This study deals with the issue of social control and evangelical preaching from 1850 to 1900. It responds to scholarship which has argued that nineteenth-century English Christianity used religion to avoid making social changes. This investigation builds upon the corrective work of E. R. Norman and Peter d'A. Jones through an intensive examination of the theological and social views of leading preachers from three different channels of evangelical religion. The principal sources of data are the pastoral messages, sermons, special addresses, and essays of the three men who are the focal point of this study. Other sources include memoirs, biographies, and church records.

This thesis examines Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi Germany's attempt to use the Berlin Olympic Games to bring its citizens together in national consciousness and simultaneously enhance Germany's position in the international community. The sources include official documents issued by both the German and American Olympic Committees as well as newspaper reports of the Olympic proceedings. This eight chapter thesis discusses chronologically the beginnings of the Olympic movement in Imperial Germany, its growth during the Weimar and Nazi periods, and its culmination in the 1936 Berlin Games. Each German government built and improved upon the previous government's Olympic experiences with the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler reaping the benefits of forty years of German Olympic participation and preparation.