Among America's more interesting new religious movements, the Shakers and the Mormons came to be thought of as separate and distinct from mainstream Protestantism. Using archives and historical materials from the 19th century, Stephen C. Taysom shows how these groups actively maintained boundaries and created their own thriving, but insular communities. Taysom discovers a core of innovation deployed by both the Shakers and the Mormons through which they embraced their status as outsiders. Their marginalization was critical to their initial success. As he skillfully negotiates the differences between Shakers and Mormons, Taysom illuminates the characteristics which set these groups apart and helped them to become true religious dissenters.
A collection of original essays exploring the history of the various American religious traditions and the meaning of their many expressions The Blackwell Companion to American Religious History explores the key events, significant themes, and important movements in various religious traditions throughout the nation’s history from pre-colonization to the present day. Original essays written by leading scholars and new voices in the field discuss how religion in America has transformed over the years, explore its many expressions and meanings, and consider religion’s central role in American life. Emphasizing the integration of religion into broader cultural and historical themes, this wide-ranging volume explores the operation of religion in eras of historical change, the diversity of religious experiences, and religion’s intersections with American cultural, political, social, racial, gender, and intellectual history. Each chronologically-organized chapter focuses on a specific period or event, such as the interactions between Moravian and Indigenous communities, the origins of African-American religious institutions, Mormon settlement in Utah, social reform movements during the twentieth century, the growth of ethnic religious communities, and the rise of the Religious Right. An innovative historical genealogy of American religious traditions, the Companion: Highlights broader historical themes using clear and compelling narrative Helps teachers expose their students to the significance and variety of America’s religious past Explains new and revisionist interpretations of American religious history Surveys current and emerging historiographical trends Traces historical themes to contemporary issues surrounding civil rights and social justice movements, modern capitalism, and debates over religious liberties Making the lessons of American religious history relevant to a broad range of readers, The Blackwell Companion to American Religious History is the perfect book for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in American history courses, and a valuable resource for graduate students and scholars wanting to keep pace with current historiographical trends and recent developments in the field.
Up-to-date one-volume edition of a standard text For decades students and scholars have turned to the two-volume Documentary History of Religion in America for access to the most significant primary sources relating to American religious history from the sixteenth century to the present. This fourth edition—published in a single volume for the first time—has been updated and condensed, allowing instructors to more easily cover the material in a single semester. With more than a hundred illustrations and a rich array of primary documents ranging from the letters and accounts of early colonists to tweets and transcripts from the 2016 presidential election, this volume remains an essential text for readers who want to encounter firsthand the astonishing scope of religious belief and practice in American history.
In Smitten, Rodney Hessinger examines how the Second Great Awakening disrupted gender norms across a breadth of denominations. The displacement and internal migration of Americans created ripe conditions for religious competition in the North. Hessinger argues that during this time of religious ferment, religious seekers could, in turn, play the missionary or the convert. The dynamic of religious rivalry inexorably led toward sexual and gender disruption. Contending within an increasingly democratic religious marketplace, preachers had to court converts in order to flourish. They won followers through charismatic allure and making concessions to the desires of the people. Opening their own hearts to new religious impulses, some religious visionaries offered up radical dispensations—including new visions of how God wanted them to reorder sex and gender relations in society. A wide array of churches, including Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, Shakers, Catholics, and Perfectionists, joined the fray. Religious contention and innovation ultimately produced backlash. Charges of seduction and gender trouble ignited fights within, among, and against churches. Religious opponents insisted that the newly converted were smitten with preachers, rather than choosing churches based on reason and scripture. Such criticisms coalesced into a broader pan-Protestant rejection of religious enthusiasm. Smitten reveals the sexual disruptions and subsequent domestication of religion during the Second Great Awakening.
Irenaeus, Joseph Smith, and God-Making Heresy seeks both to demonstrate the salience of “heresy” as a tool for analyzing instances of religious conflict far beyond the borders of traditional historical theology and to illuminate the apparent affinity for deification exhibited by some persecuted religious movements. To these ends, the book argues for a sociologically-informed redefinition of heresy as religiously-motivated opposition and applies the resulting concept to the historical cases of second-century Christians and nineteenth-century Mormons. Ultimately, Irenaeus, Joseph Smith, and God-Making Heresy is a careful application of the comparative method to two new religious movements, highlighting the social processes at work in their early doctrinal developments.
