In \u201cPages from Beyond the American Pale,\u201d David Emmons makes the interesting if unoriginal argument that Protestant Christianity functioned as the locomotive that spurred the United States’s development. This contention begs comparison to the work of scholars such as Max Weber, famous for his concept of the \u201cProtestant work ethic,\u201d and Ronald Takaki, an American Studies academic known for his research on America’s Protestant underpinnings (and how the colonization of Ireland by the British served as a model for their colonization of North America).<\/p>\n

As my colleague Danny Alvarez states in his own blog post, Britain \u201csought to subjugate whoever it globally came in contact with through reflecting on the inverse effects of things not in correlation with Protestant thought, therefore not suitable among civilized society.\u201d<\/a> This analysis ties in very well with a central tenet of Emmons’s argument, which is that Britain’s fervent Protestantism and adamant anti-Catholicism greatly impacted the Thirteen Colonies (7). Indeed, our Founding Fathers themselves levied a cautious eye on developments in Catholic Quebec, as the British formally granted its Catholic majority the freedom to practice their religion as they pleased (8). In a glaring bout of hypocrisy, Thomas Jefferson decried this mere toleration of Catholicism as tantamount to abandonment of English common law (itself providing a basis for the American legal system) (8). Catholicism came to be seen by many American Protestants as \u201csquarely antithetical to American ideals,\u201d and this reflected in the nativist prejudices against Irish immigration in the mid-19th century.<\/p>\n

Although the United States is rightly touted as a melting pot (or salad bowl for the pedantic), it is worth noting much of its early history and foundation retained a profound \u201cBritishness,\u201d encapsulated by a Protestant identity, that deeply influenced its emergence as an independent nation. This reflects greatly in its institutions, from its republicanism down to its legal system, and of course, its work ethic. David Emmons rightly and persuasively argues this.<\/p>\n

…read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In \u201cPages from Beyond the American Pale,\u201d David Emmons makes the interesting if unoriginal argument that Protestant Christianity functioned as the locomotive that spurred the United States’s development. This contention begs comparison to the work of scholars such as Max Weber, famous for his concept of the \u201cProtestant work ethic,\u201d and Ronald Takaki, an American […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":996192,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195876\/revisions\/996192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist410-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}