Markku Ruotsila
Biographic Data
| ID | 1034345 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Markku Ruotsila |
| GIVEN NAMES | Markku |
| FAMILY NAME | Ruotsila |
| SIGNATURE | RUOTSILA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Helsinki |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Policing the Containment Order
According to an influential narrative, the Cold War era Federal Bureau of Investigation led in the construction of a countersubversive machinery that was designed to punish progressive dissent and to uphold a conservative Christian capitalist public order. This narrative has been constructed with very little research done into the FBI's actual views of and relations with the Cold War era political and religious Right, the ideology of which it was…
Christian Fundamentalism in Japan
This article examines the ultimately unfruitful attempts by U.S. Christian fundamentalists at establishing a presence within Japanese Protestantism. Almost unknown even to scholars in the field, this missionary effort was launched in 1949. It yielded several indigenous institutions, including the Tokyo Christian Theological Seminary, the Japan Bible Times , and the Christian Presbyterian Church of Japan. This uniquely American import of a fundame…
The Last Embers of British Fundamentalism
This article unearths the little-remembered history of British fundamentalist organisations of the Cold War era. These bodies constituted the last embers of an organised movement in Britain: the British Evangelical Council after 1953; the English Consultative Committee and the British Council of Protestant Christian Churches from the mid-1950s; the Christian Bible Unity Fellowship in the 1960s; and the British and European Reformation Fellowship …
Spiritual Socialists
In this book, Vaneesa Cook sets out to complicate the customary declension narrative of the religious Left in modern U.S. history by investigating a select group of politically engaged people of faith from the early 1920s to the present. These “spiritual socialists,” as she calls them, include A. J. Muste, Sherwood Eddy, Dorothy Day, Myles Horton, Staughton Lynd, and Pauli Murray. These individuals cannot be accommodated by the customary analytic…
Protestants Abroad
With this book, David A. Hollinger provides an exceptionally important addition to scholarship on the transnational impact of American Protestant missionaries in the crucial decades of the Cold War
Revolutionaries for the Right
Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War. By Kyle Burke. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xii, 351 pp. $35.00.) Markku Ruotsila Markku Ruotsila University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jou…
S arah R uth H ammond . God’s Businessmen
With her 2010 Yale University dissertation, the late Sarah Ruth Hammond was a pioneering figure in the since rapidly expanded field of inquiry that looks into the potent interpenetration of conservative evangelicalism and American business. It is much to the credit of Darren Dochuk that he chose to edit and update her book manuscript based on that dissertation, and to the credit of the University of Chicago Press that they then moved forward with…
Globalising the US Christian Right
This article investigates the Cold War era efforts by self-identified Christian fundamentalists in the United States to export their political agendas and their methodologies of exerting political pressure to the rest of the world. It focuses on the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC), the era's only worldwide interdenominational association by Protestant Christian fundamentalists, founded by North Americans in 1948 but functioning…
Fighting Fundamentalist
For most of his sixty-year career, the Rev. Carl McIntire was at the center of controversy. The best known and most influential of the fundamentalist radio broadcasters and anticommunists of the Cold War era, his many church and political enemies depicted him as a dangerous far rightist, a racist, or a McCarthyite opportunist engaged in red-baiting for personal profit. Despised and hounded by liberals, revered by fundamentalists and distrusted by…
Jacob A. Zumoff. The Communist International and US Communism, 1919–1929
As the author Jacob A. Zumoff helpfully informs us in the introduction, this revised and updated version of a 2003 doctoral dissertation at the University of London has been written from a “Marxist perspective” by one sympathetic to his protagonists’ “goal of workers’ revolution in the United States,” a goal he insists is “still necessary today” (20). The slant is evident even without the disclaimer, for the text is full of rather quaint Marxian …
The League of Nations Controversy among British Protestants
Traditionally, the British reaction to the League of Nations has been narrated in terms of an almost uniform acceptance. British Churches, in particular, have been seen as among its most enthusiastic supporters and principal campaigners for its creation. In fact, a significant amount of debate over the League erupted in the Church of England and the Free Churches. In these debates, Christian Socialists emerged as passionate League enthusiasts and…
Faith and War
In recent years the corpus of scholarship on religion and U.S. foreign policy has advanced by leaps and bounds. The latest addition, David E. Settje's detailed account of Christian debates over the Vietnam War, adds important new perspectives and details. Moving beyond the much-traversed terrain that is bounded by the antiwar religious Left and the prowar evangelical Right, Settje seeks instead to expose the full variety of denominational Christi…
Carl McIntire and the Fundamentalist Origins of the Christian Right
Recent scholarship has argued that Cold War anticommunism was key among the tools with which conservative evangelicals in the United States negotiated their return to the mainstream of American public conversation. While useful, such renderings of the anticommunist leaven in the repoliticization of religious conservatives remain misleading as long as they remain pivoted on the small cadre of reputedly moderate new evangelical intellectuals. Entir…
