Bruce Kuklick

From the 1880s through the 1920s a motley collection of American scholars, soldiers of fortune, institutional bureaucrats, and financiers created the academic fields that give us our knowledge of the ancient Near East. Bruce Kuklick's new book begins with the story of the initial adventure of these determined investigators - a twelve-year dig near the Biblical Babylon, at Nippur, conducted at intervals from 1888 through 1900 and bankrolled by the Babylonian Exploration Fund. To unearth tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets, the leaders of this venture faced harsh living conditions in the desert and an academic war of each against all that was quickly begun at the site itself. As their knowledge increased, they risked their personal religious beliefs in the search for historical truth. Kuklick discusses their tribulations to illuminate two other contemporary developments: first, the maturation of the American university, particularly in contrast to its German counterpart, and second, the influence of religious-secular conflict on the ways in which Western scholarship appropriated or appreciated other cultures.

In this book, Kuklick traces the continuities between early American theology and scientific philosophy. This book outlines the speculative discourse of New England Congregational Calvinism. The intellectual tradition began with Edwards in the middle of the eighteenth century and concluded with Dewey at the end of the nineteenth. The central protagonists are Trinitarian Congregationalists: Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Hopkins, Nathaniel Emmons, Nathaniel William Taylor, Horace Bushnell, Edwards Amasa Park, the orthodox "progressives" at the Congregational Andover Seminary in the 1880s, and John Dewey. - Publisher.

Death in the Congo is a gripping account of a murder that became one of the defining events in postcolonial African history. It is no less the story of the untimely death of a national dream, a hope-filled vision very different from what the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo became in the second half of the twentieth century. When Belgium relinquished colonial control in June 1960, a charismatic thirty-five-year-old African nationalist, Patrice Lumumba, became prime minister of the new republic. Yet stability immediately broke down. A mutinous Congolese Army spread havoc, while Katanga Province in southeast Congo seceded altogether. Belgium dispatched its military to protect its citizens, and the United Nations soon intervened with its own peacekeeping troops. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, both the Soviet Union and the United States maneuvered to turn the crisis to their Cold War advantage. A coup in September secretly aided by the UN toppled Lumumba s government. In January 1961, armed men drove Lumumba to a secluded corner of the Katanga bush, stood him up beside a hastily dug grave, and shot him. His rule as Africa s first democratically elected leader had lasted ten weeks. Fifty years later, the murky circumstances and tragic symbolism of Lumumba s assassination still trouble many people around the world. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick pursue events through a web of international politics, revealing a tangled history in which many people black and white, well-meaning and ruthless, African, European, and American bear responsibility for this crime.

Religious Advocacy and American History explores the general question of bias and objectivity in higher learning from the perspective of the role of religious convictions in the study of American history. The contributors to this book, many of whom are leading historians of American religion and culture, address primarily two related questions. First, how do personal religious convictions influence one's own research, writing, and teaching? And, second, what place should personal beliefs have within American higher education?