With the conclusion of the Civil War, the beginnings of Reconstruction, and the realities of emancipation, former slaves were confronted with the possibility of freedom and, with it, a new way of life. In The Times Were Strange and Stirring, Reginald F. Hildebrand examines the role of the Methodist Church in the process of emancipation—and in shaping a new world at a unique moment in American, African American, and Methodist history. Hildebrand explores the ideas and ideals of missionaries from several branches of Methodism—the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and the northern-based Methodist Episcopal Church—and the significant and highly charged battle waged between them over the challenge and meaning of freedom. He traces the various strategies and goals pursued by these competing visions and develops a typology of some of the ways in which emancipation was approached and understood. Focusing on individual church leaders such as Lucius H. Holsey, Richard Harvey Cain, and Gilbert Haven, and with the benefit of extensive research in church archives and newspapers, Hildebrand tells the dramatic and sometimes moving story of how missionaries labored to organize their denominations in the black South, and of how they were overwhelmed at times by the struggles of freedom.

Seventeen distinguished historians and political scientists discuss the phenomenon of Indian Nationalism, one hundred years after the founding of the Congress party. They offer important new interpretations of Nationalism's evolution during more than six decades of crucial change and rapid growth. As India's foremost political institution, the National Congress with its changing fortunes mirrored Indian aspirations, ideals, dreams, and failures during the country's struggle for nationhood. Many difficulties face by the pre-independence Indian National Congress are critically examined for the first time in this volume. Major times of crisis and transition are considered, as well as the tension between mass action and political control and the problem of creating and maintaining unity in the face of divisive social and economic interests and between deeply hostile religious communities. A composite portrait of the Congress Party emerges. We see a coalition of often conflicting communities and interests much like India itself, struggling to stay together, tenuously united by little more at times than a common "enemy," the imperial British Raj. But linked together in precarious, seemingly haphazard fashion, shifting networks of elite political entrepreneurs manage to keep India's National Congress alive long enough to convince the British that it would be easier to "Quit India" than to try to hang on to it by force. With the abrupt transfer of power form the British to the independent Dominions of India and Pakistan in 1947, Congress provided institutional sinews for the administration of what had been British India and over five hundred Princely States. By contributing to a deeper understanding of India's nationalist experience, this volume may illuminate the experience of other Third World states. Essays by:S. BhattacharyaJudith M. BrownMushirul HansanZoya HasanD.A. LowClaude MarkovitsJohn R. McLaneW.H. Morris-JonesGyanendra PandeyBimal PrasadRajat Kanta RayBarbara N. RamusackPeter D. ReevesHitesranjan SanyalRichard SissonStanley WolpertEleanor Zelliot This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.

By supplying small entrepreneurs with necessary capital to start and expand their businesses, Jewish loan societies facilitated the rise up the economic ladder of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jews. These collective institutions were an important feature of a cohesive ethnic economy in which Jewish factory owners hired Jewish workers, Jewish retailers bought goods from Jewish wholesalers, and Jewish shopkeepers relied on Jewish loan associations for funding. A Credit to Their Community is a sociohistorical study of Jewish credit organizations from the 1880s until the end of World War II. Upon their arrival in the United States during this critical period in American Jewish life, Eastern European Jewish immigrants established hundreds of loan societies in communities as diverse as Nashville, Tennessee; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Rock Island, Illinois; and Portland, Oregon. While there is ample discussion and documentation of the over-representation of Jewish immigrants in business, until now the question of how these immigrant entrepreneurs raised the necessary funds to start their enterprises has not been addressed. Based on primary historical documents, this book analyzes the emergence, growth, and subsequent decline of three types of Jewish loan associations in America: Hebrew free loan societies; remedial loan associations—philanthropic loan societies that charged relatively low interest fees; and credit cooperatives. The author addresses a number of issues related to the functioning of the Jewish credit organizations, including the activities of women's loan associations, debates about whether or not to open doors to non-Jewish borrowers, discussions about the merits and faults of implementing interest charges, the effects of the Great Depression on loan organizations, and the relations between free loan Societies and other Jewish organizations. While the primary focus is on Jews, the text also offers comparisons between Jewish loan societies and those of other enterprising groups such as the Japanese and Chinese. This study raises an important theoretical question in the field of ethnicity; namely, to what extent are ethnic institutions influenced by culture—cultural traits brought from countries of origin—and to what extent do they emerge as responses to the new context to which immigrants have arrived? In answering this question, Dr. Tenenbaum highlights the importance of both cultural and contextual factors for the emergence of Jewish loan associations.