Keepers of the Covenant


Book Description

The first book-length treatment of its topic, this study is aimed at abolishing the old cliche that Congregationalism failed to adapt to the democratizing culture of the westward migration. Drawing on hundreds of previously unused letters, journals, and sermons, the author argues that Congregational missionaries were aggressive evangelists who successfully adjusted to the egalitarian demands of the early republican frontier. Keepers of the Covenant critically examines the various explanations for the decline of Congregationalism after the American Revolution, and in the process, overturns generalizations that have prevailed for years. The conclusion offers a reinterpretation of Congregationalist decline that challenges much conventional wisdom about church growth. It will interest not only church historians and students of early republican America, but also sociologists and all those concerned with the decline of the Protestant "mainline" today.







Down the Warpath to the Cedars


Book Description

In May 1776 more than two hundred Indian warriors descended the St. Lawrence River to attack Continental forces at the Cedars, west of Montreal. In just three days’ fighting, the Native Americans and their British and Canadian allies forced the American fort to surrender and ambushed a fatally delayed relief column. In Down the Warpath to the Cedars, author Mark R. Anderson flips the usual perspective on this early engagement and focuses on its Native participants—their motivations, battlefield conduct, and the event’s impact in their world. In this way, Anderson’s work establishes and explains Native Americans’ centrality in the Revolutionary War’s northern theater. Anderson’s dramatic, deftly written narrative encompasses decisive diplomatic encounters, political intrigue, and scenes of brutal violence but is rooted in deep archival research and ethnohistorical scholarship. It sheds new light on the alleged massacre and atrocities that other accounts typically focus on. At the same time, Anderson traces the aftermath for Indian captives and military hostages, as well as the political impact of the Cedars reaching all the way to the Declaration of Independence. The action at the Cedars emerges here as a watershed moment, when Indian neutrality frayed to the point that hundreds of northern warriors entered the fight between crown and colonies. Adroitly interweaving the stories of diverse characters—chiefs, officials, agents, soldiers, and warriors—Down the Warpath to the Cedars produces a complex picture, and a definitive account, of the Revolutionary War’s first Indian battles, an account that significantly expands our historical understanding of the northern theater of the American Revolution.




Moral Geography


Book Description

Moral Geography traces the development of a moral basis for American expansionism, as Protestant missionaries, using biblical language and metaphors, imaginatively conjoined the cultivation of souls with the cultivation of land and made space sacred. While the political implications of the mapping of American expansion have been much studied, this is the first major study of the close and complex relationship between mapping and missionizing on the American frontier. Moral Geography provides a fresh approach to understanding nineteenth-century Protestant home missions in Ohio's Western Reserve. Through the use of maps, letters, religious tracts, travel narratives, and geographical texts, Amy DeRogatis recovers the struggles of settlers, land surveyors, missionaries, and geographers as they sought to reconcile their hopes and expectations for a Promised Land with the realities of life on the early American frontier.




America's Religious Crossroads


Book Description

Between 1790 and 1850, waves of Anglo-Americans, African Americans, and European immigrants flooded the Old Northwest (modern-day Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin). They brought with them a mosaic of Christian religious belief. Stephen T. Kissel draws on a wealth of primary sources to examine the foundational role that organized religion played in shaping the social, cultural, and civic infrastructure of the region. As he shows, believers from both traditional denominations and religious utopian societies found fertile ground for religious unity and fervor. Able to influence settlement from the earliest days, organized religion integrated faith into local townscapes and civic identity while facilitating many of the Old Northwest's earliest advances in literacy, charitable public outreach, formal education, and social reform. Kissel also unearths fascinating stories of how faith influenced the bonds, networks, and relationships that allowed isolated western settlements to grow and evolve a distinct regional identity. Perceptive and broad in scope, America’s Religious Crossroads illuminates the integral relationship between communal and spiritual growth in early Midwestern history.




Year with American Saints


Book Description










A Memoir of Rev. Joseph Badger; Containing an Autobiography, and Selections from His Private Journal and Correspondence


Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1851 edition. Excerpt: ... Next Tuesday, if the Lord will, I expect to attend a four days' meeting at Farmington, twenty miles a li ttle south of west from here. We have meetings appointed for each week to the middle of September, one at Braceville, at Youngstown, and at Kinsman, and people are quite anxious to have it here the last week in September, but I fear we are not prepared for it. It appears to me that the church must wake up to fervent, agonizing prayer. God says, I will be sought unto to do these things for them. We may then expect to see, when Zion travails, her children will be brought forth. Perhaps it might be well for the mission family to invite Mr. Smith and several praying souls to hold a meeting for agonizing prayer for a revival and for the oppressed and abused Indians. They can have no trust in the promises of the Government: when every treaty with them is violated, and they, are robbed, plundered, and murdered without redress, what confidence can they have in any new treaty or promise of protection beyond the Mississippi? What this missionary persecution and oppression, and war against the work so happily begun among some of the Indian tribes will end in, we know not, only that God is able, and will make the wrath of man to praise Him and restrain the remainder. I tremble for our country, for I believe God is just, and that we are fast approaching to some awful crisis. The Church is fast ripening for some great and signal event May it be for a day of brighter glory, even the shaking of all nations, and breaking the arm of tyrannical oppression in every land. My health is remarkably good, considering my age and worn out constitution. I have, been able to tend my garden and potatoes, and help get my hay; but I find a little over-exertion...