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News, events, updates, and tidbits from the Presbyterian Historical Society. Use tags to read related articles or sort by author for similar posts written by PHS staff members and volunteers.

A Reckoning in Princeton

February 18, 2016

Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church (Princeton, N.J.) directory, 1980s. From RG 425, Series I, Congregational vertical file.

The November 2015 protests at Princeton University brought renewed critical interest in the Presbyterian elder Woodrow Wilson's presidential administration. By segregating the civil service in 1913, Wilson drove African American workers, ...

Author:

David S

Tags:

Congregations, William Drew Robeson, African American History

Where Did the Confession of 1967 Come From?

February 12, 2016

Depending on who you asked at the time, the new confessional position of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. -- written over the course of seven years, referred to a Special Committee of Fifteen for study and review for one year, passed by the next General Assembly and sent to the presbyteries for ratification, finally adopted and added to Presbyterians' constitution, intact, by the skin of its teeth at the General Assembly in Portland in May 1967 -- was apostasy, evidence of communist brainwashing, a threat to national security, or a milquetoast concession to political...

Author:

David S

Tags:

Confession of 1967, General Assembly

Remembering David Gelzer

February 11, 2016

David Gelzer, Presbyterian missionary, theological educator, and friend of the Presbyterian Historical Society, died on January 23, 2016.

David Georg Gelzer was born in Vevey, Switzerland, the third of eight children of a Swiss Reformed minister, and grew up in Basel, in an extended family of bankers, scholars, and clergymen. He emigrated alone to the United States, with no grasp of English, as a seventeen year old, sponsored by a...

Author:

David S

Tags:

David Georg Gelzer, Mission History

PHS Awards 2015 Heritage Preservation Grants

January 4, 2016

The Presbyterian Historical Society is pleased to award Heritage Preservation Grants to four PC(USA) congregations. The records to be preserved come from two former congregations of the PCUS, a 19th-century church west of the Mississippi, and a New Deal planned community in Appalachia. The winners are:

Fairfield Presbyterian Church (Sandy Lake, Pa.), organized in 1831.
Presbyterian Church (Floyd, Va.), organized in 1853.
First

Author:

David S

Tags:

Heritage Preservation Grants, Congregations

PHS Presents at Portland's #policon15

November 18, 2015

The Presbyterian Historical Society's executive director, Beth Hessel, and records archivist, David Staniunas, accompanied our Office of the General Assembly colleagues and hundreds of mid council leaders to Portland, Oregon, for the 2015 Polity Conference and associated meetings. Polity in odd-years takes place at the site of the next General Assembly, and the last time Presbyterians gathered in Portland, it looked like this: