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In the early nineteenth century, a great deal of diversity existed in American theology. Nevertheless, despite substantial differences, American religious thinkers during this period were dominated by Christians – mostly Protestants – and emphasized commonsense republican understandings of authority over against traditional standards. Even in disagreements, the commonsense republican approach to Christianity set the boundaries for dispute.

Gender is a relation of difference and domination constructed such that it appears “natural” in day-to-day life. The American West is historically a place of disrupted gender relations and stunning racial and ethnic diversity, a diversity structured by inequality and injustice. So, studying gender in the West holds promise for the project of denaturalizing gender and dislodging it from its comfortable moorings in other relations of domination. Indeed, in the West as many scholars have represented it, gender has been among the great invisible creators of meaning, perhaps more invisible than race itself, which even in the most predictable, problematic winning-of-the-West narratives has been an explicit, if deeply offensive, analytical theme. To demonstrate this, two texts are considered for critical rereading: Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land (1950) and Richard Slotkin's The Fatal Environment (1985).

Between 1790 and 1840, Reformed theology reached the summit of its broad influence in American culture. With New England's Congregationalists in the lead, and then joined by mid‐state and southern Presbyterians, the Reformed theologians engaged in the most serious religious and public debates of the years. These debates led to the production of a great surge of theological literature, most of which was significantly influenced by the new conditions of American public life. The rise of Unitarianism during this period presented a special challenge to more traditional Calvinist theologians.

Mathematicians played a prominent part in the reform and administration of Oxford University in the Victorian era. Bartholomew Price, the Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy, and Henry Smith, Savilian Professor of Geometry, were in the first rank of the reform party during the 1860s and 1870s. Two mathematics professors of the previous generation, Baden Powell and George Johnson, served on the 1850 Royal Commission. The role of these mathematicians in the university reform process is particularly interesting because they were also fighting on a second front to revitalize English mathematics after a century of stagnation. Exaggerated respect for Isaac Newton in the wake of the priority dispute with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had left English mathematicians isolated from the mainstream of mathematical developments on the Continent. The slow recovery of English mathematics during the 19th century is usually dated from around 1814, when a group of Cambridge undergraduates formed the Analytical Society, one aim of which was to promote the introduction of continental notation and methods at Cambridge.

Henry Smith was the first substantial mathematician to occupy the Savilian Chair of Geometry for well over a century. A highly cultured man who spoke several languages, he made internationally admired contributions to number theory and invented the ‘Cantor set’ eight years before Georg Cantor. As Keeper of the new University Museum and a member of the Hebdomadal Council, he was also greatly involved with University administration.

Chapter fifty-three examines Hodge’s opposition to the reunion of the Old and New Schools of Presbyterianism just a few years later. Henry Boyton Smith of Union Seminary led the New School movement for reunion. Hodge wished such a reunion to come, but only when it was based on theological agreements that he did not believe yet existed. He feared that a premature reunion would simply set the stage for a re-enactment of the Schism of 1837.

Chapter fifty-four examines the crowning achievement of Hodge’s publishing career, his three-volume Systematic Theology. Rather than simply compile and edit his theological writings of the past half century, Hodge took the opportunity to write his Systematic as an organic whole. Certain new stresses appear in the volumes. He emphasized Baconian scientific method and the role of the intellect in theological study to a degree that had not been the case in his theological lectures. He used his Systematic to argue for the importance of the intellect (over the emotions) in theological study, and he made his volumes and apologetic for God’s goodness and benevolent work in the world, even after the devastating events of the Civil War.

This chapter offers a property-based economic account of trusts. It explains the various functions of property and their limitations. Trusts can be understood as a functional extension of property. A major limit of property is that although the exclusion strategy is cheap, it is very blunt and not suitable for fine-tuned resource sharing arrangements. In this respect, it argues that trusts uniquely use the governance strategy to achieve effective exclusion against the trustee and other non-beneficiaries. Trust law is also unique in that its main focus is not on individuals. Trust law is asset- and wealth-centric in that its doctrines promote efficient resource use and protects beneficiaries' wealth, rather than their interests in specific assets. This chapter concludes that, ultimately, trusts are still second-best to property and beneficiaries must be able to transition from holding intangible wealth to owning tangible things.

This chapter discusses the escape of Henry Smith after being accused of sexually assaulting and murdering Myrtle Vance, the three-year-old daughter of a former police officer. The incident brought the city of Paris, Texas to a standstill as a posse sought his capture. When word came that the posse was returning with Smith by train so he could meet his fate, the “streets of Paris were a busy spectacle.” Schools and businesses closed. People from the surrounding county, nearby towns and counties, and places as far away as Dallas and Arkansas came by foot, horse, and train into the town. “Every highway leading into the city was an almost continuous cavalcade…. Every train that arrived from any direction was crowded to suffocation,” enthused P. L. James, a local man. Men erected a scaffold ten feet tall near the railroad where Smith would arrive, in full view of the city center, in preparation for his “execution.”

This chapter shows the restoration of property in law and in economics and the development of the fund concept. The key to restoring property as a coherent idea in law is to de-emphasize the right to exclude as traditionally understood. Nowadays, the right to exclude is no longer seen as a prerequisite to finding property. In trusts and beneficial interests, however, the right to exclude returns in a different guise and provides the foundation for understanding property in a fund. Property in a fund is a legal interest that is distinct from property in the fund's underlying assets. In economics, property has recently been explained as a coherent concept and its in rem nature can be justified on grounds of conserving information-processing costs.

Through the works of the philosopher William Henry Smith, especially his 1857 book Thorndale: Or, the Conflict of Opinions, this chapter explores the complexity of Victorian ideas of progress, and particularly the combination of moral optimism with uncertainty over how to restore a putative lost intellectual consensus. Thorndale is shown as grappling with the place of an intellectual vanguard in society, and with whether philosophy could contribute to the creation of intellectual foundations for a stable moral order. By combining didactic philosophical prose with dialogue and narrative, Smith self-consciously used the structure of his work to create an inconclusive and self-contradictory meditation on the problems of guiding the progress of ideas. Smith's manipulation of authorial voice, and his ultimate prioritizing of personal self-fashioning over philosophical certainty, without recourse to Christian orthodoxy, are revealing of the problems and possibilities that faced Victorian intellectuals as they sought to comprehend their role in the moving stream of popular opinion. Thorndale and its reception cast light on the tensions in Victorian attitudes towards the place of abstract thought in discussions of progress, and on the alternative standpoints of Smith's acquaintances, including John Stuart Mill, Frederick Denison Maurice, and George Henry Lewes.