H.M. Hyndman and the Russia Question after 1917
In the last four years of his life the eclectic veteran of British Marxism, H.M. Hyndman (1842–1921), was intimately involved in a transatlantic socialist effort to destroy the Russian Bolshevik regime. Historians have rarely investigated this effort, because it appears not to fit into the customary categories constructed about Marxian socialism. Utilizing Hyndman's extensive published writings and hitherto mostly ignored private correspondence w…
Communism as Anarchism
The Catholic Apostolic Church in British Politics
This article looks at a largely neglected aspect of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religio-political activism and public doctrine, the conservative politics of premillennialist Protestantism. It approaches this subject through a case study of the doctrines and activities of the Catholic Apostolic Church, a relatively small premillennialist and Pentecostal faith-community extant from the 1830s through to the mid-twentieth century. The translati…
Mrs Webster’s religion
Ruotsila examines the interpenetration of premillennialist Christian fundamentalism and secular conspiracy theory through a case study of Nesta Webster, the pioneer of modern Illuminati theory. He offers an alternative to the usual interpretation of Webster as an example of delusional fascist psychopathology, and roots her thinking instead in a secularized rendering of premillennialist Christian echatological thought. The article shows how Webste…
The Antisemitism of the Eighth Duke of Northumberland’s the Patriot, 1922-1930
This article explores British antisemitism through an investigation of the journal Patriot, a leading weekly of the interwar British radical right. It provides the first indepth examination of the Patriot’s editorial content for the period it was under the direction of its founder, the leading publicist of the aristocratic Die-hard and protofascist right, the eighth Duke of Northumberland. The roots and trajectories of the Patriot’s antisemitic p…
Conservative American Protestantism in the League of Nations Controversy
The emerging fundamentalist movement made its first foray into extra-ecclesiastical politics during the League of Nations controversy of 1919-20. Both of the two main wings of fundamentalism-dispensational premillennialists and conservative Calvinists-took part in this controversy because both of them regarded the proposed League as an important, inherently religious issue. Both kinds of fundamentalists opposed the League, and both used the ratif…
The Great Charter for the Liberty of the Workingman’
This article explores the interaction of Anglophone labour and liberals in the process which led to the creation of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 1919, the first international attempt to legislate sociopolitical and economic standards central to the agendas of both movements. It charts the dynamics between collectivist, mostly British, and voluntarist, mostly American, conceptions of international labour legislation, and analyses…
British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War
It is not often that contemporary historians focus on anticommunism as an ideology and a political force before the beginning of the Cold War in 1945–1946. But the Finnish historian Markku Ruotsila has now turned to that very topic. Originating as a doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge, the author's study focused on the period of the Russian Revolution, foreign intervention, and civil war from 1917 to 1921. He has since added another 48…
Lord Sydenham of Combe's World Jewish Conspiracy
Ruotsila's article is the first in-depth examination of the development of the racialist and antisemitic thinking of one of the main expositors of British radical-right doctrine in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Viscount Sydenham of Combe. An active participant in all the major debates of the radical right, a popularizer of conspiracy theories to explain Bolshevism, Zionism and modern internationalism, Sydenham had unusually cl…
The Antisemitism of the Eighth Duke of Northumberland’s the Patriot, 1922-1930
This article explores British antisemitism through an investigation of the journal Patriot, a leading weekly of the interwar British radical right. It provides the first indepth examination of the Patriot’s editorial content for the period it was under the direction of its founder, the leading publicist of the aristocratic Die-hard and protofascist right, the eighth Duke of Northumberland. The roots and trajectories of the Patriot’s antisemitic p…
H.M. Hyndman and the Russia Question after 1917
In the last four years of his life the eclectic veteran of British Marxism, H.M. Hyndman (1842–1921), was intimately involved in a transatlantic socialist effort to destroy the Russian Bolshevik regime. Historians have rarely investigated this effort, because it appears not to fit into the customary categories constructed about Marxian socialism. Utilizing Hyndman's extensive published writings and hitherto mostly ignored private correspondence w…
Mrs Webster’s religion
Ruotsila examines the interpenetration of premillennialist Christian fundamentalism and secular conspiracy theory through a case study of Nesta Webster, the pioneer of modern Illuminati theory. He offers an alternative to the usual interpretation of Webster as an example of delusional fascist psychopathology, and roots her thinking instead in a secularized rendering of premillennialist Christian echatological thought. The article shows how Webste…
The Great Charter for the Liberty of the Workingman’
