Herbert A. Wisbey

In Mark Twain in Elmira, editors Robert D. Jerome and Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr. reprint reminisces and other early articles about Twain's time in Elmira, NY. The editors organize the topics into nine topics: Mark Twain in Elmira; The Langdon Family (Twain's in-laws); Quarry Farm; Lectures in Elmira; Monument to Adam; Friends and Visitors; Park Church and Thomas K. Beecher; Woodlawn Cemetery; and Anecdotes. The stories shed light on a town that played a large role in Twain's life, both his personal life and as an author. Those who enjoy his humor will not be disappointed and the vignette style of Jerome and Wisbey's organization makes for easy reading.… (más)

In Soldiers Without Swords, Herbert A. Wisbey presents the story of the Salvation Army in America from its founding until his publication in 1955. Like Wisbey's other works, the greatest strength of Soldiers Without Swords is its narrative style, which is exceptionally readable for an academic history written in the mid-1950s.
My greatest critique is relatively minor: in all of Wisbey's books, but especially this one, he has a clear bias toward the subject of his writing. Even when covering secession and schism in the Salvation Army, he remains a steadfast apologist in favor of the Salvationists. This may stem from Wisbey's own interaction with the Salvation Army and its connection to the USO in World War II. Wisbey neither condemns nor frowns upon the Salvation Army's decision to sacrifice its belief in interracial equality in the face of Southern segregation in order that the organization might become established in the South. Rather, he quickly changes subject to the Army's endorsement of Brown v. Board of Education as if that made up for the years when the Salvation Army failed the Southern African American population. It would be interesting to see how Wisbey would cover the Salvation Army's current anti-LGBTQ policies.
This critique notwithstanding, Soldiers Without Swords serves as a concise, readable account of the Salvation Army in America and is especially important for, as Wisbey himself wrote, many documents of the early Salvation Army were decaying with age at the time he was writing and may now be lost. His record may be all that remains of many of the documents.… (más)

In his account of Jemima Wilkinson, who called herself the Public Universal Friend, Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr. worked to write a concise history that cut through much of the tall-tales and lore that followed her in life and continued after her death. Wisbey made use of documents which were, at the time of publication, relatively recently available to academic analysis.
Though other historians and scholars have studied and written about Wilkinson in the fifty years since Wisbey first published this monograph, it still serves as a good introduction to the Public Universal Friend. Modern historians, such as Paul Moyer, have added gender analysis and focused on the role of the Great Awakening and the Revolution in shaping Wilkinson, but Wisbey's work remains a useful text in the historiography of Wilkinson, the Great Awakening, and the settling of Western New York.… (más)