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In the summer of 1893, American audiences were introduced to the perfect man. EugenSandow was a Prussian-born strongman whose sinewy physique was instantly lauded as the height of physical perfection. To mark his distance from laboring classes and colonized peoples, the theatrics of Sandow’s presentation positioned him as a modern incarnation of classical beauty. But influential as he was, Sandow was not the only physical embodiment of corporeal perfection Americans plucked from antiquity. Another contender for the title of the perfect man was Jesus. The contours of manhood coded in Sandow’s sinew were rendered in contemporaneous depictions of Jesus as the model physical type. The face of Jesus was not simply mimeographed onto Sandow’s flesh. Instead, a language of physical perfection and attending visual and imaginative strategies of representation linked Jesus and Sandow—American Christianity and American manhood—in minds and bodies. Rather than compare Jesus and the strongman, this article explores visual regimes of late nineteenth-century American masculinity to demonstrate the mutual articulation of religious and national imaginaries through visual iconographies of race.

This article seeks to redress certain historiographical oversights in the study of Father Divine's Peace Mission movement by turning away from exclusive consideration of Divine's own theological agenda and toward the very tactile devotional culture of his diverse followers. Recent scholarship has rightly pointed out the influences of New Thought on Divine's theologies of materialization and on his reconceptualization of cosmic dramas of personal and corporate salvation, developments that can be seen in the theological sensibilities of his followers as well. Yet, the Peace Mission's “living epistles” also had deep histories, whether personal or familial, in Protestant and Catholic traditions that were not simply discarded when they turned to Father Divine. Lastly, much of the current scholarship on Father Divine and the Peace Mission has been limited to the highly charged Harlem decade of the 1930s. Drawing on the rich material archive of subsequent decades, this article looks primarily at the Peace Mission's activities of the 1940s and 1950s, thus yielding insight into the changing racial dynamics of the movement as well as its ongoing relationship with postwar American cultures.

This article seeks to redress certain historiographical oversights in the study of Father Divine's Peace Mission movement by turning away from exclusive consideration of Divine's own theological agenda and toward the very tactile devotional culture of his diverse followers. Recent scholarship has rightly pointed out the influences of New Thought on Divine's theologies of materialization and on his reconceptualization of cosmic dramas of personal and corporate salvation, developments that can be seen in the theological sensibilities of his followers as well. Yet, the Peace Mission's “living epistles” also had deep histories, whether personal or familial, in Protestant and Catholic traditions that were not simply discarded when they turned to Father Divine. Lastly, much of the current scholarship on Father Divine and the Peace Mission has been limited to the highly charged Harlem decade of the 1930s. Drawing on the rich material archive of subsequent decades, this article looks primarily at the Peace Mission's activities of the 1940s and 1950s, thus yielding insight into the changing racial dynamics of the movement as well as its ongoing relationship with postwar American cultures.

This dissertation is a material culture analysis of vernacular photographic artifacts that were incorporated into the devotional culture of nineteenth-century religious Americans. Rather than focusing exclusively on the visual content of early photographs to determine whether or not they constituted a religious archive, I am attentive to the practices of preservation and display that contributed to circumstances of encounter. In several instances it is a study of religion in photography, but my interests are ultimately much broader than the compositional frame of any given photograph. Theological, devotional, liturgical, and skeptical discourses thus emerge less as compositional directives than as interpretive contexts. Likewise, as a category of analysis rather than a category of collectible, in this dissertation the terminology of the vernacular refers to the photographic artifacts that Americans most commonly encountered through the course of their daily affairs, specifically studio portraiture, memorial photographs, halftone reproductions, stereographs, and, at the end of the century, consumer generated snapshots arranged into albums and scuttled through the mail. This art historical interest in the vernacular is considered alongside recent historiographic interest in the quotidian among historians of American religion, a field which, not incidentally, has also become increasingly committed to material culture analysis. By identifying a historiographic association between lived religion, everyday practices, and material artifacts, this dissertation works to interrogate notions of indexicality freighted in historical analysis. American religionists' converging interest in the quotidian and in material culture, not surprisingly, echoed similar movements in other disciplines, including sociology, history, art history, literature, and area studies. In many respects located at the crossroads of these disciplinary concerns, my dissertation contributes to this broad scholarly interest by providing an attentive consideration of the relationships that historians, especially, posit between material culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, the accessibility of human experiences via the artifacts that inhabited their subjects' tactile worlds. During the nineteenth century, arguably no other cultural medium in the United States was more charged than photography, and no other arena of human life more contested—or more fervently defended—than religion. By placing these two areas of inquiry in deliberate conversation through cultural historical analysis, my dissertation works to provide one place wherein scholars of any number of specializations can begin to think critically about the relationships between material artifacts, photographic representation, and religious experiences.

For Williams, the Asian technê that he traces through Sarah Wyman Whitman's book designs, Jack London's writing and photographs, Ezra Pound's machine art, Lin Yutang's typewriter, Robert Prisig's motorcycle, Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, and Wang Zi Won's sculptures, among many other artists and authors, is itself an instrument that \"reflects a general, therapeutic effort to explore alternatives to the overtechnologization . . . of Western modernity\" (6). [...]by the final page Williams persuades readers that American encounters with \"the East\" in the long shadow of the Columbian Exposition evince, alongside Lin's typewriter, a \"possibility of imagining therapeutic and alternative forms of modernity outside the Euro-American myths of progress and white, Western superiority\" (148).

We present the mission concept \"Mission to Analyze the UltraViolet universE\" (MAUVE), a wide-field spectrometer and imager conceived during the inaugural NASA Astrophysics Mission Design School. MAUVE responds to the 2023 Announcement of Opportunity for Probe-class missions, with a budget cap of \\$1 billion, and would hypothetically launch in 2031. However, the formulation of MAUVE was an educational exercise and the mission is not being developed further. The Principal Investigator-led science of MAUVE aligns with the priorities outlined in the 2020 Astrophysics Decadal Survey, enabling new characterizations of exoplanet atmospheres, the early-time light curves of some of the universe's most explosive transients, and the poorly-understood extragalactic background light. Because the Principal Investigator science occupies 30% of the observing time available during the mission's 5 yr lifespan, we provide an observing plan that would allow for 70% of the observing time to be used for General Observer programs, with community-solicited proposals. The onboard detector (THISTLE) claims significant heritage from the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on Hubble, but extends its wavelength range down to the extreme UV. We note that MAUVE would be the first satellite in decades with the ability to access this regime of the electromagnetic spectrum. MAUVE has a field of view of 900\" x 900\" a photometric sensitivity extending to \\(m_UV 24\\), and a resolving power of \\(R1000\\). This paper provides full science and mission traceability matrices for this concept, and also outlines cost and scheduling timelines aimed at enabling a within-budget mission and an on-time launch.