Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America

student-professor world of the 1890s provide some fascinating material and would be of particular interest to the historian with proclivities for the American social and/or educational experience.This section of the monograph is largely based on the author's fortuitous discovery in the Grand View walk-in vault of a dauy journal covering four of the school's five years and which was kept by its two principal professors.However, the major contribution of this work rests on its analysis of the schism in the Danish Church, for the seminary miscarried, not because of its lack of success in performing its mission, but because of the increasingly acrimonious dissension among Danish Lutherans.All of the explicit problems (the seminary, secret societies, conversion after death, Grundtvigianism, literalism, personalities) were symptoms, not the disease: "The fatal blow to both the school . . .and the church itself was dealt by sociological pressures generated by the new world environment."The Church of Denmark had successfully harbored widely diverse factions, but in the United States, the liberals were out of step with both Protestantism and Lutheranism, a factor that elicited ridicule and even allegations of heresy ftom other Lutherans.The secessionists could not cope with that state of affairs; the liberals would not surrender their freedom.School in the Woods, then, is much more than a nostalgic narrative and represents a significant-and persuasive-consideration in reconciling the self-destructive tendencies of one immigrant group.