Download or read book Damned Women written by Elizabeth Reis and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-18 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches. In negotiating their beliefs about the devil's powers, both women and men embedded womanhood in the discourse of depravity.Puritan ministers insisted that women and men were equal in the sight of God, with both sexes equally capable of cleaving to Christ or to the devil. Nevertheless, Reis explains, womanhood and evil were inextricably linked in the minds and hearts of seventeenth-century New England Puritans. Women and men feared hell equally but Puritan culture encouraged women to believe it was their vile natures that would take them there rather than the particular sins they might have committed.Following the Salem witchcraft trials, Reis argues, Puritans' understanding of sin and the devil changed. Ministers and laity conceived of a Satan who tempted sinners and presided physically over hell, rather than one who possessed souls in the living world. Women and men became increasingly confident of their redemption, although women more than men continued to imagine themselves as essentially corrupt, even after the Great Awakening.
Download or read book The World of Hannah Heaton written by Hannah Heaton and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ordinary eighteenth-century New England woman, Hannah Heaton left an extraordinary document as her legacy. Over a period of 40 years, from the Great Awakening through the Revolutionary War, this farm wife and mother kept a diary recounting her experiences. Now published for the first time, Heaton's diary offers an unparalleled revelation of one American woman's experience of the birth of the nation. Much of her diary records Heaton's spiritual struggles, beginning with her conversion during the Great Awakening and her separation from the established Congregational church. Pious by nature, she recalls her childhood fears of the devil, who at night tempted her away from prayer and told her in a whisper to hang herself. Deeply concerned over her own salvation and that of those she loved, Heaton found comfort in the act of writing, feeling that such self-examination brought her closer to God. Hannah Heaton was devoutly religious and intensely self-aware. Spiritually isolated from her husband and children, and often at odds with her neighbors and church community, she found solace in her journal, which was at times her only friend. She loved her husband deeply, but nonetheless regretted marrying a nonbeliever and yearned for him to become a true spiritual partner. He tolerated her religious convictions but occasionally grew frustrated and even hid her spectacles so that she could not read the Bible. A staunch patriot, Heaton carefully recorded her impressions of the Revolutionary War. Believing the fight for independence was part of God's plan, Heaton, who before the war had scarcely taken note of the political world around her, began to write at length about imperial policy and military engagements. As she wrote of the national struggles, however, she remained equally interested in the intricate details of her own private life: her relationships with kinfolk and neighbors, her domestic struggles, and her personal experiences with disease and death. Heaton's unabridged diary, edited and annotated by Barbara E. Lacey, is an extraordinarily valuable source for scholars and students of colonial history, women's studies, and religion in America.
Download or read book To be Useful to the World written by Joan R. Gundersen and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering an interpretation of the Revolutionary period that places women at the center, Joan R. Gundersen provides a synthesis of the scholarship on women's experiences during the era as well as a nuanced understanding that moves beyond a view of the war
Download or read book Colonial North America and the Atlantic World written by Brett Rushforth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive collection of primary documents for students of early American and Atlantic history, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World gives voice to the men and women¿Amerindian, African, and European¿who together forged a new world.These compelling narratives address the major themes of early modern colonialism from the perspective of the people who lived at the time: Spanish priests and English farmers, Indian diplomats and Dutch governors, French explorers and African abolitionists. Evoking the remarkable complexity created by the bridging of the Atlantic Ocean, Colonial North America and the Atlantic World suggests that the challenges of globalization¿and the growing reality of American diversity¿are among the most important legacies of the colonial world.
