The story of how nineteenth-century preacher Lorenzo Dow helped create the aggressive Protestantism that now predominates in American cultureLorenzo Dow was the most famous preacher in America of the early nineteenth century and one of the United States’ first truly national celebrities who did not owe his fame to feats of arms or of politics. Dow became famous, rather, by traveling and preaching constantly for three decades while cutting an eccentric figure. He wa...

Exploring the dynamic interplay between religion and revolution in the founding eraReligion lies at the heart of how many Americans understand the birth of their nation, giving rise to passionate calls for national unity and principled struggles for religious freedom. For the first time in thirty years, scholars of the founding era have joined together to reassess this central topic for our present moment. From fast-day proclamations to wartime crises of conscience...

Early Americans claimed that they looked to "the Bible alone" for authority, but the Bible was never, ever alone. Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States is a wide-ranging exploration of the place of the Christian Bible in America in the decades after the Revolution. Attending to both theoretical concerns about the nature of scriptures and to the precise historical circumstances of a formative period in American history, Seth Perry argues that the Bible was not a "s...

Viewing the Civil War as a major turning point in American religious thought, Mark A. Noll examines writings about slavery and race from Americans both white and black, northern and southern, and includes commentary from Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Canada. Though the Christians on all sides agreed that the Bible was authoritative, their interpretations of slavery in Scripture led to a full-blown theological crisis.

Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new Am...

America's Book shows how the Bible decisively shaped American national history even as that history influenced the use of Scripture. It explores the rise of a strongly Protestant Bible civilization in the early United States that was then fractured by debates over slavery, contested by growing numbers of non-Protestant Americans (Catholics, Jews, agnostics), and torn apart by the Civil War. This first comprehensive history of the Bible in America explains why Tom Paine's anti-bibl...

Fast, informed answers to the challenges of false religions -- This is an age when countless groups and movements, new and old, mark the religious landscape in our culture. As a result, many people are confused or uncertain in their search for spiritual truth and meaning. Because few people have the time or opportunity to research these movements fully, the Zondervan Guide to Cults and Religious Movements series provides essential information and insights for their spiritual journeys. The ...

**Winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for General NonfictionShortlisted for the 2014 Cundill Prize in Historical Literature**From the revered historian, the long-awaited conclusion of the magisterial history of slavery and emancipation in Western culture that has been nearly fifty years in the making.David Brion Davis is one of the foremost historians of the twentieth century, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Priz...

This study describes the creation of the Primitive Baptist movement and discusses the main outlines of their thought. It also weaves the story of the Primitive Baptists with other developments in American Christianity in the Early Republic.

This in-depth study examines the social structures and religious beliefs that helped shape Southern history from colonization to the twenty-first century.The history of race and religion in the American South is infused with tragedy, survival, resistance, and even transcendence. In Christianity and Race in the American South, Paul Harvey provides an enlightening narrative history that fundamentally transforms our understanding of American Christianity and r...

"Both the sources he employs and the scope of his study set his work apart from all that have precede it...The first study of New England preaching to span the entire colonial period...very important book." - Journal of American History "Simply breathtaking in scope. No one else has dared to grapple with the full sweep of Puritan preaching form the founding of New England through the American Revolution." - Nathan O. Hatch, University of Notre Dame "A massive achievement will stan...