Journal ArticleDOI
Bibles, benevolence, and bureaucracy: the changing nature of nineteenth century religious records
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The American Bible Society's founders conceived the organization in 1816 as a traditional missionary moral reform agency as discussed by the authors, but by the mid-nineteenth century, the ABS more closely resembled a modern national nonprofit corporate bureaucracy.Abstract:
The American Bible Society's founders conceived the organization in 1816 as a traditional missionary moral reform agency. By the mid-nineteenth century, the ABS more closely resembled a modern national nonprofit corporate bureaucracy. Important changes in institutional recordkeeping accompanied and reinforced this change in mission. Increasingly, ABS field agents and employees were discouraged from presenting rich narrative reports, and were required to quantify their work into narrow statistical compilations. Recordkeeping case studies, sensitive to the broader process of institutionalization, can contribute to bureaucratization theory, expose institutional power relationships, and help archivists better appraise the informational value and limitations of their collections.read more
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Dissertation
"Punishment for the sins of Christendom": the antebellum evangelical reaction to Mormonism
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a method to solve the problem of homonymity in homonym identification, and propose a solution to solve it................................................................................................................. vii vii
Journal ArticleDOI
No One Has Ever Seen God: The Use of Religious Archives for Nonreligious Purposes
TL;DR: The use of religious archives for non-religious purposes is not a recent trend as mentioned in this paper, but it has been observed that the potential to research religious subjects in religious archives has been exhausted.