Rally The Scattered Believers

“An important new interpretation of how religious change shaped American cultural identity in the early republic.” —Journal of American History Northern New England, a rugged landscape dotted with transient settlements, posed challenges to the traditional town church in the wake of the American Revolution. Using the methods of spatial geography, Shelby M. Balik examines how migrants adapted their understanding of religious community and spiritual space to survive in the harsh physical surroundings of the region. The notions of boundaries, place, and identity they developed became the basis for spreading New England’s deeply rooted spiritual culture, even as it opened the way to a new evangelical age. “I strongly recommend Balik’s book for those studying colonial religious landscapes and heritages not only in New England, but in the nineteenth-century religious diasporas that swept the continent with varying mixes of European colonials and also African and Asian heritages.” —Stanley D. Brunn, University of Kentucky “In this beautifully written and richly researched work, Shelby Balik shows how the travels of early nineteenth century Methodists, Universalists and freewill Baptist itinerant missionaries and congregations recreated the geography of New England Protestantism, setting in motion (literally) a tension between religious rootedness and religious uprootedness, center and periphery, that endures to today. Early American religious history in Balik’s retelling of it is one of bodies in constant movement in and out and around the city on the hill. The delight Balik takes in maps and journeys is infectious. This is a wonderful addition to American religious historiography.” —Robert Orsi, Northwestern University

Winner of an Award of Excellence, American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) In 1822, settlers pushed north from Massachusetts and other parts of New England into Monson, Maine. On land taken from the Penobscot people, they established prosperous farms and businesses. Focusing on the microhistory of this village, Andrew Witmer reveals the sometimes surprising ways that this small New England town engaged with the wider world across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Townspeople fought and died in distant wars, transformed the economy and landscape with quarries and mills, and used railroads, highways, print, and new technologies to forge connections with the rest of the nation. Here and Everywhere Else starts with Monson’s incorporation in the early nineteenth century, when central Maine was considered the northern frontier and over 90 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas; it ends with present-day attempts to revive this declining Maine town into an artists’ colony. Engagingly written, with colorful portraits of local characters and landmarks, this study illustrates how the residents of this remote place have remade their town by integrating (and resisting) external influences.

On May 10, 1776, the Second Continental Congress sitting in Philadelphia adopted a Resolution which set in motion a round of constitution making in the colonies, several of which soon declared themselves sovereign states and severed all remaining ties to the British Crown. In forming these written constitutions, the delegates to the state conventions were forced to address the issue of church-state relations. Each colony had unique and differing traditions of church-state relations rooted in the colony’s peoples, their country of origin, and religion. This definitive volume, comprising twenty-one original essays by eminent historians and political scientists, is a comprehensive state-by-state account of disestablishment in the original thirteen states, as well as a look at similar events in the soon-to-be-admitted states of Vermont, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Also considered are disestablishment in Ohio (the first state admitted from the Northwest Territory), Louisiana and Missouri (the first states admitted from the Louisiana Purchase), and Florida (wrestled from Spain under U.S. pressure). The volume makes a unique scholarly contribution by recounting in detail the process of disestablishment in each of the colonies, as well as religion’s constitutional and legal place in the new states of the federal republic.

The Enlightenment Atlantic was awash in deep feelings. People expressed the ardour of patriots, the homesickness of migrants, the fear of slave revolts, the ecstasy of revivals, the anger of mobs, the grief of wartime, the disorientation of refugees, and the joys of victory. Yet passions and affections were not merely private responses to the events of the period – emotions were also central to the era’s most consequential public events, and even defined them. In Enthusiasms and Loyalties Keith Grant shows that British North Americans participated in a transatlantic swirl of debates over emotions as they attempted to cultivate and make sense of their own feelings in turbulent times. Examining the emotional communities that overlapped in Cornwallis Township, Nova Scotia, between 1770 and 1850, Grant explores the diversity of public feelings, from disaffected loyalists to passionate patriots and ecstatic revivalists. He shows how certain emotions – especially enthusiasm and loyalty – could be embraced or weaponized by political and religious factions, and how their use and meaning changed over time. Feelings could be the glue that made loyalties stick, or a solvent that weakened community bonds. Taking a history of emotions approach, Enthusiasms and Loyalties aims to recover and understand the wide range of political and religious emotions that were possible – feelable – in the Enlightenment Atlantic.

