C. C. Goen's landmark study on the effects of revivalism during the latter half of the 18th century filled a great void in understanding the Great Awakening, and it continues to influence the work of scholars today. Full of artful contextualization of the issues that plagued colonial churches, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740-1800 documents the ways in which revivalism helped pave the way for a new religious identity in America. Goen underscores how these congregations responded to state involvement in matters of religion and sheds new light on the development of the Baptist denomination by locating its growth within fringe communities in New England rather than organized structures in the Middle Colonies.
The First Great Awakening was a time of heightened religious activity in the colonial New England. Among those whom the English settlers tried to convert to Christianity were the region's native peoples. In this book, Linford Fisher tells the gripping story of American Indians' attempts to wrestle with the ongoing realities of colonialism between the 1670s and 1820. In particular, he looks at how some members of previously unevangelized Indian communities in Connecticut, Rhode Island, western Massachusetts, and Long Island adopted Christian practices, often joining local Congregational churches and receiving baptism. Far from passively sliding into the cultural and physical landscape after King Philip's War, he argues, Native individuals and communities actively tapped into transatlantic structures of power to protect their land rights, welcomed educational opportunities for their children, and joined local white churches. Religion repeatedly stood at the center of these points of cultural engagement, often in hotly contested ways. Although these Native groups had successfully resisted evangelization in the seventeenth century, by the eighteenth century they showed an increasing interest in education and religion. Their sporadic participation in the First Great Awakening marked a continuation of prior forms of cultural engagement. More surprisingly, however, in the decades after the Awakening, Native individuals and sub-groups asserted their religious and cultural autonomy to even greater degrees by leaving English churches and forming their own Indian Separate churches. In the realm of education, too, Natives increasingly took control, preferring local reservation schools and demanding Indian teachers whenever possible. In the 1780s, two small groups of Christian Indians moved to New York and founded new Christian Indian settlements. But the majority of New England Natives-even those who affiliated with Christianity-chose to remain in New England, continuing to assert their own autonomous existence through leasing land, farming, and working on and off the reservations. While Indian involvement in the Great Awakening has often been seen as total and complete conversion, Fisher's analysis of church records, court documents, and correspondence reveals a more complex reality. Placing the Awakening in context of land loss and the ongoing struggle for cultural autonomy in the eighteenth century casts it as another step in the ongoing, tentative engagement of native peoples with Christian ideas and institutions in the colonial world. Charting this untold story of the Great Awakening and the resultant rise of an Indian Separatism and its effects on Indian cultures as a whole, this gracefully written book challenges long-held notions about religion and Native-Anglo-American interaction
Earle E. Cairns, renowned historian and writer on religion, explores revivals in the church from the Great Awakening to the present. In an enlightening narrative that begins with the Bible-centered Pietists of nineteenth-century Germany, Dr. Cairns unfolds the story of the workings of God's Spirit in renewing the church. Cairns takes the reader on a historical pilgrimage that features candid accounts of such figures as Billy Graham, Billy Sunday, Charles H. Spurgeon, Dwight L. Moody, Charles Finney, Lyman Beecher, Francis Asbury, John and Charles Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Philipp Jakob Spener, and many others who have served as God's instruments in revitalizing the church. The pilgrimage includes glimpses of John Wesley's field preaching, American camp meetings, college revivals in the early 1800s, Hans Hauge's revivalistic work in Norway, Francis Asbury's long treks on horseback, Dwight L. Moody's London meetings, the Jesus people of the 1960s, Billy Graham's early crusades, and many more stories of revival. Cairns also looks at the fruits of revivalism-missions, social reform, the holiness movement and more. He examines the work of missionary and explorer David Livingstone, Salvation Army founder William Booth, temperance leader Frances Willard, the abolitionists of the Clapham Sect, and many others. The Christ-centered theology that guided the revivals is discussed, and so are the hymns that gave poetic expression to that theology. And the author looks at the various methods used by the Spirit-led individuals who brought renewal. Written with impeccable scholarship and engrossing style, An Endless Line of Splendor is an insightful study of the leaders of revival and the fruits of revival.
Robert Caldwell traces the fascinating story of American revival theologies during the Great Awakenings, examining the particular convictions underlying these conversions to faith. Caldwell offers a reconsideration of the theologies of important figures and movements, giving fresh insight into what it meant to become a Christian during this age in America's religious history.
Until relatively recently, the connection between British imperial history and the history of early America was taken for granted. In recent times, however, early American historiography has begun to suffer from a loss of coherent definition as competing manifestos demand various reorderings of the subject in order to combine time periods and geographical areas in ways that would have previously seemed anomalous. It has also become common place to announce that the history of America is best accounted for in America itself in a three-way melee between "settlers", the indigenous populations, and the forcibly transported African slaves and their creole descendants. The contributions to British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries acknowledge the value of the historiographic work done under this new dispensation in the last two decades and incorporate its insights. However, the volume advocates a pluralistic approach to the subject generally, and attempts to demonstrate that the metropolitan power was of more than secondary importance to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The central theme of this volume is the question "to what extent did it make a difference to those living in the colonies that made up British North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that they were part of an empire and that the empire in question was British?" The contributors, some of the leading scholars in their respective fields, strive to answer this question in various social, political, religious, and historical contexts.
Drawing upon the religious writings of southern evangelicals, John Boles asserts that the extraordinary crowds and miraculous transformations that distinguished the South's First Great Awakening were not simply instances of emotional excess but the expression of widespread and complex attitudes toward God. Converted southerners were starkly individualistic, interested more in gaining personal salvation in a hopelessly evil world than in improving society. As Boles shows in this landmark study, the effect of the Revival was to throw over the region a conservative cast that remains dominant in contemporary southern thought and life.
John Leland (1754-1841) was one of the most influential and entertaining religious figures in early America. As an itinerant revivalist, he demonstrated an uncanny ability to connect with a popular audience, and contributed to the rise of a democratized Christianity in America. A tireless activist for the rights of conscience, Leland also waged a decades-long war for disestablishment, first in Virginia and then in New England. Leland advocated for full religious freedom for all-not merely Baptists and Protestants-and reportedly negotiated a deal with James Madison to include a Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Leland developed a reputation for being mad for politics in early America, delivering political orations, publishing tracts, and mobilizing New England's Baptists on behalf of the Jeffersonian Republicans. He crowned his political activity by famously delivering a 1,200-pound cheese to Thomas Jefferson's White House. Leland also stood among eighteenth-century Virginia's most powerful anti-slavery advocates, and convinced one wealthy planter to emancipate over 400 of his slaves. Though among the most popular Baptists in America, Leland's fierce individualism and personal eccentricity often placed him at odds with other Baptist leaders. He refused ordination, abstained from the Lord's Supper, and violently opposed the rise of Baptist denominationalism. In the first-ever biography of Leland, Eric C. Smith recounts the story of this pivotal figure from American Religious History, whose long and eventful life provides a unique window into the remarkable transformations that swept American society from 1760 to 1840.
Presents a synthetic view of the social grounding of republicanism and liberalism in Worchester Country, Massachusetts, from its settlement to the eve of the Civil War.
