These volumes are set forth in the hope that it will give the reader a deeper insight into the atmosphere of reform which permeated the time in which arose the Millerite Movement, the seedbed of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Such an atmosphere made people receptive to change and provided the attitude of mind which made the widespread dissemination of new ideas possible. Surely it was in the providence of God that the great Second Advent Movement arose at such a time.

Griffin analyses anti-Catholic fiction written between the 1830s and the turn of the century in both Britain and America.

The vivid and masterful story of Isabella Stewart Gardner—creator of one of America’s most stunning museums—an American original whose own life was remade by art. Includes archival photos of Isabella’s world, museum, and the art she collected. Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from Boston’s Fens at the turn of the twentieth century. Its treasures encompassed not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture. An extraordinary achievement of storytelling and scholarship, Chasing Beauty illuminates the fascinating ways the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of memoir, dazzling and haunting, created with objects instead of words and displayed per Isabella’s wishes in the exact placements she initially curated. Born in 1840 to a privileged New York family, Isabella Stewart married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner as she turned twenty. She was misunderstood by Boston’s insular society and suffered the death of her only child, a beloved boy, not yet two years old. But in time came friendships, glittering and bohemian; awe-inspiring world travels; and collecting beautiful things with a keen eye and competitive pace—all these were balm for loss. Henry James and John Singer Sargent—whose portrait of Isabella was a masterpiece and a scandal—came to recognize her originality. Bernard Berenson, leading connoisseur of the Italian Renaissance, was her art dealer. From award-winning author Natalie Dykstra, Chasing Beauty is the story of the complex and singular woman behind one of the most fascinating museums in the nation and the world—a tale of beauty and loss, grit and American self-invention.

DIVA statement on how “knowledge” is socialized and assimilated by a culture, investigating popular and canonical fiction, early encyclopedias, and other popular efforts at mass education and knowledge dissemination./div