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Tuesday, November 03, 2009
History Lecture Friday November 6
Please join the history department on Friday November 6, 2009, at 1:00 pm in Wiekamp 1185 for a talk by Visiting Assistant Professor Albert Zambone, “Customs of Moderation: Anglicanism and Intellectual Culture in Virginia, 1676-1750.”
For several generations of American historiography it has been generally assumed that the Colonial American South did not have an intellectual history. How could it, since it had so few ideas? Printing presses, sermons, political theorems abound in New England; from Maryland on South, these things were absent, until Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others, leaped from the red clay fully developed as intellectuals, with a little French fertilizer and Presbyterian watering.
This obviously cannot be the case, and in this talk Dr. Zambone will explain why it is not. In part, the colonial South developed an intellectual culture through the transatlantic influence of the Church of England. From hierarchy, to nature, to gambling and to the concept of moderation itself, Anglicanism provided an intellectual outlook that remained important to the American South long after Anglicanism itself had been become a marginal religious persuasion.
