Skepticism and American Faith


Book Description

Between the Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith profoundly shaped America. Although usually rendered nearly invisible, skepticism touched-and sometimes transformed-more lives than might be expected from standard accounts. This book examines Americans wrestling with faith and doubt as they tried to make sense of their world.




Foreigners in Their Own Land


Book Description

Historians of the early Republic are just beginning to tell the stories of the period&’s ethnic minorities. In Foreigners in Their Own Land, Steven M. Nolt is the first to add the story of the Pennsylvania Germans to that larger mosaic, showing how they came to think of themselves as quintessential Americans and simultaneously constructed a durable sense of ethnicity. The Lutheran and Reformed Pennsylvania German populations of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Appalachian backcountry successfully combined elements of their Old World tradition with several emerging versions of national identity. Many took up democratic populist rhetoric to defend local cultural particularity and ethnic separatism. Others wedded certain American notions of reform and national purpose to Continental traditions of clerical authority and idealized German virtues. Their experience illustrates how creating and defending an ethnic identity can itself be a way of becoming American. Though they would maintain a remarkably stable and identifiable subculture well into the twentieth century, Pennsylvania Germans were, even by the eve of the Civil War, the most &"inside&" of &"outsiders.&" They represent the complex and often paradoxical ways in which many Americans have managed the process of assimilation to their own advantage. Given their pioneering role in that process, their story illuminates the path that other immigrants and ethnic Americans would travel in the decades to follow.




Theological Index


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Theological Index


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Religion and American Politics


Book Description

These essays examine how religious beliefs and practices have shaped political thought and behaviour (and vice versa), and how in certain periods religious and political thought has coincided or moved in opposition, and how minority perspectives have challenged majority views.




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