Azusa Street Revival
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azusa_Street_Revival

WEB RESOURCE & VIDEO The Azusa Street Revival was a historic Pentecostal revival meeting that took place in Los Angeles, California, and was led by William J. Seymour, an African American preacher. It began with a meeting on April 14, 1906, and continued until roughly 1915. The revival was characterized by ecstatic spiritual experiences accompanied by speaking in tongues, dramatic worship services, and inter-racial mingling. The participants received criticism from secular media and Christian theologians for behaviors considered to be outrageous and unorthodox, especially at the time. Today, the revival is considered by historians to be the primary catalyst for the spread of Pentecostalism in the 20th century. View a video clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScXYrhlV9u4.

ID: 136. Added: 2011-11-14 21:53:14

Opening of Angelus Temple and Early Religious Radio in L.A.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUZ_-5e6G7Y&feature=related

WEB VIDEO This You Tube video segment provides a historical look at the work of Amee Semple McPherson and how she used popular the culture of radio and theatrical showmanship in her work as an evangelist and founder of Angelus Temple in downtown LA.

ID: 137. Added: 2011-11-14 21:54:31

Social Gospel and the Progressive Era
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/socgospel.htm

WEB RESOURCE This clearly written article from the National Humanities Center focuses on the Social Gospel Movement. The influence of the movement on American politics and religious thinking is one of the most important religious ideas in the US around the turn of the 20th century. The focus was on the sins of society, such as poverty and inequality, and asked people to seek salvation through building "the Kingdom of God on this earth." This had strong influence on policies of American imperialism and progressive reforms, especially after the Civil War through the early 20th c.

ID: 142. Added: 2011-11-21 00:14:55

Excerpt: The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought
http://billmoyers.com/content/excerpt-the-great-agnostic-robert-ingersoll-and-american-freethought/

WEB RESOURCE "It's hard to exaggerate how famous he was in the last two decades of the 19th century," our guest Susan Jacoby says of Robert Ingersoll, the subject of her new book, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought. But Ingersoll, once a "mover and shaker" in the Republican Party, is largely forgotten today. Why? He spoke out in favor of the separation of church and state and promoted Darwin's theory of evolution, and because of that, could never run for public office. Ingersoll's ideas were as controversial then as they are now.

ID: 447. Added: 2013-03-16 17:10:48

Birmingham and the Children's March
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/04/26/april-26-2013-birmingham-and-the-childrens-march/16051/

WEB VIDEO This Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly features an interview with Freeman Hrabowski at the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama. Here local students are on a field trip, learning how 50 years ago, kids around their age played a pivotal role in the struggle against segregation. One of them was Freeman Hrabowski, who is now president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He was 12 at the time and a math whiz.

ID: 573. Added: 2013-06-15 03:57:32

Walter Rauschenbusch: The Social Gospel, 1908
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/rausch-socialgospel.asp

PRIMARY SOURCE This 1908 essay by Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch describes much of the Christian religious thinking behind the Social Gospel movement.

ID: 584. Added: 2013-07-20 03:09:21

"The Hand of God" in the League of Nations: President Woodrow Wilson Presents the Treaty of Paris to the Senate
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4979

PRIMARY SOURCE The dispute over whether or not to ratify the Versailles Treaty and approve American participation in the newly formed League of Nations became one of the sharpest foreign policy debates in American history. The League of Nations was President Woodrow Wilson's great hope. He believed that the international organization would resolve the failures of the Versailles Treaty while ensuring free trade, reducing reparations against Germany, extending self-determination beyond Europe, and punishing aggressor nations. On July 10, 1919, the president presented the 264-page Treaty of Paris to the U.S. Senate for ratification, including the controversial Article 10. Speaking in the style of an evangelical sermon, Wilson presented his case to Congress in this address. But the League faced bitter opposition and stirred nationwide debate. Warren G. Harding's victory in the 1920 presidential election ended the debate and closed the door on American participation in the League of Nations.

ID: 714. Added: 2014-09-26 03:10:10

"Shall We Gather at the River?" - Aimee Semple McPherson on Prohibition
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5071

PRIMARY SOURCE AUDIO Urban as well as rural Americans flocked to fundamentalist and evangelical churches in the 1920s. Preaching tradition and timeless value, American evangelicals adopted innovative techniques for spreading the word. Aimee Semple McPherson, pastor of the enormous Angelus Temple in the booming city of Los Angeles, preached to a vast radio audience and pioneered the novel technique of faith healing over the airwaves. In this audio clip from a 1924 sermon, McPherson described a loving, kind, and rewarding God instead of the severe, wrathful God of Old Testament tradition. Her youthful persona and cheery good humor helped make her radio presence highly effective. Following a well-publicized scandal involving a mysterious lover, McPherson and other fundamentalists began to lose the prominence they enjoyed in the 1920s.

