Online History About Many Years AGO

Twenty-five years ago, in Sydney E. Ahlstrom's magisterial A Religious History of the American People, the early Republic appeared as just one chapter in (8) "the Great Puritan Epoch in American History." Ahlstrom could boil the period's significance down to a few major themes: the division of New England theology and the subsequent rise of a reformist "Evangelical United Front" in the mainstream, the outbreak of revivalism on the frontier, and the growth of a range of sects, communitarian experiments, and "countervailing" denominations such as the Roman Catholics and Jews on the cultural margins.

In the quarter century since Ahlstrom's landmark book, a veritable earthquake has reshaped the landscape of early American religious history. Those groups formerly seen as marginal are now depicted as occupying the cutting edge of American culture. Likewise, those establishment clergymen formerly portrayed as mainstream figures have been recast as people swimming against the prevailing tides. Amidst all this upheaval, the early Republic has emerged as an absolutely seminal period in American religious history. It was during the post-Revolutionary years, recent scholars tell us, that heretofore unreached segments of American society were evangelized by a welter of new religious movements. The early Republic has become even more fundamental to the master narrative of American religious history than Puritanism. The past two decades of scholarship document the extraordinary vitality of American religious life during the early Republic and its profound impact on the culture at large. A religious awakening touched nearly every group in the society so it seems, and the influence of religion extended far beyond the confines of the denominations to color significantly the political and intellectual life of the period as well.

Two important monographs mark the distance traveled in the past generation since Ahlstrom. Nathan Hatch's Democratization of American Christianity argues that religious newcomers seized upon the democratic thrust of the American Revolution to create popular Christian movements. Hatch's five groups of religious "insurgents" -- Baptist, Christian, Methodist, Mormon, and African-American leaders -- merged Christianity with the individualistic ethos of the early Republic. These movements, Hatch claims, embodied the truly significant story of religion in the early Republic. Hatch's thesis provides an explanation for the statistics on changing denominational strength provided by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark. Like Hatch, Jon Butler finds the early Republic to be a period that fundamentally reshaped the American religious environment. Butler's chapters on the early Republic in Awash in a Sea of Faith emphasize the eclecticism and syncretism of the era's theology along with the power of its denominational structures. Both Hatch and Butler answer the call issued by R. Laurence Moore's Religious Outsider and the Making of Americans for a more inclusive American religious history whose focus shifts away from the Puritans' descendants.

The books by Hatch and Butler, which put former "outsiders" such as Mormons or African-American Methodists at center stage, show how far the historical literature has evolved since the 1960s. The older literature focused primarily upon the Congregational and Presbyterian clergy of the Northeastern United States. It cast these ministers as conservative reformers, who were struggling to maintain their authority and racked by status anxiety in a more secular post-Revolutionary America. Exemplars of this interpretation include John Bodo's The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues and Clifford Griffin's Their Brother's Keeper. While the foregoing now seem interpretatively dated, other early works have withstood better the passage of time, such as Daniel Walker Howe's The Unitarian Conscience. Turning from the Northeast, the frontier was the scene of a Turneresque breakdown and Americanization of European traditions and institutions in the work of William Warren Sweet and Sidney Mead. Where the frontier met the expanding culture of New England, as it did in upstate New York during the early Republic, the results could be explosive. Whitney Cross's classic The Burned Over District detailed the outburst of religious reform and experimentation taking place there.

Some of the first breaches in the walls of the older paradigm came from people working on the subject of reform movements. Lois Banner's 1973 article, "Religious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique of an Interpretation," cast doubt upon the conventional portrayal of the reform clergy as kneejerk reactionaries. Likewise, James Essig argued in Bonds of Wickedness that the antislavery thrust of early evangelicalism came not from a desire for social control but from an identification on the part of white evangelicals between their own outsider status and that of the African-American bondsmen. Moreover, community studies growing out of the new social history showed reform to be a largely grassroots phenomenon, deeply infused with religious motives, although not the machination of a few elite clerics. Two outstanding examples of in-depth community studies of reform are Mary Ryan's Cradle of the Middle Class and Randolph Roth's The Democratic Dilemma. Recently, Robert Abzug's Cosmos Crumbling has provided a sweeping reinterpretation of reform from the American Revolution to the Civil War as an attempt to maintain the link between society and the sacred in a period of awesome change.

