Written from the perspective of the various denominations that thrived in the 19th century, this comprehensive survey of the middle period in America's religious past actually starts a little earlier, in the 1780s. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the citizens of the newly-minted republic had to cope with more than the havoc wreaked on churches and denominations by the war. They also tasted for the first time the effects of two novel ideas incorporated in the Constitution and the First Amendment: the separation of church and state and the freedom to practice any religion.

Grant Wacker takes readers on a lively tour of the numerous religions and the major historical challenges--from the Civil War and westward expansion to immigration and the Industrial Revolution--that defined the century. The narrative focuses on the rapid growth of evangelical Protestants, in denominations such as Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, and their competition for dominance with new immigrants' religions such as Catholicism and Judaism. The author discusses issues ranging from temperance to Sunday schools and introduces the personalities--sometimes colorful, sometimes saintly, and often both--of the men and women who shaped American religion in the 19th century, including Methodist bishop Francis Asbury, ex-slave Sojourner Truth, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and evangelist Dwight L. Moody.

Religion in American Life explores the evolution, character, and dynamics of organized religion in America from 1500 to the present day. Written by distinguished religious historians, these books weave together the varying stories that compose the religious fabric of the United States, from Puritanism to alternative religious practices. Primary source material coupled with handsome illustrations and lucid text make these books essential in any exploration of America's diverse nature. Each book includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and index.

The decades since the 1980s have witnessed an unprecedented surge in research about Latin American history. This much-needed volume brings together original essays by renowned scholars to provide the first comprehensive assessment of this burgeoning literature.
The seventeen original essays in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History survey the recent historiography of the colonial era, independence movements, and postcolonial periods and span Mexico, Spanish South America, and Brazil. They begin by questioning the limitations and meaning of Latin America as a conceptual organization of space within the Americas and how the region became excluded from broader studies of the Western hemisphere. Subsequent essays address indigenous peoples of the region, rural and urban history, slavery and race, African, European and Asian immigration, labor, gender and sexuality, religion, family and childhood, economics, politics, and disease and medicine. In so doing, they bring together traditional approaches to politics and power, while examining the quotidian concerns of workers, women and children, peasants, and racial and ethnic minorities.
This volume provides the most complete state of the field and is an indispensible resource for scholars and students of Latin America.

The United States has never had an officially established church. Since the time of the first British colonists, it has instead developed a strong civil religion that melds national symbols to symbols of God. In a deft exploration of American civil religious symbols ranging from the Liberty Bell and Vietnam Memorial to Mount Rushmore and Disney World, Peter Gardella explains how the places, objects, and symbols that Americans hold sacred came into being and how they have changed over time. In addition to examining revered historical sites and structures, he analyzes such sacred texts as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the Kennedy Inaugural, and the speeches of Martin Luther King, and shows how five patriotic songs-''The Star-Spangled Banner,'' ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic'' ''America the Beautiful,'' ''God Bless America,'' and ''This Land Is Your Land''-have been elevated into hymns. Arguing that certain values-personal freedom, political democracy, world peace, and cultural tolerance-have held American civil religion together, this book chronicles the numerous forms those values have taken, from Jamestown and Plymouth to the September 11, 2001, Memorial in New York.

Wisconsin's trees heard "Timber " during World War II, as the forest products industry of the Badger State played a key role in the Allied aerial campaign. It was Wisconsin that provided the material for the De Havilland Mosquito, known as the "Timber Terror," while the CG-4A battle-ready gliders, cloaked in stealthy silence, carried the 82nd and 101st Airborne into fierce fighting throughout Europe and the Pacific. Sara Witter Connor follows a forgotten thread of the American war effort, celebrating the factory workers, lumberjacks, pilots and innovative thinkers of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory who helped win a world war with paper, wood and glue.

