camp meetings

Examples of camp meetings in the following topics:

• Frontier Revivals

  • In the newly settled frontier regions, the revivals of the Second Great Awakening took the form of camp meetings.
  • The camp meeting was a religious service of several days' length involving multiple preachers.
  • Settlers in thinly populated areas would gather at the camp meeting for fellowship.
  • One of the early camp meetings took place in July 1800 at Gasper River Church in southwestern Kentucky.
  • Camp meetings were multi-day affairs with multiple preachers, often attracting thousands of worshippers.

• The Sectional Crisis Deepens

  • Increasing sectional polarization pushed most Americans into two distinct political camps on the eve of the 1860 presidential election.
  • The debates between slave-state and free-state interests raged in Congress; many people in the North and the South began to polarize along similar fault lines, and various disparate political organizations began to coalesce into distinct camps.
  • Northern Democrats hoped for a long-term compromise between slave and free states in new territories, while Southern Democrats demanded federal protections of slavery and threatened secession if Congress refused to meet their demands.
  • By the election of 1860, these political camps were firmly aligned with Northern and Southern interests, with Southern states whipping up public support for state conventions to vote on secession if Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans won the presidency.
  • The antebellum era of short-term compromise and evasion between the political camps was heading toward an end.

• Pioneer Women

  • They often sponsored activities that combined work, food, and entertainment such as barn raisings, corn huskings, quilting bees, Grange meetings, and church and school functions.
  • The most famous were the houses of prostitution found in mining camps.
  • Chinese women, for example, were frequently sold by their families and taken to the camps as prostitutes; they had to send their earnings back to their families in China.

• The Holocaust

  • Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between extermination camps and concentration camps.
  • Instead, the ghettos' inhabitants were sent to extermination camps.
  • The use of extermination camps (also called "death camps") equipped with gas chambers for the systematic mass extermination of peoples was an unprecedented feature of the Holocaust.
  • At this time, as the Soviet armed forces approached, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, any surviving inmates being shipped west to camps closer to Germany.
  • Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches" until the last weeks of the war.

• The Camp David Accords

  • The Camp David Accords were part of the Middle East peace process through comprehensive, multi-lateral negotiations.
  • The Camp David Accords were the result of 18 months of intense diplomatic efforts by Egypt, Israel, and the United States that began after Jimmy Carter became President.
  • The Camp David Accords were signed by Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on September 17, 1978, following thirteen days of secret negotiations at Camp David.
  • There were two 1978 Camp David agreements: A Framework for Peace in the Middle East and A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel, the second leading towards the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty signed in March 1979.
  • Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat with U.S. president Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978.

• The Nuremberg Trials

  • At the meetings in Tehran (1943), Yalta (1945) and Potsdam (1945), the three major wartime powers, the United Kingdom, United States, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics agreed on the format of punishment for those responsible for war crimes during World War II.
  • The pictures had been gathered when the inmates were liberated from the concentration camps.
  • The creation of the IMT was followed by trials of lesser Nazi officials and the trials of Nazi doctors, who performed experiments on people in prison camps.

• Internment of Japanese Americans

  • Japanese-American internment was the relocation and internment by the United States Government in 1942 of about 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese living along the Pacific coast of the United States to camps called "War Relocation Camps."
  • The Department of Justice (DOJ) operated camps officially called Internment Camps, which were used to detain those suspected of actual crimes or "enemy sympathies."
  • The spartan facilities of the camps met international laws, but still left much to be desired.
  • Camp schoolhouses were crowded and had insufficient materials, books, notebooks, and desks for students.
  • At the height of it attendance, the Rohwer Camp of Arkansas reached 2,339, with only 45 certified teachers. 

• The Contraband Camps

  • Former slaves set up camps near Union forces, and the army helped support and educate both adults and children among the refugees.
  • Thousands of men from these camps enlisted in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) when recruitment started in 1863.
  • They called their new settlement "Grand Contraband Camp" (which they nicknamed "Slabtown").
  • Across the South, Union forces managed more than 100 contraband camps, although not all were as large.
  • From a camp on Roanoke Island that started in 1862, Horace James developed the Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island (1863–1867).

• The European Crisis

  • When Belgium refused, Germany violated Belgian neutrality by crossing its territory to attack the French forces that had mobilized to meet the invaders.
  • Thus, Europe was divided into two warring camps: the Allies, based on the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France and Russia, and the Central Powers, based on the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy; although, as Austria-Hungary had initiated the offensive, Italy did not immediately enter the war.

• The Middle East

  • Secretary of State Madeline Albright later wrote "Saddam Hussein could have prevented any child from suffering simply by meeting his obligations. "
  • Arafat with Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton at Camp David Summit, 2000.