Studies of reform opened up and were in turn enriched by new insights from women's history. A series of scholars has probed the overlapping linkages between women, religion, and reform; see especially the works listed below by Nancy Cott, Barbara Epstein, and Lori Ginzberg. Susan Juster's Disorderly Women has redirected attention on the connections between women, religion, and reform away from ideology and institutions toward the gendered nature of language. Juster argues that Rhode Island Baptists moved away from an inclusive, feminine vocabulary that validated women's participation toward a more exclusive, patriarchal one that portrayed sin as a female problem during the era of the American Revolution and early Republic.

Historians have brought to light the religious histories of other previously underrepresented groups. The early Republic is now seen as critical to the formation of African-American Christianity. Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion unearthed the religious life of slaves, which, he argued, fused Christianity with elements of African beliefs and practices. Recently Jon Butler has questioned the extent to which African religion survived in the U.S. in a chapter of Awash in a Sea of Faith with the provocative title of "Slavery and the African Spiritual Holocaust." According to the iconoclastic Butler, (130) African "religious systems" were for the most part extinguished during the forced relocation of Africans to the North American mainland. Wherever one stands in this debate, it is clear that although proselytizing began early in the colonial period, the early Republic saw an explosion in the Christianization of African-Americans, slave and free. For analyses, see Hatch, Democratization, Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock, and Gary Nash, Forging Freedom. While neither of the latter two books is narrowly about religious history per se, both demonstrate the centrality of Afro-Christianity and autonomous black churches to the struggles of slaves and free blacks alike to resist white control.

This African-American Christianity was largely a Southern phenomenon during the early Republic, and Southern religious history had been another neglected area of scholarly interest. Donald Mathews's Religion in the Old South did more than any other book to rectify the situation. Mathews focused upon the rise of evangelicalism among whites and blacks, and in both cases the early Republic appeared again as a key period. In his interpretation, it was during the post-Revolutionary decades that white evangelicals moved from a marginal and critical stance toward Southern culture to a position that was established and respectable, while blacks appropriated evangelicalism's liberating themes to their own situation. The following four monographs all amplified different aspects of Mathews's book. If Southern religion was seen as anti-intellectual and excessively emotional, E. Brooks Holifield's The Gentlemen Theologians challenged the stereotype by analyzing a group of Southern clergymen who were enlightened, rationalistic, and aspired to the kind of intellectual respectability Mathews described. Also along lines suggested by Mathews, Anne Loveland's Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order found the evangelical clergy to be engaged with its culture, specifically in addressing issues like temperance, benevolence, or slavery usually associated with Northeasterners like Lyman Beecher. The books noted below by Robert Calhoon and Randy Sparks both further trace the shift from radicalism to conservatism on the part of Southern white evangelicals during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Further from the old Protestant mainstream, both Roman Catholics and Jews have also been recognized as having experienced important phases in their respective histories during the early Republic. Both groups confronted similar issues of immigration, adaptation to the American environment, and ethnic identity, despite the difference in their sizes: by 1850 Roman Catholics were America's single largest denomination, while the Jews remained a tiny minority. The work of Jay Dolan has been influential in moving Catholic history beyond a narrowly ecclesiastical focus. His The Immigrant Church, a social history of New York City Catholics, studied a formative period of community building, while Catholic Revivalism showed how popular Catholic religiosity paralleled the surrounding Protestant culture. For early American Judaism, the books by Eli Faber and Hasia Diner listed below -- part of the American Jewish Historical Society's five-volume series, "The Jewish People in America" -- would be a good starting point along with the demographic analysis in Ira Rosenwaike's On the Edge of Greatness.

