Francis Asbury shaped the religious landscape of early America more decisively than any other person. As the first bishop of the Methodist Church in America, Asbury attempted to visit all of his preachers every year, crisscrossing most of the territory east of the Mississippi River on horseback. In this biography, Darius L. Salter gives us a candid view of Asbury's personal life and public ministry. Book jacket.

Dakota Cross-Bearer is the story of Harold S. Jones, a Dakota Indian born in 1909 and raised on the Santee Reservation in Nebraska, who rose through the ranks of the Episcopal Church to become the first Native bishop of a Christian church. Jones's biography sheds light on the importance of Christianity for the Dakotas and other Native peoples during the twentieth century. His story yields insights into the history of twentieth-century missionary activity among Native communities and illuminates instances of conflict and discrimination within the Episcopal Church, the processes of clerical training and testing, and the demands of constant relocation. Mary E. Cochran is the wife of an Episcopal bishop who worked on the Standing Rock Reservation and who later was named bishop of Alaska. She and her husband live in Tacoma, Washington. Raymond A. Bucko, S.J., a Catholic priest, is the director of the Native American Studies Program and an associate professor of anthropology at Creighton University. He is the author of The Lakota Ritual of the Sweat Lodge: History and Contemporary Practice (Nebraska 1998). Martin Brokenleg, an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota, is a professor of Native American studies at Augustana College and an Episcopal priest. He is a coauthor of Reclaiming Youth at Risk: Our Hope for the Future.

The Poetry of the Americas provides an expansive history of relations between poets in the US and Latin America over three decades, from the Good Neighbor diplomacy of World War II to 1960s Cold War cultural policy.

Henry McNeal Turner was an "epoch-making man, " as his colleague Reverdy Ransom called him. A bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1880 to 1915, Turner was also a politician and Georgia legislator during Reconstruction, U.S. Army chaplain, newspaper editor, prohibition advocate, civil rights and back-to-Africa activist, African missionary, and early proponent of black theology. This richly detailed book, the first full-length critical biography of Turner, firmly places him alongside DuBois and Washington as a preeminent visionary of the postbellum African-American experience. The strength and vitality of today's black church tradition owes much to the herculean labors of pioneers such as Turner, one of the most skillful denominational builders in American history. When emancipation created the prerequisites for a strong national religious organization, Turner, with his boldness, charisma, political wisdom, eloquence, and energy, took full advantage of the opportunity. Combining evangelicalism with forthright agitation for racial freedom, he instigated the most momentous transformation in A.M.E. Church history--the mission to the South. Stephen Angell views Turner's advocacy of ordination for women and his missionary work in Africa as a further outgrowth of the bishop's deep evangelical commitment. The book's epilogue offers the first serious analysis of Turner's theology and his replies to racist distortions of the Christian message.

Acclaimed biographer John Loughery tells the story of John Hughes, son of Ireland, friend of William Seward and James Buchanan, founder of St. John’s College (now Fordham University), builder of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, pioneer of parochial-school education, and American diplomat. As archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York in the 1840 and 1850s and the most famous Roman Catholic in America, Hughes defended Catholic institutions in a time of nativist bigotry and church burnings and worked tirelessly to help Irish Catholic immigrants find acceptance in their new homeland. His galvanizing and protecting work and pugnacious style earned him the epithet Dagger John. When the interests of his church and ethnic community were at stake, Hughes acted with purpose and clarity. In Dagger John, Loughery reveals Hughes’s life as it unfolded amid turbulent times for the religious and ethnic minority he represented. Hughes the public figure comes to the fore, illuminated by Loughery’s retelling of his interactions with, and responses to, every major figure of his era, including his critics (Walt Whitman, James Gordon Bennett, and Horace Greeley) and his admirers (Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln). Loughery peels back the layers of the public life of this complicated man, showing how he reveled in the controversies he provoked and believed he had lived to see many of his goals achieved until his dreams came crashing down during the Draft Riots of 1863 when violence set Manhattan ablaze. To know "Dagger" John Hughes is to understand the United States during a painful period of growth as the nation headed toward civil war. Dagger John’s successes and failures, his public relationships and private trials, and his legacy in the Irish Catholic community and beyond provide context and layers of detail for the larger history of a modern culture unfolding in his wake.

The award-winning journalist reveals the untold story of why America is so culturally and politically divided in this groundbreaking book. Armed with startling demographic data, Bill Bishop demonstrates how Americans have spent decades sorting themselves into alarmingly homogeneous communities—not by region or by state, but by city and neighborhood. With ever-increasing specificity, we choose the communities and media that are compatible with our lifestyles and beliefs. The result is a country that has become so ideologically inbred that people don't know and can't understand those who live just a few miles away. In The Big Sort, Bishop explores how this phenomenon came to be, and its dire implications for our country. He begins with stories about how we live today and then draws on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling big-picture accounts of America in recent memory.