In America the category ‘bible’ enjoys a privileged cultural position. That fact was brought home to me anecdotally several years ago when I received a telephone call forwarded through a departmental secretary. The woman on the other end of the line expressed frustration because she did not know what to do with a worn-out Bible. She asked if there was a proper way to handle the situation: should she bury it, or burn it? She was genuinely perplexed. Of one thing alone was she certain: she could not throw the Bible into a garbage can. As it turned out, I was of little help. I knew no liturgy for disposing of old Bibles, nor any special protocol for handling them. But I also do not remember ever throwing one away. I am accustomed to seeing old Bibles in attics or on shelves of used-book stores. The telephone call underscored in a practical way the special aura that surrounds the ‘bible’ in America.

“Use Auriol's Compendium as a mould, pour in Lyre, flavor with Augustine, and sprinkle with Grosseteste.” This was John Wyclif's (1330–1384) recipe for biblical commentary. It may be the nature of biblical commentary that commentators do not follow recipes closely, but the history of how the admirers of Nicholas of Lyra's Apocalypse Commentary (1329) received and reworked it indicates that Nicholas's work served frequently as the “mould” into which other interpretations were “poured,” while his own Augustinian seasonings were largely ignored. Although later commentators often adopted Nicholas's method, they more frequently poured in the ingredients of his younger Franciscan colleague, Peter Auriol (whose Apocalypse Commentary of 1319 Nicholas sharply critiqued), serving up a dish that Nicholas would not have enjoyed eating.

During the last years of his ministry in Strasbourg, the Protestant reformer Martin Bucer and his fellow pastors introduced a new procedure for the exercise of church discipline, the voluntary enrollment of their parishioners in “Christian fellowships.” The parish structures created in Strasbourg have been regarded as forerunners of Pietist conventicles ever since the late seventeenth century, when Philip Jakob Spener justified his own Pietist assemblies by publishing a memorandum in which Bucer had defended the “Christian fellowships.” In the twentieth century, Gustav Anrich brought the attempt to establish “Christian fellowships” to the attention of scholars in his publication of an abridged version of Bucer's initial proposal. Anrich's student, Werner Bellardi, wrote the standard study of the movement's origin, development, and eventual disappearance on the basis of documents preserved in the Strasbourg archives. In their discussions of the movement, both Anrich and Bellardi were led astray by their assumption that Bucer originally intended to form conventicles of believers within the city's official church. In fact, those enrolled in “Christian fellowships” did not begin meeting together until the autumn of 1547, almost a year after Bucer first proposed the enrollment procedure.

When they regained power at Westminster in November 1830, the Whigs were dedicated to reform without knowing exactly where to begin. For decades they had committed themselves to financial “retrenchment” and parliamentary reform and now they hoped to pacify an angry country by dealing with those two great issues. Indeed, their main objective was to restore public confidence in the constitution and to prevent a French-style revolution. But their approach to reform in 1830 was uncertain and unpromising. Their vague intentions can be partly explained by their lack of party organization and cohesion; in Parliament, Whigs served as individual opponents of Tory policies rather than as supporters of an alternative government. Factionalism among the Whigs had kept them out of office for more than a generation. Some Whigs were considered unpatriotic because they persisted in defending the ideals of the French Revolution. Still others were hostile to the notion of reform because they suspected that the Tories had already given the country as much reform as it could digest. For many Whigs, the extension of civil liberties to Dissenters (in 1828) and then to Roman Catholics (in 1829) was momentous enough. What the country now wanted was a sensible and flexible government which accommodated the spirit of the age by heeding public opinion. It is not surprising, therefore, that the new government in 1830 was really a coalition of liberals and moderates, and as Peter Mandler has remarked, it was a while before their potential was realized.

One of the most innovative provisions of the Economic Opportunity Act, passed by Congress in August 1964 as the heart of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, was funding for a preschool program for the youngest of America's poor, known as Head Start. Many children were qualified for Head Start in Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation. This was especially so in the northwest quadrant of that state. The area, known locally as “the Delta,” was dominated by the floodplain of the lower Mississippi River, a largely rural, cotton-based economy, and tens of thousands of desperately poor, largely black, farm workers.