This article explores the interaction of Anglophone labour and liberals in the process which led to the creation of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 1919, the first international attempt to legislate sociopolitical and economic standards central to the agendas of both movements. It charts the dynamics between collectivist, mostly British, and voluntarist, mostly American, conceptions of international labour legislation, and analyses…
Lord Sydenham of Combe's World Jewish Conspiracy
Ruotsila's article is the first in-depth examination of the development of the racialist and antisemitic thinking of one of the main expositors of British radical-right doctrine in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Viscount Sydenham of Combe. An active participant in all the major debates of the radical right, a popularizer of conspiracy theories to explain Bolshevism, Zionism and modern internationalism, Sydenham had unusually cl…
Carl McIntire and the Fundamentalist Origins of the Christian Right
Recent scholarship has argued that Cold War anticommunism was key among the tools with which conservative evangelicals in the United States negotiated their return to the mainstream of American public conversation. While useful, such renderings of the anticommunist leaven in the repoliticization of religious conservatives remain misleading as long as they remain pivoted on the small cadre of reputedly moderate new evangelical intellectuals. Entir…
British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War
It is not often that contemporary historians focus on anticommunism as an ideology and a political force before the beginning of the Cold War in 1945–1946. But the Finnish historian Markku Ruotsila has now turned to that very topic. Originating as a doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge, the author's study focused on the period of the Russian Revolution, foreign intervention, and civil war from 1917 to 1921. He has since added another 48…
Lord Sydenham of Combe's World Jewish Conspiracy
Ruotsila's article is the first in-depth examination of the development of the racialist and antisemitic thinking of one of the main expositors of British radical-right doctrine in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Viscount Sydenham of Combe. An active participant in all the major debates of the radical right, a popularizer of conspiracy theories to explain Bolshevism, Zionism and modern internationalism, Sydenham had unusually cl…
The Great Charter for the Liberty of the Workingman’
This article explores the interaction of Anglophone labour and liberals in the process which led to the creation of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 1919, the first international attempt to legislate sociopolitical and economic standards central to the agendas of both movements. It charts the dynamics between collectivist, mostly British, and voluntarist, mostly American, conceptions of international labour legislation, and analyses…
British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War
It is not often that contemporary historians focus on anticommunism as an ideology and a political force before the beginning of the Cold War in 1945–1946. But the Finnish historian Markku Ruotsila has now turned to that very topic. Originating as a doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge, the author's study focused on the period of the Russian Revolution, foreign intervention, and civil war from 1917 to 1921. He has since added another 48…
Conservative American Protestantism in the League of Nations Controversy
The emerging fundamentalist movement made its first foray into extra-ecclesiastical politics during the League of Nations controversy of 1919-20. Both of the two main wings of fundamentalism-dispensational premillennialists and conservative Calvinists-took part in this controversy because both of them regarded the proposed League as an important, inherently religious issue. Both kinds of fundamentalists opposed the League, and both used the ratif…
Mrs Webster’s religion
Ruotsila examines the interpenetration of premillennialist Christian fundamentalism and secular conspiracy theory through a case study of Nesta Webster, the pioneer of modern Illuminati theory. He offers an alternative to the usual interpretation of Webster as an example of delusional fascist psychopathology, and roots her thinking instead in a secularized rendering of premillennialist Christian echatological thought. The article shows how Webste…
The Antisemitism of the Eighth Duke of Northumberland’s the Patriot, 1922-1930
This article explores British antisemitism through an investigation of the journal Patriot, a leading weekly of the interwar British radical right. It provides the first indepth examination of the Patriot’s editorial content for the period it was under the direction of its founder, the leading publicist of the aristocratic Die-hard and protofascist right, the eighth Duke of Northumberland. The roots and trajectories of the Patriot’s antisemitic p…
The Catholic Apostolic Church in British Politics
This article looks at a largely neglected aspect of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religio-political activism and public doctrine, the conservative politics of premillennialist Protestantism. It approaches this subject through a case study of the doctrines and activities of the Catholic Apostolic Church, a relatively small premillennialist and Pentecostal faith-community extant from the 1830s through to the mid-twentieth century. The translati…
Communism as Anarchism
H.M. Hyndman and the Russia Question after 1917
In the last four years of his life the eclectic veteran of British Marxism, H.M. Hyndman (1842–1921), was intimately involved in a transatlantic socialist effort to destroy the Russian Bolshevik regime. Historians have rarely investigated this effort, because it appears not to fit into the customary categories constructed about Marxian socialism. Utilizing Hyndman's extensive published writings and hitherto mostly ignored private correspondence w…
Faith and War