“From one of the brightest of the new generation of Mormon-studies scholars comes a crisp, engaging account of the religion’s history.”—The Wall Street Journal With Mormonism on the nation’s radar as never before, religious historian Matthew Bowman has written an essential book that pulls back the curtain on more than 180 years of Mormon history and doctrine. He recounts the church’s origins and explains how the Mormon vision has evolved—and with it the esteem in which Mormons have been held in the eyes of their countrymen. Admired on the one hand as hardworking paragons of family values, Mormons have also been derided as oddballs and persecuted as polygamists, heretics, and zealots. The place of Mormonism in public life continues to generate heated debate, yet the faith has never been more popular. One of the fastest-growing religions in the world, it retains an uneasy sense of its relationship with the main line of American culture. Mormons will surely play an even greater role in American civic life in the years ahead. The Mormon People comes as a vital addition to the corpus of American religious history—a frank and balanced demystification of a faith that remains a mystery for many. “Fascinating and fair-minded . . . a sweeping soup-to-nuts primer on Mormonism.”—The Boston Globe “A cogent, judicious, and important account of a faith that has been an important element in American history but remained surprisingly misunderstood.”—Michael Beschloss “A thorough, stimulating rendering of the Mormon past and present.”—Kirkus Reviews “[A] smart, lucid history.”—Tom Brokaw
This set provides insight into the lives of ordinary Americans free and enslaved, in farms and cities, in the North and the South, who lived during the years of 1815 to 1860. Throughout the Antebellum Era resonated the theme of change: migration, urban growth, the economy, and the growing divide between North and South all led to great changes to which Americans had to respond. By gathering the important aspects of antebellum Americans' lives into an encyclopedia, The World of Antebellum America provides readers with the opportunity to understand how people across America lived and worked, what politics meant to them, and how they shaped or were shaped by economics. Entries on simple topics such as bread and biscuits explore workers' need for calories, the role of agriculture, and gendered divisions of labor, while entries on more complex topics, such as aging and death, disclose Americans' feelings about life itself. Collectively, the entries pull the reader into the lives of ordinary Americans, while section introductions tie together the entries and provide an overarching narrative that primes readers to understand key concepts about antebellum America before delving into Americans' lives in detail.
Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography demonstrates that the history and experience of Mormon women is central to the history of Mormonism and to histories of American religion, politics, and culture. Yet the study of Mormon women has mostly been confined to biographies, family histories, and women’s periodicals. The contributors to Mormon Women’s History engage the vast breadth of sources left by Mormon women—journals, diaries, letters, family histories, and periodicals as well as art, poetry, material culture, theological treatises, and genealogical records—to read between the lines, reconstruct connections, recover voices, reveal meanings, and recast stories. Mormon Women’s History presents women as incredibly inter-connected. Familial ties of kinship are multiplied and stretched through the practice and memory of polygamy, social ties of community are overlaid with ancestral ethnic connections and local congregational assignments, fictive ties are woven through shared interests and collective memories of violence and trauma. Conversion to a new faith community unites and exposes the differences among Native Americans, Yankees, and Scandinavians. Lived experiences of marriage, motherhood, death, mourning, and widowhood are played out within contexts of expulsion and exile, rape and violence, transnational immigration, establishing “civilization” in a wilderness, and missionizing both to new neighbors and far away peoples. Gender defines, limits, and opens opportunities for private expression, public discourse, and popular culture. Cultural prejudices collide with doctrinal imperatives against backdrops of changing social norms, emerging professional identities, and developing ritualization and sacralization of lived religion. The stories, experiences, and examples explored in Mormon Women’s History are neither comprehensive nor conclusive, but rather suggestive of the ways that Mormon women’s history can move beyond individual lives to enhance and inform larger historical narratives.
“Shakerism teaches God’s immanence through the common life shared in Christ’s mystical body.” Like many religious seekers throughout the ages, they honor the revelation of God but cannot be bound up in an unchanging set of dogmas or creeds. Freeing themselves from domination by the state religion, Mother Ann Lee and her first followers in mid-18th-century England labored to encounter the godhead directly. They were blessed by spiritual gifts that showed them a way to live the heavenly life on Earth. The result of their efforts was the fashioning of a celibate communal life called the Christlife, wherein a person, after confessing all sin, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, can travel the path of regeneration into ever- increasing holiness. Pacifism, equality of the sexes, and withdrawal from the world are some of the ways the faith was put into practice. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Shakers contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on Shaker communities, industries, individual families, and important people. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Shakers.
Railroads, tourism, and government bureaucracy combined to create modern religion in the American West, argues David Walker in this innovative study of Mormonism's ascendency in the railroad era. The center of his story is Corinne, Utah—an end-of-the-track, hell-on-wheels railroad town founded by anti-Mormon businessmen. In the disputes over this town's frontier survival, Walker discovers intense efforts by a variety of theological, political, and economic interest groups to challenge or secure Mormonism's standing in the West. Though Corinne's founders hoped to leverage industrial capital to overthrow Mormon theocracy, the town became the site of a very different dream. Economic and political victory in the West required the production of knowledge about different religious groups settling in its lands. As ordinary Americans advanced their own theories about Mormondom, they contributed to the rise of religion itself as a category of popular and scholarly imagination. At the same time, new and advantageous railroad-related alliances catalyzed LDS Church officials to build increasingly dynamic religious institutions. Through scrupulous research and wide-ranging theoretical engagement, Walker shows that western railroads did not eradicate or diminish Mormon power. To the contrary, railroad promoters helped establish Mormonism as a normative American religion.
