Souls at Sea: Religion, Reform, and the American Sailor

Join us for lunch to hear Dr. Ryan Tobler discuss his research into the evolving social profile and reputation of sailors during an era when they constituted a vital population and significant presence in American society. Focusing on activity in major port cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Honolulu, his work examines a striking moral and religious reappraisal of American seamen in the years after the War of 1812 and the corresponding rise of the "seaman's cause”—a surge of new religious and social initiatives.

These initiatives included innovative campaigns to church and evangelize seamen, the creation of morally-regulated “Sailor’s Home” boarding houses to domesticate seamen and protect them from exploitation, the foundation of Seaman's Banks for their financial protection, opposition to corporal punishment, and the advocacy of temperance among sailors, among other things.

These efforts were the work of a new set of mission, reform, and aid societies, such as the Boston Seaman's Friend Society, whose institutional records reside at the Congregational Library & Archives. As the documents of these groups reveal, seafaring men represent a fascinating and overlooked vector of social reform in a morally mobilized new republic.

For more information, please email info@14beacon.org.

SPEAKER BIO:

Ryan Tobler is a scholar of American religious and intellectual history, specializing in the nineteenth century United States. He holds several graduate degrees in Religious Studies: an MA from the University of Chicago, and an MA and PhD from Harvard. Currently, Ryan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. Starting this fall he'll be a Lecturer in American Studies at Universität Heidelberg, in southwestern Germany.