Download or read book In the Words of Women written by Louise V. North and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-04-12 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Words of Women brings together the writings-letters, diaries, journals, pamphlets, poems, plays, depositions, and newspaper articles-of women who lived between 1765 and 1799. The writings are organized chronologically around events, battles, and developments from before the Revolution, through its prosecution and aftermath. They reflect the thoughts, observations and experiences of women during those tumultuous times, women less well known to the reading public, including patriots and loyalists; the highborn and lowly; Native Americans and blacks, both free and enslaved; the involved and observers; the young and old; and those in between. Brief narrative passages provide historical context, and information about the women as they are introduced enable readers to appreciate their relevance and significance. In the Words of Women also focuses on topics such as health, everyday life, and travel. The selections not only document existing attitudes, practices, and customs but also changes wrought by the war and independence. This book allows the voices of these women to be heard and readers to make their own inferences and judgments based on women "speaking for themselves." For more information on this topic, please visit the author's website at www.inthewordsofwomen.com.
Download or read book Practicing Protestants written by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-08-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the significance of practice in understanding American Protestant life. The authors are historians of American religion, practical theologians, and pastors and were the twelve principal researchers in a three-year collaborative project sponsored by the Lilly Endowment. Profiling practices that range from Puritan devotional writing to twentieth-century prayer, from missionary tactics to African American ritual performance, these essays provide a unique historical perspective on how Protestants have lived their faith within and outside of the church and how practice has formed their identities and beliefs. Each chapter focuses on a different practice within a particular social and cultural context. The essays explore transformations in American religious culture from Puritan to Evangelical and Enlightenment sensibilities in New England, issues of mission, nationalism, and American empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, devotional practices in the flux of modern intellectual predicaments, and the claims of late-twentieth-century liberal Protestant pluralism. Breaking new ground in ritual studies and cultural history, Practicing Protestants offers a distinctive history of American Protestant practice.
Download or read book Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America written by Julius H. Rubin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original examination of the spiritual narratives of conversion in the history of American Protestant evangelical religion reveals an interesting paradox. Fervent believers who devoted themselves completely to the challenges of making a Christian life, who longed to know God's rapturous love, all too often languished in despair, feeling forsaken by God. Ironically, those most devoted to fostering the soul's maturation neglected the well-being of the psyche. Drawing upon many sources, including unpublished diaries and case studies of patients treated in nineteenth-century asylums, Julius Rubin's fascinating study thoroughly explores religious melancholy--as a distinctive stance toward life, a grieving over the loss of God's love, and an obsession and psychopathology associated with the spiritual itinerary of conversion. The varieties of this spiritual sickness include sinners who would fast unto death ("evangelical anorexia nervosa"), religious suicides, and those obsessed with unpardonable sin. From colonial Puritans like Michael Wigglesworth to contemporary evangelicals like Billy Graham, among those who directed the course of evangelical religion and of their followers, Rubin shows that religious melancholy has shaped the experience of self and identity for those who sought rebirth as children of God.
Download or read book Bodies complexioned written by Mark S. Dawson and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-13 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bodily contrasts – from the colour of hair, eyes and skin to the shape of faces and skeletons – allowed the English of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to discriminate systematically among themselves and against non-Anglophone groups. Making use of an array of sources, this book examines how early modern English people understood bodily difference. It demonstrates that individuals’ distinctive features were considered innate, even as discrete populations were believed to have characteristics in common, and challenges the idea that the humoral theory of bodily composition was incompatible with visceral inequality or racism. While ‘race’ had not assumed its modern valence, and ‘racial’ ideologies were still to come, such typecasting nonetheless had mundane, lasting consequences. Grounded in humoral physiology, and Christian universalism notwithstanding, bodily prejudices inflected social stratification, domestic politics, sectarian division and international relations.
Download or read book Christian History Volume 2 written by Thomas S. Kidd and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2024-09-01 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas S. Kidd presents a global history of the Christian church in the modern age. Christian History, Volume 2: From the Reformation to the Present provides a composite picture of important, influential, and representative Christian beliefs, thinkers, activists, trends, and practices from about 1500 to the present day. In a highly readable style, Kidd covers the events and figures from the Reformation, the Great Awakenings, higher criticism, and the culture wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This volume also covers the global nature of God’s church by examining historical global traditions as well as the recent the demographic shift of active Christian communities to the global South. In addition to the major theologians, movements, and events of the period, Kidd highlights the everyday Christian experience through the centuries, including accounts of ordinary men and women who experience conversion, live sacrificially for the gospel, or endure persecution. A lively, engaging, and readable text, Christian History, Volume 2: From the Reformation to the Present will become a staple text for students and professors alike.
