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The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America.Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, \"the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.\" This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up.

At the close of the eighteenth century, Timothy Dwight -- poet, clergyman, and, later, president of Yale College -- waged a literary and intellectual war against the forces of infidelity.

Hidden lives, hidden history, and hidden manuscripts. InThe Virgin of Guadalupe and the Conversos,Marie-Theresa Hernández unmasks the secret lives ofconversosandjudaizantesand their likely influence on the Catholic Church in the New World.The termsconversoandjudaizanteare often used for descendants of Spanish Jews (the Sephardi, or Sefarditas as they are sometimes called), who converted under duress to Christianity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are few, if any, archival documents that prove the existence ofjudaizantesafter the Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the Portuguese expulsion in 1497, as it is unlikely that a secret Jew in sixteenth-century Spain would have documented his allegiance to the Law of Moses, thereby providing evidence for the Inquisition.On aDa Vinci Code- style quest, Hernández persisted in hunting for a trove of forgotten manuscripts at the New York Public Library. These documents, once unearthed, describe the Jewish/Christian religious beliefs of an early nineteenth-century Catholic priest in Mexico City, focusing on the relationship between the Virgin of Guadalupe and Judaism. With this discovery in hand, the author traces the cult of Guadalupe backwards to its fourteenth-century Spanish origins. The trail from that point forward can then be followed to its interface with early modern conversos and their descendants at the highest levels of the Church and the monarchy in Spain and Colonial Mexico. She describes key players who were somehow immune to the dangers of the Inquisition and who were allowed the freedom to display, albeit in a camouflaged manner, vestiges of their family's Jewish identity.By exploring the narratives produced by these individuals, Hernández reveals the existence of thoseconversosandjudaizanteswho did not return to the \"covenantal bond of rabbinic law,\" who did not publicly identify themselves as Jews, and who continued to exhibit in their influential writings a covert allegiance and longing for a Jewish past. This is a spellbinding and controversial story that offers a fresh perspective on the origins and history ofconversos.

Scholars of the Black lived experience have always had a contentious relationship with the writings and poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters. Discussions about the contemporaneous reach of her advocacy for other enslaved Africans is often muted due to her closeness to the white Wheatley family. This essay recasts Wheatley's \"On Being Brought from Africa to America\" as a diplomatic treatise that illustrates African Christians exclusion within the faith in colonial America. Drawing on Christianity as a point of identification, Wheatley derives her own philosophical reading from biblical myths, using her enlightened status as an ambassador arguing for the wider acceptance of African Christians within evangelical ranks. This example centers Wheatley's lived experience, her survival of the transatlantic slave trade, and her ability to capture collective grievances in her signature poem. Using both rhetorical and literary studies, this essay considers Wheatley's rhetorical experiments as necessary to the continued evolution of Black rhetoric as offering public discourse during the early national period.

Gathering the attention and excitement of American colonists from Boston to Charleston, the religious revival of the 1740s traditionally known as the First Great Awakening provided colonial newspaper printers with their first story of transcolonial importance. At the time of the Awakening, American newspapers had become a vital part of the colonial information network as each major city offered at least one weekly paper. Papers printed weekly reports on revivalist preaching, eye-witness accounts of revival meetings, shocking stories of improper ordinations and church separations, as well as numerous contributed letters praising or denouncing virtually every aspect of the Awakening. No other colonial event of the 1740s, including the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Jacobite Rebellion (1745), came close to receiving as much newspaper coverage, making the First Great Awakening America’s first “Big Story.” In The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers: A Shifting Story, Lisa Smith offers the first scholarly work to examine in detail the printed newspaper record of the revival. This comprehensive, in-depth examination of colonial newspapers over a ten-year period uncovers information on shifts in the presentation of the revival over time, specific differences in regional reporting, and significant transformations in the newspaper personae of popular revivalists such as George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent. Using original newspaper excerpts and graphs revealing reporting trends, this book presents an engaging, detailed picture of how colonial newspaper printers covered the experience of the First Great Awakening.

