As early as the 1780s, African Americans told stories that enabled them to survive and even thrive in the midst of unspeakable assault. Tracing previously unexplored narratives from the late eighteenth century to the 1920s, Laurie Maffly-Kipp brings to light an extraordinary trove of sweeping race histories that African Americans wove together out of racial and religious concerns.

Asserting a role in God's plan, black Protestants sought to root their people in both sacred and secular time. A remarkable array of chroniclers men and women, clergy, journalists, shoemakers, teachers, southerners and northerners shared a belief that narrating a usable past offered hope, pride, and the promise of a better future. Combining Christian faith, American patriotism, and racial lineage to create a coherent sense of community, they linked past to present, Africa to America, and the Bible to classical literature. From collected shards of memory and emerging intellectual tools, African Americans fashioned stories that helped to restore meaning and purpose to their lives in the face of relentless oppression.

In a pioneering work of research and discovery, Maffly-Kipp shows how blacks overcame the accusation that they had no history worth remembering. African American communal histories imagined a rich collective past in order to establish the claim to a rightful and respected place in the American present. Through the transformative power of storytelling, these men and women led their people and indeed, all Americans into a more profound understanding of their interconnectedness and their prospects for a common future.

The chaotic and reputedly immoral society of the California mining frontier during the gold rush period greatly worried Protestant evangelicals from the Northeast, and they soon sent missionaries westward to transplant their religious institutions, beliefs, and practices in the area. This book tells the story of that enterprise, showing how it developed, why it failed, and what patterns of religious adherence evolved in the West in place of evangelical Protestantism. Laurie Maffly-Kipp begins by analyzing the eastern-based religious ideology that underlay the movement westward and by investigating the motives behind the founding of home mission boards dedicated to the spread of Christianity and civility among new settlers. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and journals of hundreds of California "argonauts," Maffly-Kipp describes those missionaries and their wives sent to California after 1848 and the virtually all-male mining society that resisted the missionaries' notions of moral order and in turn created new religious beliefs and practices. Maffly-Kipp argues that despite its alleged immorality, the California gold rush was actually one of the most morally significant events of the nineteenth century, for it challenged and brought into conflict the cherished values of antebellum American culture: a commitment to spiritual and social progress; a concern with self-discipline, moral character, and proper gender roles; and a thirst for wealth fostered by the spirit of free enterprise.

Whether in schoolrooms or kitchens, state houses or church pulpits, women have always been historians. Although few participated in the academic study of history until the mid-twentieth century, women functioned as primary translators and teachers, offering explanations, allegories, and scholastic narrations of the past. Though often lesser known that white women in the historical literature, black women wrote textbooks, pedagogical polemics, popular poems, and sermons assessing ancient Ethiopia, contemporary Liberia, the role of the female historian, and the future of the black race.
This anthology aims to bring together approximately sixteen writings by African-American women between 1832 and 1920, the period when they began to write for American audiences and to use history to comment on political and social issues of the day. The pieces are by more familiar nineteenth-century writers in black America--like Maria Stewart, Francis E. W. Harper, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson--as well as lesser-known mothers and teachers whose participation in their local educational systems thrust them into national intellectual conversations. Each piece will have a headnote providing biographical information about its author as well as contextual information about its publication and the topic being discussed. The volume will contain a substantial introduction to the overall enterprise of black women's historical writings. Because the editors are both trained in American Studies and religious history, their introduction will particularly highlight religious themes and venues in which these writings were presented. This book should appeal to general readers of books like those in the Schomburg Libraryseries, as well as those who work and teach American history, African American studies, womens studies, American literature, and American religious history.

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.