of conservatives and liberals. Yet Harrell’s work marked the beginning of a shift away from a strictly apologetic or triumphalist interpretation among historians in Churches of Christ. The second “new historian” in Churches of Christ was Bill J. Humble. Humble’s 1964 dissertation at the University of Iowa was a history of the nineteenth-century missionary society controversy in which he, like Harrell, acknowledged a major role for the Civil War in sectionalizing the issue and making it divisive.
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