This first scholarly treatment of a fascinating and understudied figure offers a unique and powerful view of nearly one hundred years of the struggle for freedom in North America. After her conversion at a Baptist revival at sixteen, Jennie Johnson followed the call to preach. Raised in an African Canadian abolitionist community in Ontario, she immigrated to the United States to attend the African Methodist Episcopal Seminary at Wilberforce University. On an October evening in 1909 she stood before a group of Free Will Baptist preachers in the small town of Goblesville, Michigan, and was received into ordained ministry. She was thefirst ordained woman to serve in Canada and spent her life building churches and working for racial justice on both sides of the national border. In this first extended study of Jennie Johnson's fascinating life, Nina Reid-Maroney reconstructs Johnson's nearly one-hundred-year story -- from her upbringing in a black abolitionist settlement in nineteenth-century Canada to her work as an activist and Christian minister in the modern civil rights movement. This critical biography of a figure who outstripped the racial and religious barriers of her time offers a unique and powerful view of the struggle for freedom in North America. Nina Reid-Maroney is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Huron University College at Western (London, Ontario) and a coeditor of The Promised Land: History and Historiography of Black Experience in Chatham-Kent's Settlements

Rather than treating the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment as defining opposites in 18th century American culture, this study argues that the imperatives of the great revival actually shaped the pursuit of enlightened science. Reid-Maroney traces the interwoven histories of the two movements by reconstructing the intellectual world of the Philadelphia circle. Prophets of the Enlightenment had long tried to resolve pressing questions about the limitations of human reason and the sources of our knowledge about the created order of things. The leaders of the Awakening addressed those questions with a new urgency and, in the process, determined the character of the Enlightenment emerging in Philadelphia's celebrated culture of science.

Tracing the influence of evangelical sensibility and the development of a Calvinist parallel to the philosophical skepticism of enlightened Scots, Reid-Maroney finds that the Philadelphians' love of science rested on a radical critique of human reason, even while it acknowledged that reason was the dignifying and distinguishing property of human nature. Benjamin Rush alluded to an enlightenment wrought by grace in his image of the Kingdom of Christ and the Empire of Reason. In the post-Revolutionary period, the redemptive Enlightenment of the Philadelphia circle reached its greatest cultural power as a vision for scientific progress in the new republic.

Women in the "Promised Land" places African Canadian women's lived experiences, identities, and histories at the centre of Canada's past. This collection of original research edited by leading scholars in the field encourages readers to interrogate the idea of Canada as a "Promised Land" by examining the rich and varied history of African Canadian women. The nine chapters span the early 1830's of slavery through to the late twentieth centuries of activism. This interdisciplinary collection draws on existing research from cultural studies, literary studies, communications, and visual culture to reframe familiar figures in African Canadian women's history, such as feminist Mary Ann Shadd and civil rights activist Viola Desmond, in the wider African diaspora. This invaluable text sheds light on questions of the past, present, and future in the field, and is best suited for undergraduate courses in women's studies, African studies, sociology, and history. Features: contains interdisciplinary, accessible, and original work that examines African Canadian women's history through a visual culture lens includes chapter abstracts, questions for discussion, and a bibliographic appendix encourages readers to make connections between African Canadian women's history and emerging scholarship on race, indigeneity, and queer histories