Download or read book Made in America written by Claude S. Fischer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-05-15 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our nation began with the simple phrase, “We the People.” But who were and are “We”? Who were we in 1776, in 1865, or 1968, and is there any continuity in character between the we of those years and the nearly 300 million people living in the radically different America of today? With Made in America, Claude S. Fischer draws on decades of historical, psychological, and social research to answer that question by tracking the evolution of American character and culture over three centuries. He explodes myths—such as that contemporary Americans are more mobile and less religious than their ancestors, or that they are more focused on money and consumption—and reveals instead how greater security and wealth have only reinforced the independence, egalitarianism, and commitment to community that characterized our people from the earliest years. Skillfully drawing on personal stories of representative Americans, Fischer shows that affluence and social progress have allowed more people to participate fully in cultural and political life, thus broadening the category of “American” —yet at the same time what it means to be an American has retained surprising continuity with much earlier notions of American character. Firmly in the vein of such classics as The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart—yet challenging many of their conclusions—Made in America takes readers beyond the simplicity of headlines and the actions of elites to show us the lives, aspirations, and emotions of ordinary Americans, from the settling of the colonies to the settling of the suburbs.
Download or read book The First Great Awakening written by John Howard Smith and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First Great Awakening, an unprecedented surge in Protestant Christian revivalism in the Eighteenth Century, sparked enormous of controversy at the time and has been a source of scholarly debate ever since. Few historians have sought to write a synthetic history of the First Great Awakening, and in recent decades it has been challenged as having happened at all, being either an exaggeration or an “invention.” The First Great Awakening expands the movement’s geographical, theological, and sociopolitical scope. Rather than focus exclusively on the clerical elites, as earlier studies have done, it deals with them alongside ordinary people, and includes the experiences of women, African Americans, and Indians as the observers and participants they were. It challenges prevailing scholarly opinion concerning what the revivals were and what they meant to the formation of American religious identity and culture. Cover image: NPG 131, George Whitefield by John Wollaston, oil on canvas, circa 1742. © National Portrait Gallery, London
Download or read book Evangelicalism and Conversion Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide written by Carla Gardina Pestana and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Atlantic History, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of Atlantic History, the study of the transnational interconnections between Europe, North America, South America, and Africa, particularly in the early modern and colonial period. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.
Download or read book The Great Awakening written by Thomas S. Kidd and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-eighteenth century, Americans experienced an outbreak of religious revivals that shook colonial society. This book provides a definitive view of these revivals, now known as the First Great Awakening, and their dramatic effects on American culture. Historian Thomas S. Kidd tells the absorbing story of early American evangelical Christianity through the lives of seminal figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield as well as many previously unknown preachers, prophets, and penitents.The Great Awakening helped create the evangelical movement, which heavily emphasized the individual’s experience of salvation and the Holy Spirit’s work in revivals. By giving many evangelicals radical notions of the spiritual equality of all people, the revivals helped breed the democratic style that would come to characterize the American republic. Kidd carefully separates the positions of moderate supporters of the revivals from those of radical supporters, and he delineates the objections of those who completely deplored the revivals and their wildly egalitarian consequences. The battles among these three camps, the author shows, transformed colonial America and ultimately defined the nature of the evangelical movement.
