American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • American History >
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

MARSH, JAMES

(19 July 1794, Hartford, VT-3 July 1842, Colchester, VT). Education: B.A., Dartmouth College, 1817; B.D., Andover Seminary, 1822. Career: Tutor, Dartmouth College, 1818-20; professor of Oriental Languages, Hampden-Sydney College, 1823-26; president, University of Vermont, 1826-33; professor of moral and intellectual philosophy, University of Vermont, 1833-42.

James Marsh spent most of his adult life as president and professor at the University of Vermont. He is credited with helping to create a good atmosphere at the university for students and teachers, but he is best remembered for his philosophical influence. Although he was converted in 1815 during a revival;" he was suspicious of certain forms of revivalism and publicly condemned an evangelical preacher in 1836 who had, in his view, sacrificed reason to emotion. Favoring an approach to religion that balanced heart and intellect, he was attracted to the European romantic movement and played an important role in bringing such thinkers as Coleridge and Herder to the attention of the American public. In 1829 he brought out an edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, including an influential introduction, that helped shape Ralph Waldo Emerson's thought.

Marsh's career, brief though it was, suggests the appeal of romanticism to some Congregationalists. That appeal was to find its ablest spokesman a few year's after Marsh's death in the person of Horace Bushnell*.

Bibliography
A: An Exposition of the Course of Instruction and Discipline in the University of Vermont (Burlington, Vt., 1829); "Preliminary Essay," accompanying his publication of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (Burlington, Vt., 1829).
B: AAP 2, 692-704; DAB 12, 299-300; DARB, 291-92; NCAB 2, 40; Joseph Torrey, The Remains of the Rev. James Marsh (Burlington, Vt., 1843); John J. Duffy, "From Hanover to Burlington: James Marsh's Search for Unity," Vermont History, 38 (1970), 27-48; Douglas McCreary Greenwood, "James Marsh and the Transcendental Temper" (Ph. D. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1979).