In the past three and a half weeks I’ve managed to stitch together almost thirty pages of something resembling the beginning of a chapter (kind of the way Frankenstein’s monster resembled a human.) This hot mess is a combination of detailed notes from secondary readings, unfocused and repetitive ramblings about abstract ideas, and copy-and-pasted text from a completely different source. First goal for this week is to print it all out and whack at it with the red pen, editing, rewriting, and filling in gaps as much as possible. I won’t be finished with this section, by any means. I just want all the parts to start working together. The pending archival work for this section is contingent on how the commo with the various church people goes, but I can’t imagine I’ll be sitting in front of any manuscripts this week.
Should I finish that, I will begin to paste in the work I did last fall on temperance societies. Several ideas here in this rough order: The evangelical sense of discipline fostered a spirit of improvement within congregations (coupled with quite a bit of anxiety) based on rejection of sin and sinful behavior. The boundary between the evangelical space and the world was not as well-defined for practitioners as it is for historians. Therefore, the impulse to create an environment free of sin easily spilled over to the public, secular, space. We see this in a variety of enterprises, including education/Sunday Schools/literacy and missions to the slaves and other domestic and foreign missionary projects. But the single largest effort at creating evangelically safe places in public is the movement to restrict or criminalize the distilling, vending, and use of spirituous liquors (to use their language). What I wrote last fall wasn’t intended for the context of the current chapter, so it will require plenty of nip and tuck. Best to think of it as a solid foundation for what I need to say about temperance societies.
That actually sounds more fun than the first goal. Can I skip the whole editing and rewriting part?
I’ll budget two days for teaching and another for general historian tasks (ahem, job search stuff), so when I come up short this time, I won’t be so disappointed.
Comments