Perhaps no group within the religious history of the early Republic has benefited more from the attention of a recent, talented cohort of scholars than the Mormons. Unlike the aforementioned religions that had to transfer Old World beliefs and institutions to a New World setting, Mormonism was born in upstate New York during the early Republic. Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism discusses Smith's background, revelations, and the pre-1831, New York phase of the movement from the sympathetic perspective of a Mormon scholar. Jan Shipps, a non-Mormon, argues that Smith's new sect was (ix) "a new religious tradition"; i.e., essentially not part of Christianity, but a new faith altogether. John Brooke's The Refiner's Fire takes a much longer perspective than Bushman or Shipps. It ambitiously tries to situate Smith's claims within two centuries of prior Anglo-American popular beliefs about hermeticism, providentialism, and the occult.

Beyond the Mormons, new work has further illuminated a host of other sectarian and communitarian groups. Here there is only room to mention some of the most noteworthy titles. The "Christian" denominations spawned by restorationists like Alexander Campbell and the Adventist sects launched by the predictions of William Miller are two more originally American groups to come out of the early Republic. Richard Hughes and C. Leonard Allen's Illusions of Innocence surveys the "primitivist" strain in American Protestantism from the Puritans to the Confederacy, but pays particular attention to the Campbellites. The collection edited by Ronald Numbers and Jonathan Butler, The Disappointed, contains essays about William Miller, his followers, and their times. While the Millerites anticipated the imminent end of the world, other religious radicals in the early Republic withdrew from society to form religious communes. Recent scholars have been especially attracted to these alternative communities for the way in which they explored unconventional gender roles and sexual practices; see the works by Lawrence Foster and Ira Mandelker listed below. Indeed, the more bizarre the spirituality of a given group, the more some historians have been drawn to it as a window into the tensions and possibilities inherent in the religious culture of the early Republic. Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz's Kingdom of Matthias, for example, recounts the story of the "Prophet Matthias." Like Joseph Smith, Matthias proclaimed a new revelation, but unlike Smith's his cult ended in scandal, dissolution, and obscurity. All of the aforementioned works are united by a common conviction that those religious movements formerly deemed marginal are actually just as much a part of the essence of the early Republic as Lyman Beecher's revivals.

Beyond the culture(s) created by Euro-Americans in the early Republic, scholars have also found that the period was one of intense spiritual ferment among American Indians. Anthony Wallace's The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, R. David Edmunds's The Shawnee Prophet, and Gregory Evans Dowd's A Spirited Resistance all offer interpretations of revitalization movements in the early Republic, in which charismatic religious figures appeared to offer native Americans their visions of social reintegration through new spiritual practices. Although these Indian movements existed outside of and often explicitly rejected elements of United States culture, they were not sealed off from that culture either. Instead the prophets sometimes implicitly adopted elements of American religious culture such as temperance, conversion, or a new vision of the afterlife. William McLoughlin's Cherokees and Missionaries studies an instance in which cross-cultural issues were much more out in the open.

Given all this documented religious activity, it should come as no surprise that historians working in adjacent fields of the early Republic have found a pervasive religious influence. Religious culture powerfully shaped political culture. Political historians working since the advent of the ethnocultural interpretation, for instance, have found religion to be one of the leading factors behind party allegiance. Religion likewise injected into the political arena a host of value-laden moral issues that heated up Jacksonian politics. For examples of some of the best work in these areas, refer to the books and articles listed below by Richard Carwardine, Ronald Formisano, Daniel Walker Howe, and Richard John. As Paul Goodman's Towards a Christian Republic argues, perhaps no political movement in the early Republic was more influenced by evangelicalism than the Antimasons. William Gribbin's The Churches Militant showed how religion helped to intensify the divisiveness surrounding the War of 1812. The early Republic was also the scene of church-state controversies. Volume two of William McLoughlin's massive New England Dissent chronicled the final disestablishment of Congregationalism in the New England states in the first third of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Thomas Buckley's "After Disestablishment" has shown that Virginia's 1786 disestablishment of the Anglican church did not lay church-state issues to rest.

Like politics, American intellectual life in the early Republic cannot be written apart from religion, especially considering that most colleges were under religious auspices. In Henry May's classification, the early Republic saw the triumph of "the Didactic Enlightenment," in which Scottish common sense philosophy was brought to bear to restore the intellectual credibility of Protestantism. The Scottish Enlightenment also plays a major role in Theodore Dwight Bozeman's study of the interaction between religious and scientific thought, Protestants in an Age of Science, as well as in the works by Daniel Walker Howe and E. Brooks Holifield mentioned earlier. Mark Noll offers a fascinating case study of the interconnections and incompatibilities between Scottish philosophy, republicanism, and Calvinism in Princeton and the Republic. Meanwhile, Ruth Bloch's Visionary Republic studies an anti-Enlightenment strand of thought, millennialism, through 1800.

As these examples of Scottish influence suggest, historians have long recognized that a good deal of the early Republic's religious, intellectual, political, and reformist activity took place within a transatlantic framework. See, for example, the older works listed below by Charles Foster and Frank Thistlethwaite. As world history comes more and more into vogue, it is important to note that the religious history of the early Republic perfectly fits within a transnational perspective.

Finally, the historical literature has in some sense come full circle, now casting important new light on those groups portrayed as "mainstream" twenty-five years ago. David Kling's A Field of Divine Wonders provides a close-up study of the Second Great Awakening among New Divinity Congregationalists in Connecticut's Hartford and Litchfield Counties, an area that has always attracted scholarly interest. Mark Hanley challenges the conventional wisdom of cultural accommodationism among the mainstream denominations in Beyond a Christian Commonwealth. Moreover, first-rate biographies and institutional studies continue to appear, such as Keith Hardman's Charles Grandison Finney and Anne Boylan's Sunday School, which show that there remains work to be done among the old "Evangelical United Front."

Readers looking for further bibliographies and bibliographical essays on the subject of religion in the early Republic should consult volume one of the collection edited by John Wilson in 1986, Church and State in America. As the foregoing has hopefully made clear, the early Republic stands as an elemental period in American religious history. All students and teachers of the early Republic need to take note of the era's tremendous religious activity and its far-reaching impact.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

*Abzug, Robert H. Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

*Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972.

*Banner, Lois W. "Religious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique of an Interpretation." Journal of American History 60 (1973): 23-41.

*Berens, John F. Providence and Patriotism in Early America 1640-1815. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1978.

*Bloch, Ruth H. Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

*Bodo, John R. The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues, 1812-1848. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954.

*Boylan, Anne M. Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790-1880. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.

*Bozeman, Theodore Dwight. Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Ante-bellum American Religious Thought. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977.

*Brooke, John. The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology,1644-1844. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

*Buckley, Thomas E. "After Disestablishment: Thomas Jefferson's Wall of Separation in Antebellum Virginia." Journal of Southern History 61 (1995): 445-480.

*Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

*Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

*Calhoon, Robert M. Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740-1861. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

*Carwardine, Richard. Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

*Conkin, Paul K. Cane Ridge, America's Pentecost. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

*Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977.

*Cross, Whitney R. The Burned Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850. New York: Harper & Row, 1950.

*Diner, Hasia R. A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820-1880.. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

*Dolan, Jay P. The Immigrant Church: New York's Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

*---. Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience, 1830-1900. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978.

*Dowd, Gregory Evans. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

*Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

*Epstein, Barbara Leslie. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-century America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.

