Skip to main content

The Water is Wide

By



I found myself searching through the new titles at amazon for something interesting to read in the way of history and fell across this title, By the Rivers of Water, which tells the story of a Southern missionary couple who chose to go to West Africa in the 1830s to spread the message.  This would have been at the dawn of the Second Great Awakening.

The twist is that the couple apparently viewed the Africans as equals and made every effort to learn their language and culture, while still struggling with their own family legacy at home.  They owned slaves by inheritance and couldn't quite bring themselves to free them, feeling that the freed slaves would be cast adrift and unable to fend for themselves.

Erskine Clark probes this moral dilemma and others in a book that seems to have garnered surprisingly little attention, especially since Clark had previously won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for Dwelling Place, a meticulous study of antebellum Georgian plantation life.    Clark moves back and forth across the Atlantic, following the Wilsons as tensions reach a boiling point in the United States.

Hard to say whether their missionary work was a success or not based on the review, but John Wilson apparently was an active speaker and continued to help raise money for foreign missions all the way up to 1884 when he and his wife became too infirmed to travel.  Looks like it would be a very interesting read.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more