Rebuilding Zion

Rebuilding Zion
Author: Daniel W. Stowell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2001
Genre: Evangelicalism
ISBN: 0195149815

Both the North and the South viewed the Civil War in Christian terms. Each side believed that its fight was just, that God favored its cause. Rebuilding Zion is the first study to explore simultaneously the reaction of southern white evangelicals, northern white evangelicals, and Christian freedpeople to Confederate defeat. As white southerners struggled to assure themselves that the collapse of the Confederacy was not an indication of God's stern judgment, white northerners and freedpeople were certain that it was. Author Daniel W. Stowell tells the story of the religious reconstruction of the South following the war, a bitter contest between southern and northern evangelicals, at the heart of which was the fate of the freedpeople's souls and the southern effort to maintain a sense of sectional identity. Central to the southern churches' vision of the Civil War was the idea that God had not abandoned the South; defeat was a Father's stern chastisement. Secession and slavery had not been sinful; rather, it was the radicalism of the northern denominations that threatened the purity of the Gospel. Northern evangelicals, armed with a vastly different vision of the meaning of the war and their call to Christian duty, entered the post-war South intending to save white southerner and ex-slave alike. The freedpeople, however, drew their own providential meaning from the war and its outcome. The goal for blacks in the postwar period was to establish churches for themselves separate from the control of their former masters. Stowell plots the conflicts that resulted from these competing visions of the religious reconstruction of the South. By demonstrating how the southern vision eventually came to predominate over, but not eradicate, the northern and freedpeople's visions for the religious life of the South, he shows how the southern churches became one of the principal bulwarks of the New South, a region marked by intense piety and intense racism throughout the twentieth century.

Methodism in the American Forest

Methodism in the American Forest
Author: Russell E. Richey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2015-03-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190266562

Winner of the 2015 Saddleback Selection Award from the Historical Society of The United Methodist Church During the nineteenth century, camp meetings became a signature program of American Methodists and an extraordinary engine for their remarkable evangelistic outreach. Methodism in the American Forest explores the ways in which Methodist preachers interacted with and utilized the American woodland, and the role camp meetings played in the denomination's spread across the country. Half a century before they made themselves such a home in the woods, the people and preachers learned the hard way that only a fool would adhere to John Wesley's mandate for preaching in fields of the New World. Under the blazing American sun, Methodist preachers sought and found a better outdoor sanctuary for large gatherings: under the shade of great oaks, a natural cathedral where they held forth with fervid sermons. The American forests, argues Russell E. Richey, served the preachers in several important ways. Like a kind of Gethesemane, the remote, garden-like solitude provided them with a place to seek counsel from the Holy Spirit. They also saw the forest as a desolate wilderness, and a means for them to connect with Israel's years after the Exodus and Jesus's forty days in the desert after his baptism by John. The dauntless preachers slashed their way through, following America's expanding settlement, and gradually sacralizing American woodlands as cathedral, confessional, and spiritual challenge-as shady grove, as garden, and as wilderness. The threefold forest experience became a Methodist standard. The meeting of Methodism's basic governing body, the quarterly conference, brought together leadership of all levels. The event stretched to two days in length and soon great crowds were drawn by the preaching and eventually the sacraments that were on offer. Camp meetings, if not a Methodist invention, became the movement's signature, a development that Richey tracks throughout the years that Methodism matured, to become a central denomination in America's religious landscape.

A History of the Book in America, 5-volume Omnibus E-book

A History of the Book in America, 5-volume Omnibus E-book
Author: David D. Hall
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 4704
Release: 2015-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469628961

The five volumes in A History of the Book in America offer a sweeping chronicle of our country's print production and culture from colonial times to the end of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary, collaborative work of scholarship examines the book trades as they have developed and spread throughout the United States; provides a history of U.S. literary cultures; investigates the practice of reading and, more broadly, the uses of literacy; and links literary culture with larger themes in American history. Now available for the first time, this complete Omnibus ebook contains all 5 volumes of this landmark work. Volume 1 The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World Edited by Hugh Amory and David D. Hall 664 pp., 51 illus. Volume 2 An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 Edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley 712 pp., 66 illus. Volume 3 The Industrial Book, 1840-1880 Edited by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship 560 pp., 43 illus. Volume 4 Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940 Edited by Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway 688 pp., 74 illus. Volume 5 The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America Edited by David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson 632 pp., 95 illus.

The Wilderness, the Nation, and the Electronic Era

The Wilderness, the Nation, and the Electronic Era
Author: Elmer J. O'Brien
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 688
Release: 2009-07-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0810863138

The Wilderness, the Nation, and the Electronic Era: American Christianity and Religious Communication 1620-2000: An Annotated Bibliography contains over 2,400 annotations of books, book chapters, essays, periodical articles, and selected dissertations dealing with the various means and technologies of Christian communication used by clergy, churches, denominations, benevolent associations, printers, booksellers, publishing houses, and individuals and movements in their efforts to disseminate news, knowledge, and information about religious beliefs and life in the United States from colonial times to the present. Providing access to the critical and interpretive literature about religious communication is significant and plays a central role in the recent trend in American historiography toward cultural history, particularly as it relates to numerous collateral disciplines: sociology, anthropology, education, speech, music, literary studies, art history, and technology. The book documents communication shifts, from oral history to print to electronic and visual media, and their adaptive uses in communication networks developed over the nation's history. This reference brings bibliographic control to a large and diverse literature not previously identified or indexed.