*Essig, James D. The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals Against Slavery, 1770-1808. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1982.

*Faber, Eli. A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654-1820. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

*Finke, Roger and Rodney Stark. "How the Upstart Sects Won America: 1776-1850." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 28 (1989): 27-44.

*Formisano, Ronald P. The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

*Foster, Charles I. An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790-1837. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1960.

*Foster, Lawrence. Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

*Frey, Sylvia R. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

*Gaustad, Edwin S. Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987.

*Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.

*Goodman, Paul. Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826-1836. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

*Gribbin, William. The Churches Militant: The War of 1812 and American Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973.

*Griffin, Clifford S. "Religious Benevolence as Social Control, 1815-1860." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (1957): 423-444.

*---. Their Brother's Keeper: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800-1865. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1960.

*Hanley, Mark Y. Beyond a Christian Commonwealth: The Protestant Quarrel with the American Republic, 1830-1860. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

*Hardman, Keith J. Charles Grandison Finney, 1792-1875: Revivalist and Reformer. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987.

*Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.

*Holifield, E. Brooks. The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795-1860. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978.

*Howe, Daniel Walker. The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

*---. The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861. 1970. Rev. ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

*---. "The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North during the Second Party System." Journal of American History 77 (1991): 1216-1239.

*Hughes, Richard T. and C. Leonard Allen. Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

*John, Richard R. "Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture." Journal of the Early Republic 10 (1990): 517-567.

*---. Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

*Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

*Johnson, Paul E. and Sean Wilentz. The Kingdom of Matthias. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

*Juster, Susan. Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

*Kling, David W. A Field of Divine Wonders: The New Divinity and Village Revivals in Northwestern Connecticut, 1792-1822. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

*Loveland, Anne C. Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800-1860. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

*Mandelker, Ira L. Religion, Society, and Utopia in Nineteenth-Century America. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.

*Marsden, George M. The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology in Nineteenth-Century America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970.

*Mathews, Donald G. Slavery and Methodism: A Chapter in American Morality, 1780-1845. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.

*---. Religion in the Old South. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977.

*---. "The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780-1830: An Hypothesis." American Quarterly 21 (1969): 23-43.

*May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

*McLoughlin, William G. New England Dissent, 1630-1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

*---. Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.

*Mead, Sidney Earl. The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

*Miller, Perry. "From the Covenant to the Revival." In The Shaping of American Religion, ed. James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison. 322-368. Volume I: Religion in American Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.

*---. The Life of the Mind in America From the Revolution to the Civil War. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965.

*Moore, R. Laurence. Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

*Nash, Gary B. "The American Clergy and the French Revolution." William and Mary Quarterly 22 (1965): 392-412.

*---. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

*Noll, Mark A. Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

*---. "Evaluating North Atlantic Religious History, 1640-1859. A Review Article." Comparative Studies in Society and History 33 (1991): 415-425.

*Numbers, Ronald L. and Jonathan M. Butler, eds. The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987.

*Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

*---. A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

*Rosenwaike, Ira. On the Edge of Greatness: A Portrait of American Jewry in the Early National Period. Cincinnati, OH: American Jewish Archives, 1985.

*Roth, Randolph A. The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791-1850. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

*Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

*Scott, Donald M. From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry, 1750-1850. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978.

*Shipps, Jan. Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

*Sparks, Randy J. On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773-1876. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

*Stauffer, Vernon. New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. New York: Columbia University Press, 1918.

*Stein, Stephen J. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

*Sweet, William Warren. Religion in the Development of American Culture, 1765-1840. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952.

*Thistlethwaite, Frank. The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959.

*Tyrrell, Ian R. Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800-1860. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.

*Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. New York: Knopf, 1970.

*Wilson, John F., ed. Church and State in America: A Bibliographical Guide. Vol. 1: The Colonial and Early National Periods. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.

*Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery. Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969.

Copyright 1997 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@H-Net.MSU.EDU.