The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660-1700

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Todd Shallat

As the Mississippi and other midwestern rivers inundated town after town during the summer of 1993, concerned and often angry citizens questioned whether the very technologies and structures intended to "tame" the rivers did not, in fact, increase the severity of the floods. Much of the controversy swirled around the apparent culpability of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the designer and builder of many of the flood control systems that failed. In this book, Todd Shallat probes the origins of the United States' oldest and largest water management agency and explores how the Corps' emphasis on scientific planning cut against the grain of a nation deeply committed to private enterprise and community rights. Combining extensive research with a lively, engaging style, Shallat follows the technological elite of the army from European antecedents through the boom years of river building after the Civil War. He tells the story of monumental construction and engineering fiascoes, public service and public corruption, and the rise of science and the army expert as agents of the state. Information on engineering during the Civil War, the influence of women and family on the political and organizational philosophy of the Corps, and numerous historical illustrations add interesting highlights to the story. . Much more than an institutional history, Structures in the Stream offers significant insights into American society, which has alternately supported the massive public works projects that are a legacy of our French heritage and opposed them based on the democratic, individualist tradition inherited from Britain. It will provide important reading for a wide audience in environmental and military history, the history of science and technology, policy studies, and American cultural history.

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Christi Phillips

London, 1672: A vicious killer stalks the court of Charles II, inscribing his victims' bodies with mysterious markings. Are these the random murders of a madman? The deadly consequence of a personal vendetta? Or the grisly result of a hidden conspiracy? Cambridge, 2008: A Trinity College history professor is found dead, the torn page of a seventeenth-century diary in his hand. His death appears to be an accident, but the college's newest Fellow Claire Donovan and historian Andrew Kent suspect otherwise ...

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A.J.B. Johnston

"Three [Catholic] religious groups served the French stronghold of Louisbourg during the eighteenth century. They were the Récollets of Brittany, who acted as parish priests and chaplains; the Brothers of Charity of Saint John of God, who operated the King's Hospital; and the Sisters of the Congregation of Notre-Dame, who conducted the local school for girls. [The author] establishes the secular and religious contexts of life in Louisbourg, and then traces the mixed fortunes of each of these groups.".

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Thomas D. Hamm

Growing out of the most radical fringes of the abolitionist movement, Universal Inquiry and Reform brought together New England evangelicals with Hicksite Quakers from Ohio and Indiana. They founded eight utopian communities which, though short-lived, were the setting for the most radical questioning of antebellum American society. The advocates of Universal Inquiry and Reform renounced all forms of coercive government, relying instead on initiating the Government of God. They were fierce critics of competitive capitalism, looking instead toward an economy based on cooperation. They experimented with new forms of education. They advocated equality for women and played important roles in the early women's rights movement in the Old Northwest. In religion, they repudiated "sectism" and "priestcraft" for a religion of humanity that sometimes verged on atheism. Though they are less well-known than other reform groups of the time, theirs was one of the most ambitious communitarian movements of the nineteenth century.