The festal homilies of the middle Byzantine period are covered in this chapter, following the introduction of major Marian feasts between the sixth and early eighth century. These works provide a combination of Christological teaching, which is often presented by means of typological rather than discursive methods, along with narrative – some of which comes from apocryphal rather than canonical biblical texts. Although the Virgin remained important as the guarantor of Christ’s humanity and divinity in this period, growing interest in her own legendary story and personal holiness is reflected in the festal homilies. The homiletic category called ‘occasional’ meanwhile provides narrative concerning Mary’s intervention in human catastrophes such as the siege of the Avars and Persians on Constantinople in 626 CE. The homiletic genre, as practised by preachers of the middle Byzantine period, thus encompassed a range of didactic and panegyrical purposes.

Economic hardship, exacerbated by the Civil War, revealed deep divisions between rich and poor, North and South, and dampened enlistment enthusiasm.

Visions of landownership in America were a key pull factor, associated with equality and social mobility, for Scandinavians who arrived in the United States with ideas of nonwhites shaped by scientific racism.

Scandinavian immigrants proved nonradical Republicans after the Civil War, exemplified by their continued focus on economic growth and an expanding white man's republic at the expense of nonwhites.

Attitudes toward recruitment and religion were more pragmatic among settlers and military personnel than the ones articulated by religious and ethnic leaders.

Principled opposition to slavery and concrete support for homestead legislation led Scandinavian immigrants to overwhelmingly support the Republican Party in 1860.

Scandinavian immigration floodgates opened into the Midwest after 1870. Over the next half-century, more than two million Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes came to the United States and changed the ethnic makeup of burgeoning cities such as Chicago, Saint Paul, and Milwaukee. For agricultural and industrial workers, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were undesirable places to live in the nineteenth century, as evidenced by the emigration of more than 10 percent of each country’s population, and America, with its growing territory and population, was perceived as an ideal destination. What many Scandinavian settlers had in common were visions of America as a place with opportunities for landownership, social mobility, and central citizenship rights such as voting.

Despite their Republican leanings, many Scandinavian immigrants expressed scepticism toward the Emancipation Proclamation and black citizenship, and opposed black laborers potentially migrating north.

The 1848 revolutions impacted American politics as it increased the need for labor in the West Indies, elevated fear of abolition, and prompted disappointed European revolutionaries to emigrate.

The threshold principle, emphasizing territorial and population expansion, was intimately tied to ideas of white citizenship in nineteenth-century America.