Few issues have received as much attention and achieved as little consensus among historians of late medieval theology during the past several generations as the debate over the character of “nominalism.” One thrust of the research from this debate has focused on the theological dimensions of this scholastic tradition: building on the work of Erich Hochstetter, Paul Vignaux, and others, Heiko Oberman discussed this development in the North American arena of scholarship by describing theological concerns as “the inner core of nominalism.”1

Anne Hutchinson has been one of the few women to attain canonical status in the history of colonial New England. Her marvelous intellectual abilities (so unusual in a seventeenth-century woman), her popularity among Boston men as well as women, and the powerful political and theological implications of her challenge render Hutchinson a force that must be explored if colonial Massachusetts is to be understood. Not only are historians fascinated by this extraordinary woman herself, they are intrigued by the colony's response to her; for in that very response the founders may have revealed their essential character. So a few books and many articles have analyzed and reanalyzed Hutchinson as victim of Puritan injustice, as threat to the Puritan experiment, as menopausal neurotic, as antinomian heretic, as rebel (occasionally a protofeminist one).

The myth of the American West has become the nation's greatest cultural creation. From nineteenth-century German writer Karl May to the present day Solidarity movement in Poland, images drawn from the frontier West have inspired people throughout the globe. Although scholars have spent years trying to separate fact from fiction in this tale, most have concluded that it is impossible. “The myth,” historian Robert Athearn has noted, “is an essential part of the western past.”1

As I began researching religion and woman suffrage in the South I asked a prominent historian of southern religion if he knew of any sources. I had assumed that religion and woman suffrage had an intimate relationship in the South, since historians have amply documented the close connection between southern religion and culture. After scraching his head for a moment, however, he commented dryly, “There really aren't any sources. That will be a short paper.” He went on to explain that religious arguments were seldom used in the struggle for woman suffrage, that natural rights ideology and the social benefits of moral women voting were more common defenses than ones based on Scripture. Even antisuffragists relied on the threat of black women voting and the superfluity of women voting when they were represented by their husbands at the ballot box more often than explicitly religious arguments.

Writing in the midst of World War II, the Italian exiles Gaetano Salvemini and Giorgio La Piana charged that the Catholic church in America had bestowed its blessing upon Benito Mussolini and fascism.1 In discussing this charge the historian John Diggins admitted that “at first glance it does appear that the American clergy had indeed composed a political choir in behalf of Fascism.”2 Diggins portrayed a large number of Catholic clergy led by figures like Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston and Father Charles E. Coughlin who found occasion to praise Mussolini. He outlined the views of the major Catholic periodicals and discovered that only the Paulist-sponsored Catholic World took exception to fascism with any consistency.3 Nonetheless, Diggins partially dismissed the charge of Salvemini and La Piana. He argued that the Catholic church in the United States during the interwar years was not a pro-Fascist monolith and briefly touched on the anti-Fascist endeavors of such individuals as Monsignor Joseph Giarrochi, Father Francis Duffy, and Father James Gillis, C.S.P., the erstwhile editor of the Catholic World. Notably, Diggins accorded particular status among Catholic anti-Fascists to Monsignor John A. Ryan, whom he described as having waged “a relentless assault upon Mussolini's dictatorship and upon the Catholic defense of Fascism” and as being “the theological thorn in the flesh of complacent Catholic apologists for Fascism.”4