In recent years the corpus of scholarship on religion and U.S. foreign policy has advanced by leaps and bounds. The latest addition, David E. Settje's detailed account of Christian debates over the Vietnam War, adds important new perspectives and details. Moving beyond the much-traversed terrain that is bounded by the antiwar religious Left and the prowar evangelical Right, Settje seeks instead to expose the full variety of denominational Christi…
Carl McIntire and the Fundamentalist Origins of the Christian Right
Recent scholarship has argued that Cold War anticommunism was key among the tools with which conservative evangelicals in the United States negotiated their return to the mainstream of American public conversation. While useful, such renderings of the anticommunist leaven in the repoliticization of religious conservatives remain misleading as long as they remain pivoted on the small cadre of reputedly moderate new evangelical intellectuals. Entir…
The League of Nations Controversy among British Protestants
Traditionally, the British reaction to the League of Nations has been narrated in terms of an almost uniform acceptance. British Churches, in particular, have been seen as among its most enthusiastic supporters and principal campaigners for its creation. In fact, a significant amount of debate over the League erupted in the Church of England and the Free Churches. In these debates, Christian Socialists emerged as passionate League enthusiasts and…
Jacob A. Zumoff. The Communist International and US Communism, 1919–1929
As the author Jacob A. Zumoff helpfully informs us in the introduction, this revised and updated version of a 2003 doctoral dissertation at the University of London has been written from a “Marxist perspective” by one sympathetic to his protagonists’ “goal of workers’ revolution in the United States,” a goal he insists is “still necessary today” (20). The slant is evident even without the disclaimer, for the text is full of rather quaint Marxian …
Fighting Fundamentalist
For most of his sixty-year career, the Rev. Carl McIntire was at the center of controversy. The best known and most influential of the fundamentalist radio broadcasters and anticommunists of the Cold War era, his many church and political enemies depicted him as a dangerous far rightist, a racist, or a McCarthyite opportunist engaged in red-baiting for personal profit. Despised and hounded by liberals, revered by fundamentalists and distrusted by…
Globalising the US Christian Right
This article investigates the Cold War era efforts by self-identified Christian fundamentalists in the United States to export their political agendas and their methodologies of exerting political pressure to the rest of the world. It focuses on the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC), the era's only worldwide interdenominational association by Protestant Christian fundamentalists, founded by North Americans in 1948 but functioning…
S arah R uth H ammond . God’s Businessmen
With her 2010 Yale University dissertation, the late Sarah Ruth Hammond was a pioneering figure in the since rapidly expanded field of inquiry that looks into the potent interpenetration of conservative evangelicalism and American business. It is much to the credit of Darren Dochuk that he chose to edit and update her book manuscript based on that dissertation, and to the credit of the University of Chicago Press that they then moved forward with…
Protestants Abroad
With this book, David A. Hollinger provides an exceptionally important addition to scholarship on the transnational impact of American Protestant missionaries in the crucial decades of the Cold War
Revolutionaries for the Right
Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War. By Kyle Burke. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xii, 351 pp. $35.00.) Markku Ruotsila Markku Ruotsila University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jou…
Spiritual Socialists
In this book, Vaneesa Cook sets out to complicate the customary declension narrative of the religious Left in modern U.S. history by investigating a select group of politically engaged people of faith from the early 1920s to the present. These “spiritual socialists,” as she calls them, include A. J. Muste, Sherwood Eddy, Dorothy Day, Myles Horton, Staughton Lynd, and Pauli Murray. These individuals cannot be accommodated by the customary analytic…
Christian Fundamentalism in Japan
This article examines the ultimately unfruitful attempts by U.S. Christian fundamentalists at establishing a presence within Japanese Protestantism. Almost unknown even to scholars in the field, this missionary effort was launched in 1949. It yielded several indigenous institutions, including the Tokyo Christian Theological Seminary, the Japan Bible Times , and the Christian Presbyterian Church of Japan. This uniquely American import of a fundame…
The Last Embers of British Fundamentalism
This article unearths the little-remembered history of British fundamentalist organisations of the Cold War era. These bodies constituted the last embers of an organised movement in Britain: the British Evangelical Council after 1953; the English Consultative Committee and the British Council of Protestant Christian Churches from the mid-1950s; the Christian Bible Unity Fellowship in the 1960s; and the British and European Reformation Fellowship …
Policing the Containment Order
According to an influential narrative, the Cold War era Federal Bureau of Investigation led in the construction of a countersubversive machinery that was designed to punish progressive dissent and to uphold a conservative Christian capitalist public order. This narrative has been constructed with very little research done into the FBI's actual views of and relations with the Cold War era political and religious Right, the ideology of which it was…
Political science (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (15 works) · History (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · History (11 works) · Religious studies (11 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (9 works)