So strongly associated is the Salvation Army with its modern mission of service that its colorful history as a religious movement is often overlooked. In telling the story of the organization in America, Lillian Taiz traces its evolution from a working-class, evangelical religion to a movement that emphasized service as the path to salvation. When the Salvation Army crossed the Atlantic from Britain in 1879, it immediately began to adapt its religious culture to its new American setting. The group found its constituency among young, working-class men and women who were attracted to its intensely experiential religious culture, which combined a frontier-camp-meeting style with working-class forms of popular culture modeled on the saloon and theater. In the hands of these new recruits, the Salvation Army developed a remarkably democratic internal culture. By the turn of the century, though, as the Army increasingly attempted to attract souls by addressing the physical needs of the masses, the group began to turn away from boisterous religious expression toward a more "refined" religious culture and a more centrally controlled bureaucratic structure. Placing her focus on the membership of the Salvation Army and its transformation as an organization within the broader context of literature on class, labor, and women's history, Taiz sheds new light on the character of American working-class culture and religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this surprising new look at how clothing, style, and commerce came together to change American culture, Jennifer Le Zotte examines how secondhand goods sold at thrift stores, flea markets, and garage sales came to be both profitable and culturally influential. Initially, selling used goods in the United States was seen as a questionable enterprise focused largely on the poor. But as the twentieth century progressed, multimillion-dollar businesses like Goodwill Industries developed, catering not only to the needy but increasingly to well-off customers looking to make a statement. Le Zotte traces the origins and meanings of "secondhand style" and explores how buying pre-owned goods went from a signifier of poverty to a declaration of rebellion. Considering buyers and sellers from across the political and economic spectrum, Le Zotte shows how conservative and progressive social activists--from religious and business leaders to anti-Vietnam protesters and drag queens--shrewdly used the exchange of secondhand goods for economic and political ends. At the same time, artists and performers, from Marcel Duchamp and Fanny Brice to Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain, all helped make secondhand style a visual marker for youth in revolt.

'Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia' offers a series of analyses that highlights the complexities of British and Indian civilizing missions in original ways and through various historiographical approaches. The book applies the concept of the civilizing mission to a number of issues in the colonial and postcolonial eras in South Asia: economic development, state-building, pacification, nationalism, cultural improvement, gender and generational relations, caste and untouchability, religion and missionaries, class relations, urbanization, NGOs, and civil society.

Claiming Society for God focuses on common strategies employed by religiously orthodox, fundamentalist movements around the world. Rather than employing terrorism, as much of post-9/11 thinking suggests, these movements use a patient, under-the-radar strategy of infiltrating and subtly transforming civil society. Nancy J. Davis and Robert V. Robinson tell the story of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Shas in Israel, Comunione e Liberazione in Italy, and the Salvation Army in the United States. They show how these movements build massive grassroots networks of religiously based social service agencies, hospitals, schools, and businesses to bring their own brand of faith to popular and political fronts.

This work examines the interplay between the city of Sacramento and the Catholic Church since the 1850s. Avella uses Sacramento as a case study of the role of religious denominations in the development of the American West. In Sacramento, as in other western urban areas, churches brought civility and various cultural amenities, and they helped to create an atmosphere of stability so important to creating a viable urban community. At the same time, churches often had to shape themselves to the secularizing tendencies of western cities while trying to remain faithful to their core values and practices. Besides the numerous institutions that the Church sponsored, it brought together a wide spectrum of the city’s diverse ethnic populations and offered them several routes to assimilation. Catholic Sacramentans have always played an active role in government and in the city’s economy, and Catholic institutions provided a matrix for the creation of new communities as the city spread into neighboring suburbs. At the same time, the Church was forced to adapt itself to the needs and demands of its various ethnic constituents, particularly the flood of Spanish-speaking newcomers in the late twentieth century.

Female philanthropy was at the heart of transformative thinking about society and the role of individuals in the interwar period. In Britain, in the aftermath of the First World War, professionalization; the authority of the social sciences; mass democracy; internationalism; and new media sounded the future and, for many, the death knell of elite practices of benevolence. Eve Colpus tells a new story about a world in which female philanthropists reshaped personal models of charity for modern projects of social connectedness, and new forms of cultural and political encounter. Centering the stories of four remarkable British-born women - Evangeline Booth; Lettice Fisher; Emily Kinnaird; and Muriel Paget - Colpus recaptures the breadth of the social, cultural and political influence of women's philanthropy upon practices of social activism. Female Philanthropy in the Interwar World is not only a new history of women's civic agency in the interwar period, but also a study of how female philanthropists explored approaches to identification and cultural difference that emphasized friendship in relation to interwar modernity. Richly detailed, the book's perspective on women's social interventionism offers a new reading of the centrality of personal relationships to philanthropy that can inform alternative models of giving today.

As one of Victorian Britain's pre-eminent social reformers, Lord Shaftesbury (1801-85) exerted a lasting impact surpassing all of his parliamentary contemporaries. Despite being born into one of England's aristocratic families, a combination of early childhood deprivation, an earnest Evangelical faith, and an abiding sense of noblesse oblige made him a champion of the poor. His seminal contribution to the Victorian factory reform movement represented just one of his manifold legacies. This contextual study of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury probes the mind behind the man to evaluate the religious and philosophical ideas, and their leading figures, that ignited his lifelong activism in the public sphere. This book reveals that far from representing a relic of the Victorian age, the Earl of Shaftesbury, whilst a conservative by predilection, was essentially a forward-looking and farsighted reformer. The principles that Shaftesbury espoused of industrial justice, class harmony, subsidiarity, volunteerism, selfless individualism, religious observance, strong families and private enterprise tempered by moderate state intervention are essentially those prized by liberal democracies today as the foundation for social cohesion, prosperity, and human flourishing.

"During the Progressive Era, a period of unprecedented ingenuity, women evangelists built the old time religion with brick and mortar, uniforms and automobiles, fresh converts and devoted protégés. Across America, entrepreneurial women founded churches, denominations, religious training schools, rescue homes, rescue missions, and evangelistic organizations. Until now, these intrepid women have gone largely unnoticed, though their collective yet unchoreographed decision to build institutions in the service of evangelism marked a seismic shift in American Christianity. In this ground-breaking study, Priscilla Pope-Levison dusts off the unpublished letters, diaries, sermons, and yearbooks of these pioneers to share their personal tribulations and public achievements. The effect is staggering. With an uncanny eye for essential details and a knack for historical nuance, Pope-Levison breathes life into not just one or two of these women, but two dozen. The evangelistic empire of Aimee Semple McPherson represents the pinnacle of this shift from itinerancy to institution building. Her name remains legendary. Yet she built her institutions on the foundation of the work of women evangelists who preceded her. Their stories -- untold until now -- reveal the cunning and strength of women who forged a path for every generation, including our own, to follow."--Back cover.

A study of the inability of the churches to deal with the crisis of the Great Depression and the shift from church-based aid to a federal welfare state.

Henri Peyre (1901-1988), a giant figure in French studies, did more to introduce Americans to the modern literature and culture of French than any other person. Sterling Professor and chair of the French Department of Yale University for more than four decades, Peyre was also the author of forty-four books, a brilliant speaker, and a mentor to two generations of students. He left enormous legacies as both teacher and scholar. Peyre also left a large and fascinating body of correspondence. This collection of his letters documents the era in which he lived. His lively letters also bear witness to the vast network of his friends and colleagues, including such major post-war literary figures as Robert Penn Warren, Andre Gide, and Andre Malraux.