reappearance of this classic bibliography. Anyone aspiring to a command of the literature on the Pennsylvania Germans must master its contents; and anyone doing research in Pennsylvania-German genealogy must have it at his side. It is basic, and no efficient research can be done without it. Divided into subject categories, the bibliography contains citations to all published writings dealing with the Germans in colonial North America (chiefly Pennsylvania), whether in the form of general histories, magazine articles, newspapers, pamphlets, mug-books, church records, town, county, and state histories, or printed genealogies, and it attempts to give as complete an account of the printed source material as possible. It is in effect the starting point in Pennsylvania-German research because it acquaints the researcher with everything that had been published up through the cut-off year of 1933.