Popular Religious Magazines of the United States

Popular Religious Magazines of the United States
Author: Mark Fackler
Publisher: Greenwood
Total Pages: 712
Release: 1995-07-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Magazines have long been a medium that both shapes and reflects the popular mind of Americans. This work provides profiles of some one hundred popular religious magazines currently or formerly published in the United States. Each sketches the history of a magazine and identifies its major focus, often through noting representative articles. Authors of the essays offer a critical appraisal of each magazine, assessing its contributions to popular religion and its role in shaping how ordinary men and women develop their own religious beliefs and perspectives. The essays will give users an understanding of the particular emphasis of each magazine, while the whole provides an overview of popular religious magazine publishing in the United States. This work focuses directly on those American religious periodicals, past and present, that are directed to a popular, general readership. Since the early Victorian era, periodical literature has served both to shape and to reflect the consciousness of Americans on many subjects, including religion. Hence, the purpose here is to provide a work that will introduce users to the range of popular religious periodical literature that has flourished in the United States. Some are valuable mostly for charting the development of the religious body that has served as the sponsoring agency; others provide insight into popular religious movements of their time. Some seek to promote personal piety and devotion; others serve as vehicles to gain adherents to a particular religious group or perspective. All offer important signals of the forces that have fashioned and continue to fashion the ways ordinary men and women go about the business of creating their personal religious beliefs and values, and, in many cases, how those beliefs make a difference in the public arena.

Recovering Hispanic Religious Thought and Practice of the United States

Recovering Hispanic Religious Thought and Practice of the United States
Author: Nicolás Kanellos
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2009-05-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 144381086X

The primary role played by religion in the development of the Spanish nation in the Iberian Peninsula and its subsequent role in the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas has been well studied. Similarly, Hispanics around the world and in the United States have been characterized in scholarship and popular opinion by the dimensions of their predominant Catholic faith. To date, neither their diversity of faith nor their ethnic and racial diversity have been adequately addressed, thus contributing to a widely held perception of a monolithic culture with its own Catholic world view, a world view often categorized as obscurantist, mystical and anachronistic. Most important, the role of religion, in all of its diversity and historical evolution, in building Hispanic culture in the United States has not been adequately studied or understood. Today, because a corpus of Hispanic religious thought from across the ages in the United States has been reconstituted and there are scholars dedicated to understanding this thought and the experience it reveals, publication of this present volume has been made possible. The chapters of Recovering Hispanic Religious Thought and Practice in the United States have resulted from the research underwritten by the eponymous Recovery project and initially presented at Recovery conferences in 2004 and 2005. After scholarly debate and re-working of the research papers, the articles contained in this volume were selected. They represent original work on topics rarely addressed before, in recognition that these articles are laying the groundwork on which an entire sub-discipline of Hispanic history, literature and theology will be constructed. The material addressed is so rich and the themes so numerous and promising that their presentation and elaboration here most certainly will entice scholars from other disciplines to broaden their perspectives on Hispanic life in the United States and perhaps to look to these religious and other alternative sources in conducting their own disciplinary research.

Communication and Change in American Religious History

Communication and Change in American Religious History
Author: Leonard I. Sweet
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Total Pages: 496
Release: 1993
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

Well-known historians explore a fascinating array of topics concerning religious and social change in America from colonial times to the present, looking especially at how the emergence of new communications forms contributed to those choices. Contributors include Martin E. Marty, Glenn T. Miller, Mark A. Noll, David G. Buttrick, and others.

Distinguished Classics of Reference Publishing

Distinguished Classics of Reference Publishing
Author: James Rettig
Publisher: Greenwood
Total Pages: 384
Release: 1992-02-04
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

An examination of how and why certain books have become the most widely used reference works in American libraries. From Who's Who and World Book to Turabian's Manual, it explores the origins, influence and possible future for each of these works.

Print in Motion

Print in Motion
Author: Carl F. Kaestle
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 694
Release: 2009
Genre: Book industries and trade
ISBN:

History of the Book in America: Volume 4: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940

The Methodists

The Methodists
Author: James E. Kirby
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1998-09-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

While this work takes proper notice of its origins in John Wesley's 18th-century movement in England, it is primarily concerned with the church's origins and history within the United States. Offering an account of the construction and reconstruction of the Methodist church, the authors examine the various institutional practices of the church, its organization, leadership and form of training and incorporating new members. Through their treatment of Methodism as defined by conferences bound together by a commitment to episcopal leadership and animated by various forms of lay piety, the authors help the reader understand the internal history of the denomination and its development in the United States. This student edition, ideal for classes in American Religion, Denominational History, Protestantism, and American social and cultural history, includes a chronology of significant events in the history of the church in the U.S., and concludes with a bibliographic essay intended as a guide for further reading in the history of Methodism.