A provocative examination of literacy in the American South before emancipation, countering the long-standing stereotype of the South’s oral traditionSchweiger complicates our understanding of literacy in the American South in the decades just prior to the Civil War by showing that rural people had access to a remarkable variety of things to read. Drawing on the writings of four young women who lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Schweiger shows how free and enslave...

The Gospel Working Up offers a history of three generations of Baptist and Methodist clergymen in nineteenth-century Virginia, and through them of the congregations and communities in which they lived and worked. Schweiger examines the religious experience both before and after the Civil War, showing how Southern Protestantism became an instrument of spiritual, moral, material, and cultural progress.

Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4Recovering the Margins of American Religious History, a celebration of the life and work of David Edwin Harrell Jr., brings together essays from Harrell’s colleagues, peers, and students that explore his impact and legacy in the field of American religious studies. Raised in an upper-class family in mid-twentieth-century Jacksonville, Florida, Harrell’s membership in the Church of Christ helped establish his sense of self as ...

This collection of essays examines religion in the American South across three centuries — from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The first collection published on the subject in fifteen years, Religion in the American South builds upon a new generation of scholarship to push scholarly conversation about the field to a new level of sophistication by complicating “southern religion” geographically, chronologically, and thematically a...