James Van Horn Melton (1952–2025)

Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria was a comparative study of Prussian and Austrian attempts to reform education in order to counter a crisis of legitimation. 1 Melton showed how new religious impulses-especially Pietism in Hohenzollern territories and reform Catholicism in Habsburg lands-sought to harness education to inculcate a broader social disciplining and serve the absolutist state.Despite their high aims, Melton noted the limits and constraints these educational reformers faced that, in turn, undermined what they had hoped to preserve.In his second book, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, Melton took as his point of departure Jrgen Habermas's understanding of the transformation of the public sphere in the Enlightenment. 2 Melton's wide-ranging synthesis examined the rise of public opinion in Britain, France, and central Europe.He not only described how new reading and writing publics developed across Europe and the function of salons, taverns, coffee shops, and freemasonry in providing spaces where broader "publics" could flourish, but he also revealed how such "publics" could take less liberal and rational turns than Habermas would lead us to suspect, becoming at times drivers of nationalism and aggressive calls for military action.In Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, Melton shifted his scope from Europe to the broader Atlantic world as he examined the path of exiled Protestants from Salzburg who, under Pietist influence, eventually emigrated to Georgia, where they 1