Download or read book An Extensive Republic written by Robert A. Gross and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This impressive collaborative effort by two dozen leading authorities in the field will be essential reading for any serious student of the history of American publishing and print culture during one of its most crucially transformative periods." Lawrence Buell, Harvard University "A magnificent achievement. Brilliant editing and graceful writing shatter many old assumptions about the world of the Founders. Linking intellectual history with politics, social change, and the distinctive experiences of women, African Americans and Indians, An Extensive Republic is the rare reference book that is also a mesmerizing read." Linda K. Kerber, author of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship "This volume provides a fascinating revisionist history of the United States through its focus on what was printed, how the economy of the book trades worked, who was reading, and what role reading came to assume in all sorts of people's lives. Editors Gross and Kelley make a strong team, and the contributors represent an array of disciplines suitable to the equally wide range of printed material in the United States between 1790 and 1840." Patricia Crain, New York University Volume 2 of A History of the Book in America documents the development of a distinctive culture of print in the new American republic. Between 1790 and 1840 printing and publishing expanded, and literate publics provided a ready market for novels, almanacs, newspapers, tracts, and periodicals. Government, business, and reform drove the dissemination of print. Through laws and subsidies, state and federal authorities promoted an informed citizenry. Entrepreneurs responded to rising demand by investing in new technologies and altering the conduct of publishing. Voluntary societies launched libraries, lyceums, and schools, and relied on print to spread religion, redeem morals, and advance benevolent goals. Out of all this ferment emerged new and diverse communities of citizens linked together in a decentralized print culture where citizenship meant literacy and print meant power. Yet in a diverse and far-flung nation, regional differences persisted, and older forms of oral and handwritten communication offered alternatives to print. The early republic was a world of mixed media.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Early Evangelicalism written by Jonathan Yeager and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evangelicalism, a worldwide interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity, is one of the most popular and diverse religious movements in the world today. Evangelicals maintain the belief that the essence of the Gospel consists of the doctrine of salvation by grace, through faith in Jesus' atonement. Evangelicals can be found on every continent and among nearly all Christian denominations. The origin of this group of people has been traced to the turn of the eighteenth century, with roots in the Puritan and Pietist movements in England and Germany. The earliest evangelicals could be found among Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Moravians, and Presbyterians throughout North America, Britain, and Western Europe, and included some of the foremost names of the age, such as Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitefield. Early evangelicals were abolitionists, historians, hymn writers, missionaries, philanthropists, poets, preachers, and theologians. They participated in the major cultural and intellectual currents of the day, and founded institutions of higher education not limited to Dartmouth College, Brown University, and Princeton University. The Oxford Handbook of Early Evangelicalism provides the most authoritative and comprehensive overview of the significant figures and religious communities associated with early evangelicalism within the contextual and cultural environment of the long eighteenth century, with essays written by the world's leading experts in the field of eighteenth-century studies.
Download or read book Early Evangelicalism written by Jonathan M. Yeager and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early evangelicalism flourished during the transatlantic revivals of the eighteenth century, coinciding with the emergence of the Enlightenment in America and Europe. Today, most people associate it with only a few of its leaders-namely Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitefield-despite the fact that this religious movement crossed nations as well as different traditions within Christianity. Those responsible for the growth of evangelicalism were Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Moravians, and Presbyterians and could be found in America, Canada, Great Britain, and Western Europe. They published hymns, historical works, poems, political pamphlets, revival accounts, sermons, and theological treatises. There are also records of their conversion experiences, and diaries that chronicle their spiritual development. Jonathan M. Yeager's anthology introduces a host of important religious figures, providing biographical sketches of each author and over sixty excerpts from a wide range of well-known and lesser-known Protestant Christians. Early Evangelicalism: A Reader promises to be the most comprehensive sourcebook of its kind.
Download or read book Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word written by Douglas A. Sweeney and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2010-03-23 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonathan Edwards has been recognized as the most influential evangelical theologian of all time. Before his death at the age of fifty-four, he had sparked a new movement of Reformed evangelicals who played a major role in fueling the rise of modern missions, preaching revivals far and wide, and wielding the cutting edge of American theology. He has never gone out of print, and Christians today continue to flock to seminars and conferences on him. In this biography of the great preacher and teacher, historian Douglas Sweeney locates for us the core and key to Edwards' enduring impact. Sweeney finds that Edwards' profound and meticulous study of the Bible securely anchored his powerful preaching, his lively theological passions and his discerning pastoral work. Beyond introducing you to Edwards' life and times, this book will provide you with a model of Christian faith, thought and ministry.
