Flintoff is kind of finished. I drafted out twelve pages. Kind of measly, but it will grow. I’m still not to happy with the entire thing because I spent the first part of this chapter describing an apple, but with Flintoff I’m showing you an orange to prove it. No…that’s probably unfair because I am trying to describe a larger thing (“discipline”) that contains many parts. All of it is tied together by the implications for social behavior in the world.
Ugh. It’s time to move on. Where to next? I have plenty of holes to fill in the first half of this chapter. Also, Flintoff will benefit from reading Christopher Morris’ book, Martha Jane Brazy’s book, and William Scarborough’s book by contextualizing Flintoff’s unhappiness in Mississippi. Do I need to go back and do that? Or should I return to Thomasson and sketch out what he has to say (or not) about discipline? I’m leaning toward the Thomasson option because he is like Flintoff in that his practice of discipline is not expressed in church courts or doctrine, but in his choices for social behavior. In other words, he’s another orange. Incorporating Thomasson will help me find peace between Flintoff and the first section of this chapter. Thomasson does, also, have a more direct connection to temperance activity, which is a large part of the first section. Plus, I do like to move forward.
I wanted to have this chapter done by the beginning of the four-year college semester, but oh well.
My conversation with the out-of-state denominational archives has proven frustrating. A dozen emails and a phone call and I’m still not sure if what they have is worth driving 600 miles for. This is in part because their online catalog says they have materials that their archivists say they do not. But their archivists still think I’m looking for genealogical papers. I don’t know.
Two books I should have paid attention to before now have absorbed a lot of time this week.
First, the edition The Cultural Turn in U.S. History. I think of my work as cultural history, but I don’t know cultural history all that well. In the context of this book’s opening “propositions,” I’d place myself in the “culture defined as a common set of beliefs, customs, values, and rituals—a.k.a. the ‘anthropological’ concept of culture” school, as opposed to the “matrix of commercial institutions and structures in which artistic forms are produced and consumed, “ or the “semiotic or discursive system” approaches. That, of course, includes the usual suspects (Geertz, Isaac, etc.). I’m interested in ways that the historiography seems to be loosed from New Left imperatives, but that’s ok. You already suspected that about me.*
Speaking of Whigs, the second book is Daniel Walker Howe’s Making the American Self. I really wish I had read this earlier because he’s talking about things that I’ve been having a hard time articulating for a while about changes in the larger secular world. To wit, the democritization of self-construction; that ever more people—not just elite white men—claimed the right to self-fulfilment (or actualization, as we feminists described it in late 1990s graduate school). Now I’m dealing with forces religious that continued, throughout this period, to exert powerful claims on individuals. Historiography states that religions lost power to personal autonomy, and thus represented a threat to traditional authority. I’m not seeing that. I’m seeing adaptation. Or, as Howe said,
It also seems important to explain at the outset that I have not found the kind of individualism that concerns me here to be at polar opposition to a strong sense of community, so that to emphasize one necessarily involves moving away from the other. On the contrary, the quest for personal identity can entail joining a new community, and projects of self-discipline or self-improvement can be undertaken collectively as well as individually.
This is one of those moments a young** scholar has—affirmation of an idea simply because an established scholar has already put it into print. Don’t know if I’ll remain faithful to Howe’s formulation, but that’s where I’ll start.
But that’s getting way far ahead. I think this will be the much-needed framework for the first chapter that deals with what evangelicalism does to individuals.
*This has everything to do with historiographical positioning and nothing to do with contemporary political sentiment, of which I am predictably liberal.
**Seems ridiculous to say this as I’m beginning to experience the generalized back pain associated with sleeping that only mature people talk about.
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