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This book explores the varied terrain of religious activity in early national Baltimore. It examines the development and consequences of the voluntary church system in one urban center during the ferment and change of the formative age for American religion.
Beginning with the Great Awakening in the American colonies and continuing through contemporary Latin America, where revolution and revivalism have been central to sociopolitical change, Modern Christian Revivals demonstrates the enduring relevance of Christian revivalism. Half of the contributors focus on the United States, from Puritan New England through the Old South to Billy Graham and Pat Robertson; the others discuss revivalism in England, Norway, China, and Canada, chronicling influential as well as less frequently studied movements. This volume explores long-held assumptions about revivalism and illustrates its central role in the Christian tradition.
At its founding, the United States was one of the most religiously diverse places in the world. Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Lutherans, Huguenots, Dunkers, Jews, Moravians, and Mennonites populated the nations towns and villages. Dozens of new denominations would emerge over the succeeding years. What allowed people of so many different faiths to forge a nation together? In this richly told story of ideas, Chris Beneke demonstrates how the United States managed to overcome the religious violence and bigotry that characterized much of early modern Europe and America. The key, Beneke argues, did not...
The first comprehensive biography of Elihu Palmer tells the life story of a freethinker who was at the heart of the early United States' protracted contest over religious freedom and free speech. When the United States was new, a lapsed minister named Elihu Palmer shared with his fellow Americans the radical idea that virtue required no religious foundation. A better source for morality, he said, could be found in the natural world: the interconnected web of life that inspired compassion for all living things. Religions that deny these universal connections should be discarded, he insisted. For this, his Christian critics denounced him as a heretic whose ideas endangered the country. Althoug...
These essays examine how religious beliefs and practices have shaped political thought and behaviour (and vice versa), and how in certain periods religious and political thought has coincided or moved in opposition, and how minority perspectives have challenged majority views.
A provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic "The so-called Second Great Awakening was the shaping epoch of American Protestantism, and this book is the most important study of it ever published."—James Turner, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Winner of the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic book prize, and the Albert C. Outler Prize In this provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, Nathan O. Hatch argues that during this period American Christianity was democratized and common people became powerful actors on the religious scene. Hatch examines five distinct traditions or mass movements that emerged early in the nineteenth century—the Christian movement, Methodism, the Baptist movement, the black churches, and the Mormons—showing how all offered compelling visions of individual potential and collective aspiration to the unschooled and unsophisticated.
Wielding Words like Weapons is a collection of acclaimed American Indian Movement activist-intellectual Ward Churchill’s essays in indigenism, selected from material written during the decade 1995–2005. It includes a range of formats, from sharply framed book reviews and equally pointed polemics and op-eds to more formal essays designed to reach both scholarly and popular audiences. The selection also represents the broad range of topics addressed in Churchill’s scholarship, including the fallacies of archeological and anthropological orthodoxy such as the insistence of “cannibalogists” that American Indians were traditionally maneaters, Hollywood’s cinematic degradations of nati...
The illustrated nineteenth-century travel diaries of artist, educator, and architect Thomas Kelah Wharton, documenting his trips in the lower Hudson River Valley and New Orleans to Boston and back. Thomas Kelah Whartons travel diaries provide an intimate glimpse into the society of early nineteenth-century America. As a young immigrant from England, the eldest son of a wealthy merchant who fell on hard times, Wharton (18141862) navigated the complex world of New York and the Hudson River Valley in the early 1830s and his diaries reveal a vibrant cultural and social scene. Whartons details of encounters with the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole; the author Washington Irving; Sylv...
Students and scholars have long turned to the two-volume Documentary History of Religion in America for access to the most significant primary sources relating to American religious history. Published here in a single volume for the first time, the work in this fourth edition has been both updated and condensed, allowing instructors to more easily use the material in one semester. --