Bøger af Jesse Spohnholz

Growing directly out of the experiences of a team of historians at Washington State University who designed a new foundational course for WSU's common requirements, the Roots of Contemporary Issues series is built on the premise that students will be better at facing current and future challenges, no matter their major or career path, if they are capable of addressing controversial and pressing issues in mature, reasoned ways using evidence, critical thinking, and clear written and oral communication skills. To help students achieve these goals, each title in the Roots of Contemporary Issues series argues that we need both a historical understanding and an appreciation of the ways in which humans have been interconnected with places around the world for decades and even centuries. Much of the world's politics revolves around questions about refugees and other migrating peoples, including debating the scope and limits of humanitarianism; the relevance of national borders in a globalized world; racist rhetoric and policies; global economic inequalities; and worldwide environmental disasters. There are no easy answers to these questions, but the decisions that all of us make about them will have tremendous consequences for individuals and for the planet in the future. Ruptured Lives works from the premise that studying the history of refugee crises can help us make those decisions more responsibly. Examining conflicts--in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa--that have produced migrations of people fleeing dangers or persecution, it aims to provide an intellectual framework for understanding how to think about the conflicts that produce refugees and the effects that refugee crises have on individuals and societies.

The Tactics of Toleration examines the preconditions and limits of toleration during an age in which Europe was sharply divided along religious lines. During the Age of Religious Wars, refugee communities in borderland towns like the Rhineland city of Wesel were remarkably religiously diverse and culturally heterogeneous places. Examining religious life from the perspective of Calvinists, Lutherans, Mennonites, and Catholics, this book examines how residents dealt with pluralism during an age of deep religious conflict and intolerance. Based on sources that range from theological treatises to financial records and from marriage registries to testimonies before secular and ecclesiastical courts, this project offers new insights into the strategies that ordinary people developed for managing religious pluralism during the Age of Religious Wars.Historians have tended to emphasize the ways in which people of different faiths created and reinforced religious differences in the generations after the Reformation's break-up of Christianity, usually in terms of long-term historical narratives associated with modernization, including state building, confessionalization, and the subsequent rise of religious toleration after a century of religious wars. In contrast, Jesse Spohnholz demonstrates that although this was a time when Christians were engaged in a series of brutal religious wars against one another, many were also learning more immediate and short-term strategies to live alongside one another. This book considers these "tactics for toleration" from the vantage point of religious immigrants and their hosts, who learned to coexist despite differences in language, culture, and religion. It demands that scholars reconsider toleration, not only as an intellectual construct that emerged out of the Enlightenment, but also as a dynamic set of short-term and often informal negotiations between ordinary people, regulating the limits of acceptable and unacceptable behavior.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.