Adored by many, appalling to some, baffling still to others, few authors defy any single critical narrative to the confounding extent that James Baldwin manages. Was he a black or queer writer? Was he a religious or secular writer? Was he a spokesman for the civil rights movement or a champion of the individual? His critics, as disparate as his readership, endlessly wrestle with paradoxes, not just in his work but also in the life of a man who described himself as "all those strangers called Jimmy Baldwin" and who declared that "all theories are suspect." Viewing Baldwin through a cultural-historical lens alongside a more traditional literary critical approach, All Those Strangers examines how his fiction and nonfiction shaped and responded to key political and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Showing how external forces molded Baldwinas personal, political, and psychological development, Douglas Field breaks through the established critical difficulties caused by Baldwinas geographical, ideological, and artistic multiplicity by analyzing his life and work against the radically transformative politics of his time. The book explores under-researched areas in Baldwin's life and work, including his relationship to the Left, his FBI files, and the significance of Africa in his writing, while also contributing to wider discussions about postwar US culture. Field deftly navigates key twentieth-century themesathe Cold War, African American literary history, conflicts between spirituality and organized religion, and transnationalismato bring a number of isolated subjects into dialogue with each other. By exploring the paradoxes in Baldwin's development as a writer, rather than trying to fix his life and work into a single framework, All Those Strangers contradicts the accepted critical paradigm that Baldwin's life and work are too ambiguous to make sense of. By studying him as an individual and an artist in flux, Field reveals the manifold ways in which Baldwin's work develops and coheres.

Tiny Amelia Island, in the northeast corner of Florida, was once among the most important ports in the western hemisphere. Before Florida was granted statehood, the island served as an international gateway between Spanish Florida and the English colonies that would later become the United States. Where Spanish monks and pirates once roamed, the island eventually developed into a significant seaport that exported the rich resources of Florida's interior in the late 1800s. This era was known as the Golden Age of Amelia Island and the town located on its north end, Fernandina. The railroad that connected Amelia Island to the Gulf Coast was largely responsible for the Golden Age, as it brought a burgeoning economy and many of the South's most prominent and wealthy figures. Today the island is best known as a resort community but retains the influence and charm of its remarkable past.

Future History traces the ways that English and American writers oriented themselves along an East-West axis to fantasize their place in the world. The book builds on new transoceanic scholarship and recent calls to approach early American studies from a global perspective. Such scholarship has largely focused on the early national period; Bross's work begins earlier and considers the intertwined identities of America, other English colonial sites and metropolitan England during a period before nation-state identities were hardened into the forms we know them today, when an English empire was nascent, not realized, and when a global perspective such as we might recognize it was just coming into focus for early modern Europeans. The author examines works that imagine England on a global stage in the Americas and East Indies just as-and in some cases even before-England occupied such spaces in force. Future History considers works written from the 1620s to the 1670s, but the center of gravity of Future History is writing at the mid-century, that is, writings coincident with the Interregnum, a time when England plotted and launched ambitious, often violent schemes to conquer, colonize or otherwise appropriate other lands, driven by both mercantile and religious desires.

In the 1830s, a small community known as El Fronton de Santa
Isabel set roots on the banks of the Laguna Madre Bay. Official claim for the land was granted to Don Rafael Garcia as part of the
Potrero ("Pasture") de Santa Isabel in 1828. Less than two decades
later, Point Isabel was home to Zachary Taylor's Fort Polk and found itself a home base during the Mexican-American War. In 1853, construction was completed on the Point Isabel lighthouse, a
navigational beacon with a 16-mile view. Port Isabel was incorporated in 1928, and a deep-water port shipped its first commercial load in 1937. By the 1950s, Port Isabel was the "Shrimping Capital of the World," and the first Queen Isabella Causeway connected South Padre Island to the mainland. Port Isabel continues to deepen its roots on the banks of the Laguna Madre Bay. Heritage and cultural tourism, a relaxed quality of life, and an appreciation for all things coastal are synonymous with Port Isabel.