ID: 716. Added: 2014-09-27 02:45:09

"Shall the Fundamentalists Win?"- Defending Liberal Protestantism in the 1920s
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5070

PRIMARY SOURCE Urban as well as rural Americans flocked to fundamentalist and evangelical churches in the 1920s. "Liberal" Protestants sought to reconcile faith and science and to slow what they saw as the reactionary tendencies of fundamentalism. Harry Emerson Fosdick's influential 1922 sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?," called for an open-minded, intellectual, and tolerant "Christian fellowship." Though the sermon cost him his post at New York's First Presbyterian Church, his views represented those of an influential Protestant minority, and Fosdick enjoyed a long career at Riverside Church, built for him by John D. Rockefeller. Following the Scopes trial and a well-publicized scandal involving well-known pastor Aimee Semple McPherson and a mysterious lover, fundamentalists began to lose the prominence they enjoyed in the 1920s. But religious conservatism would remain a vital political force in American life.

ID: 717. Added: 2014-09-27 02:52:26

Warning Against the "Roman Catholic Party"- Catholicism and the 1928 Election
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5073

PRIMARY SOURCE Democratic Presidential candidate Al Smith faced a vicious campaign of anti-Catholic innuendoes and slurs-both covert and overt-in the 1928 election. A widely distributed periodical called the Fellowship Forum declared that "The real issue in this campaign is PROTESTANT AMERICANISM VERSUS RUM AND ROMANISM." Anti-Catholicism was not confined to fringe groups. One of the most vocal opponents of a Catholic presence in American politics was Thomas J. Heflin, the junior senator from Alabama, who delivered some of his most vicious speeches on the floor of the Senate. Heflin's January 18, 1928, speech before his Senate colleagues blamed the defeat of 1924 Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis on Roman Catholics ("Al Smith's crowd") who demanded,to Heflin's outrage,that the party denounce the Ku Klux Klan.

ID: 719. Added: 2014-09-27 23:27:18

"I Will Not Be Influenced in Appointments": Al Smith Accepts the Nomination for President
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5075

PRIMARY SOURCE AUDIO Religion figured prominently in the 1928 presidential election when Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, became the first Catholic to run as the candidate of a major political party. Smith, who ran against the Republican Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, tried to downplay the subject of his religion. In his speech accepting the presidential nomination, Smith sought to reassure voters that he would not favor Catholics, "Wets" (supporters of the repeal of Prohibition), or Easterners if elected president. While his words may have reassured some, his obvious New York accent reinforced the worries, and prejudices, of others.

ID: 729. Added: 2014-10-14 03:59:34

"A Man's Thanksgiving:" A Hymn to the God of Business
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4992

PRIMARY SOURCE President Calvin Coolidge captured the spirit of the 1920s when he announced in a speech before the Society of American Newspaper Editors that "the chief business of the American people is business." An even more forceful publicist for the view that business and spirituality were compatible was Bruce Barton. The son of a Congregational minister, Barton cofounded one of the nation's largest and best-known advertising agencies. Barton's greatest fame came from the best-selling book that he published in 1925, The Man Nobody Knows, in which he crafted a new vision of Christ and Christianity that was not simply compatible with, but organically connected to, the business-oriented 1920s.

ID: 741. Added: 2014-11-15 04:58:01

"Not Rum but Righteousness:" Billy Sunday Attacks Booze
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5072

PRIMARY SOURCE Urban as well as rural Americans flocked to fundamentalist and evangelical churches in the 1920s. Preaching tradition and timeless value, American evangelicals adopted innovative techniques for spreading their message. Billy Sunday, the most famous preacher of the early 20th century, began his career as a professional baseball player. He emphasized a rugged, swaggering, masculine Christianity spoken in plain, slangy English. He combined the modern and the traditional in attacks on liquor, like this excerpt from one of Sunday's sermons.

ID: 742. Added: 2014-11-15 05:12:55

Should a Catholic Be President?: A Contemporary View of the 1928 Election
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5074

PRIMARY SOURCE Religion figured prominently in the 1928 presidential election when Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, became the first Catholic to run as the candidate of a major political party. Smith, who ran against the Republican Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, tried to downplay the subject of his religion. In this article from Atlantic Monthly of April 1927, lawyer Charles Marshall argued that loyalty to the Catholic Church conflicted with loyalty to the United States. Although the article revealed anti-Catholic biases, Marshall's views were less strident than those of many contemporaries.

ID: 744. Added: 2014-11-15 05:31:35

Sikh Punjabi Farmers and California's Alien Land Law
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kh4w04h

WEB RESOURCE Asian farmers from India's Punjab province were among those affected by California's Alien Land Law. Most were Sikhs. Although it was Japanese success in California agriculture which stimulated passage of the first law in 1913 and its strengthening in 1920 and 1923, the law became applicable to Asian Indians in 1923. Local records and interviews from the Imperial Valley, where these Punjabi farmers were concentrated, show the strategies they employed to continue farming and the patterns of local support and opposition.

ID: 939. Added: 2019-06-07 20:18:47

About 30% of American adults are now religiously unaffiliated
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/12/14/religion-united-states-americans-study/8899494002/

WEB RESOURCE The coronavirus pandemic haspushed Americans out of church pews and into isolation at homes. But for much longer, U.S. adults have increasingly made the conscious decision to leave or forgo organized religion, and the trend is showing no signs of slowing down. This USA Today report of the PEW research of religion in the US is an eye opening look at the changes in modern America.

ID: 1039. Added: 2022-02-03 17:39:15