History seminars: John Stenhouse discusses religious, political and class conflicts

Tuesday 14 July: William Pember Reeves: God, Nation and History

Keith Sinclair’s stylish 1965 biography of leading Liberal politician William Pember Reeves (1857-1932} triggered one of New Zealand’s few lively historiographical debates over the significance of class and class conflict in New Zealand history.

Revisiting that debate, I argue that none of the historians involved dealt adequately with the controversial religious movements of the 1880s and ’90s: the Catholic state aid and the Protestant temperance, Bible-in-Schools, and Sabbatarian campaigns.

Reconnecting Reeves’s political career with his history-writing, I argue that he launched a present-centred progressive nationalist historiographical paradigm that tended to ignore or disparage religious reformers with whom he clashed as a politician.

The God’s Own Country of history was more fractious, divided and religious than the ideal nation of Reeves’-and many subsequent historians’ – progressive faith.

Join the History department for this seminar on 14 July, 5:30pm for drinks and nibbles or 6pm seminar starts in South Arts Lecture Theatre, A4.

 

Wednesday 15 July: Samuel Lister and the Otago Workman‘s war on women’s suffrage

Samuel Lister and the Otago Workman newspaper first appeared on the map during the debate over W.P. Reeves and the significance of class in New Zealand history.

Claiming that Lister rejected Scottish Presbyterianism for atheism, anticlericalism and republicanism, Erik Olssen argued that Lister’s Workman galvanised a defiantly secular working class consciousness across Otago and the nation.

Challenging some aspects of this account, I argue that Lister was  a radical Presbyterian, not a militant atheist.

His newspaper’s attacks on the “male women” and “female men” campaigning for suffrage cannot be understood except in relation to the dominance of evangelicals—notably Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists—in Dunedin suffrage circles, and their support for prohibition and Bible-in-Schools, causes that Lister hated.

But Lister and his allies lost the battle against suffrage.

The major religio-political fault line in 1890s Dunedin lay between the more puritanical, morally rigorous and sectarian-style religiosity of evangelicals and the more relaxed, world-affirming church-style religiosity of the episcopal churches.

Join the History department for this seminar on 15 July in either Logie 613 at 12:00pm or Zoom https://canterbury.zoom.us/j/93095173648
(ID 930 9517 3648)

 

Biography: John Stenhouse is Head of the History Programme at the University of Otago where he teaches New Zealand and European history and the history of science.

Recent publications include co-editing Eugenics at the Edges of Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and ‘Missionary Science’ in The Cambridge History of Science Volume 8, Modern Science in National and International Context (New York: Cambridge UP, 2020), pp. 90-107.