In the extensive building projects of these associations - boarding houses, vocational schools, settlement houses, public baths, and playgrounds - she finds evidence of a built environment created by women.".

The Progressive Era, the period in the United States between 1898 and 1917, was a time of great social, political, and industrial change. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, an event that signaled the emergence of the United States as a great power, the country soon was involved in its first overseas guerrilla war, in the Philippines. Vast changes in communications and transportation, immigration and migration patterns, social mores, gender roles, family structure, class structure, work patterns, business methods, education, intellectual life, religion, the professions, technology, science, medicine, and much else were transforming the scope and feel of people's lives and relationships. In many ways what happened in this era set the agenda for the rest of the 20th century. The Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era is the most comprehensive and coherent reference work on the Progressive Era. Through its chronology, introductory essay, bibliography, appendixes, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the key events, people, organizations, and ideas of the period, this resource is a lively, complete, and accessible overview of this significant era.

Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform offers a major re-assessment of the thought and activities of the most famous figure of the seventeenth-century French Catholic Reformation, Vincent de Paul. Confronting traditional explanations for de Paul's prominence in the dévot reform movement that emerged in the wake of the Wars of Religion, the volume explores how he turned a personal vocational desire to evangelize the rural poor of France into a congregation of secular missionaries, known as the Congregation of the Mission or the Lazarists, with three inter-related strands of pastoral responsibility: the delivery of missions, the formation and training of clergy, and the promotion of confraternal welfare. Alison Forrestal further demonstrates that the structure, ethos, and works that de Paul devised for the Congregation placed it at the heart of a significant enterprise of reform that involved a broad set of associates in efforts to transform the character of devotional belief and practice within the church. The central questions of the volume therefore concern de Paul's efforts to create, characterize, and articulate a distinctive and influential vision for missionary life and work, both for himself and for the Lazarist Congregation, and Forrestal argues that his prominence and achievements depended on his remarkable ability to exploit the potential for association and collaboration within the dévot environment of seventeenth-century France in enterprising and systematic ways. This is the first study to assess de Paul's activities against the wider backdrop of religious reform and Bourbon rule, and to reconstruct the combination of ideas, practices, resources, and relationships that determined his ability to pursue his ambitions. A work of forensic detail and complex narrative, Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform is the product of years of research in ecclesiastical and state archives. It offers a wholly fresh perspective on the challenges and opportunities entailed in the promotion of religious reform and renewal in seventeenth-century France.

John Temple Bristow’s What Paul Really Said About Women challenges the traditional understanding of St. Paul's epistles and sexism in the modern church. Attempting to reconcile the Apostle Paul’s scripture about women being submissive to men in Ephesians 5 with his words in Galatians 3 that there is no male or female and everyone is “one in Christ Jesus”, John Temple Bristow uncovered differences between Paul’s original Greek Ephesians writings and the English version translation that indicates a deliberate alteration of the text’s meaning in favor of men. Provocative and revelatory, Bristow’s book explores not only What Paul Really Said About Women, but the history and culture of the church that misinterpreted his message. “A convincing case for equality of the sexes based on the very passages that are all too often used as proof texts to uphold male dominance and female subordination. . . . For any person who reveres scripture but who struggles with traditional interpretations of passages concerning women and who fears that a desire for equality between the sexes is a violation of biblical principles, this book is a must.” —Letha Dawson Scanzoni, co-author of All We’re Meant to Be “Bristow acquits Paul of misogyny and restores him to his rightful stature as a great architect of human liberation. Even more importantly, Bristow urges contemporary churches . . . to follow the radically egalitarian vision of the apostle Paul.” —Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, author of Women, Men, and the Bible “Cuts through much misguided rhetoric to display the actual enhancement of women’s status in early Christian culture.” —Timothy L. Smith, author of Called Unto Holiness

Julia Morgan, America’s first truly independent female architect, left a legacy of more than 700 buildings, many of which are now designated landmarks, in cities throughout California, as well as in Hawaii, Utah, and Illinois. Her work spanned five decades, and the total of her commissions was greater than any other major American architect, including Frank Lloyd Wright. This book tells the remarkable story of this architectural pioneer, and features text, drawings, and photographs of the many buildings that still exist.