Between 1776 and 1850, the people, politicians, and clergy of New England transformed the relationship between church and state. They did not simply replace their religious establishments with voluntary churches and organizations. Instead, as they collided over disestablishment, Sunday laws, and antislavery, they built the foundation of what the author describes as a religion-supported state. Religious tolerance and pluralism coexisted in the religion-supported state with religious anxiety and controversy. Questions of religious liberty were shaped by public debates among evangelicals, Unitarians, Universalists, deists, and others about the moral implications of religious truth and error. The author traces the shifting, situational political alliances they constructed to protect the moral core of their competing truths. New England's religion-supported state still resonates in the United States in the twenty-first century.

For most of the eighteenth century, British protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. Instead, it thrived as part of a complex transatlantic system that bound religious institutions to imperial politics. As Katherine Carte argues, British imperial protestantism proved remarkably effective in advancing both the interests of empire and the cause of religion until the war for American independence disrupted it. That Revolution forced a reassessment of the role of religion in public life on both sides of the Atlantic. Religious communities struggled to reorganize within and across new national borders. Religious leaders recalibrated their relationships to government. If these shifts were more pronounced in the United States than in Britain, the loss of a shared system nonetheless mattered to both nations. Sweeping and explicitly transatlantic, Religion and the American Revolution demonstrates that if religion helped set the terms through which Anglo-Americans encountered the imperial crisis and the violence of war, it likewise set the terms through which both nations could imagine the possibilities of a new world.

In New York's Burned-over District, Spencer W. McBride and Jennifer Hull Dorsey invite readers to experience the early American revivals and reform movements through the eyes of the revivalists and the reformers themselves. Between 1790 and 1860, the mass migration of white settlers into New York State contributed to a historic Christian revival. This renewed spiritual interest and fervor occurred in particularly high concentration in central and western New York where men and women actively sought spiritual awakening and new religious affiliation. Contemporary observers referred to the region as "burnt" or "infected" with religious enthusiasm; historians now refer to as the Burned-over District. New York's Burned-over District highlights how Christian revivalism transformed the region into a critical hub of social reform in nineteenth-century America. An invaluable compendium of primary sources, this anthology revises standard interpretations of the Burned-over District and shows how the putative grassroots movements of the era were often coordinated and regulated by established religious leaders.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A thwarted love triangle of heartbreak rediscovered after almost two hundred years—two men and a woman of equal ambition—that exploded in scandal and investigation, set between America's Revolution and its Civil War, revealing an age in subtle and powerful transformation, caught between the fight for women's rights and the campaign waged by evangelical Protestants to dominate the nation's culture and politics. From the winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize in History. At its center—and the center of a love triangle—Martha Parker, a gifted young New England woman, smart, pretty, ambitious, determined to make the most of her opportunities, aspiring to become an educator and a foreign missionary. Late in 1825, Martha accepted a proposal from a schoolmaster, Thomas Tenney, only to reject him several weeks later for a rival suitor, a clergyman headed for the mission field, Elnathan Gridley. Tenney's male friends, deeply resentful of the new prominence of women in academies, benevolent and reform associations, and the mission field, decided to retaliate on Tenney's behalf by sending an anonymous letter to the head of the foreign missions board impugning Martha's character. Tenney further threatened Martha with revealing even more about their relationship, thereby ruining her future prospects as a missionary. The head of the board began an inquiry into the truth of the claims about Martha, and in so doing, collected letters, diaries, depositions, and firsthand witness accounts of Martha's character. The ruin of Martha Parker's hopes provoked a resistance within evangelical ranks over womanhood, manhood, and, surprisingly, homosexuality, ultimately threatening to destroy the foreign missions enterprise.