Derived from the Latinabiectus, literally meaning \"thrown or cast down,\" \"abjection\" names the condition of being servile, wretched, or contemptible. In Western religious tradition, to be abject is to submit to bodily suffering or psychological mortification for the good of the soul. InCast Down: Abjection in America, 1700-1850, Mark J. Miller argues that transatlantic Protestant discourses of abjection engaged with, and furthered the development of, concepts of race and sexuality in the creation of public subjects and public spheres. Miller traces the connection between sentiment, suffering, and publication and the role it played in the movement away from church-based social reform and toward nonsectarian radical rhetoric in the public sphere. He focuses on two periods of rapid transformation: first, the 1730s and 1740s, when new models of publication and transportation enabled transatlantic Protestant religious populism, and, second, the 1830s and 1840s, when liberal reform movements emerged from nonsectarian religious organizations. Analyzing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conversion narratives, personal narratives, sectarian magazines, poems, and novels, Miller shows how church and social reformers used sensational accounts of abjection in their attempts to make the public sphere sacred as a vehicle for political change, especially the abolition of slavery.

The recent success of the Left Behind book series, which sold over 50 million books, points to an enormous readership of evangelical Christian literature that has not gone unnoticed by the mainstream publishing world. But this is not a recent phenomenon; the evangelical publishing community has been growing for more than two hundred years. Candy Gunther Brown explores the roots of this far-flung conglomeration of writers, publishers, and readers, from the founding of the Methodist Book Concern in 1789 to the 1880 publication of the runaway best-seller Ben-Hur. Brown shows how this distinct print community used the Word of the Bible and printed words of their own to pursue a paradoxical mission: purity from and a transformative presence in the secular world. Although scholars usually claim that religious publishing fell prey to the secularizing engines of commodification, Brown argues that evangelicals knew what they were doing by adopting a range of strategies, including the use of popular narratives and beautiful packaging. An informal canon of texts emerged in the nineteenth century, consisting of sermons, histories, memoirs, novels, gift books, Sunday school libraries, periodicals, and hymnals. Looking beyond the uses of texts in religious conversion, Brown examines how textual practices have transmitted cultural values both within evangelical communities and across a larger American cultural milieu. An epilogue conveys crucial insights into twenty-first-century ties between religion and the media.

Dr. Shippen narrowly escaped the mob in a hail of projectiles and gunfire.3 In the century following Shippen's early lecture demonstrations, an authoritative origin story for medical education in Philadelphia and across the nation was codified in the lectures of medical professors and inherited by each new generation of university-trained physicians.4 Seeking to correct European portraits of the colonies as a scientific backwater, these histories charted the rise of American medicine on a positivist axis, and they commemorated William Shippen, Jr. as a republican pioneer. According to thinkers like John Godman, and the legislators, ministers, and storytellers who echoed his resurrection rhetoric, medical progress is not a sign of religious decline but rather an affirmation of the Protestant mission's success in the New World.

Margaret Meuse Clay, who barely escaped a public whipping in the 1760s for preaching without a license; \"\"Old Elizabeth,\"\" an ex-slave who courageously traveled to the South to preach against slavery in the early nineteenth century; Harriet Livermore, who spoke in front of Congress four times between 1827 and 1844--these are just a few of the extraordinary women profiled in this, the first comprehensive history of female preaching in early America. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Catherine Brekus examines the lives of more than a hundred female preachers--both white and African American--who crisscrossed the country between 1740 and 1845. Outspoken, visionary, and sometimes contentious, these women stepped into the pulpit long before twentieth-century battles over female ordination began. They were charismatic, popular preachers, who spoke to hundreds and even thousands of people at camp and revival meetings, and yet with but a few notable exceptions--such as Sojourner Truth--these women have essentially vanished from our history. Recovering their stories, Brekus shows, forces us to rethink many of our common assumptions about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American culture. |Profiles the women preachers--white and African-American--who struggled to forge an enduring tradition of female religious leadership in early America

In accounting for the rapid development of American obstetrics as a hegemonic profession, we tend to locate a rupture in the eighteenth century that was brought about by the importation of European technologies, such as the forceps, but in fact the groundwork for such dramatic change was laid in advance of these developments, and within the context of gendered power struggles. The tools that found their way into the hands of male surgeons (and stayed out of the hands of female midwives) heralded the decline of midwifery in America and the dawning of an age of highly medicalized childbirth; as I argue, the forceps in particular enabled an unprecedented level of intervention on the part of birth attendants who were sometimes seeking happier outcomes, and sometimes just trying to hurry things up.