In the years leading up to the Civil War, southern evangelical denominations moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the American South. Scott Stephan argues that female Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians played a crucial role in this transformation. While other scholars have pursued studies of southern evangelicalism in the context of churches, meetinghouses, and revivals, Stephan looks at the domestic rituals over which southern women had increasing authority-from consecrating newborns to God's care to ushering dying kin through life's final stages. Laymen and clergymen alike celebrated the contributions of these pious women to the experience and expansion of evangelicalism across the South. This acknowledged domestic authority allowed some women to take on more public roles in the conversion and education of southern youth within churches and academies, although always in the name of family and always cloaked in the language of Christian self-abnegation. At the same time, however, women's work in the name of domestic devotion often put them at odds with slaves, children, or husbands in their households who failed to meet their religious expectations and thereby jeopardized evangelical hopes of heavenly reunification of the family. Stephan uses the journals and correspondence of evangelical women from across the South to understand the interconnectedness of women's personal, family, and public piety. Rather than seeing evangelical women as entirely oppressed or resigned to the limits of their position in a patriarchal slave society, Stephan seeks to capture a sense of what agency was available to women through their moral authority.

Covering everything from the arts to food and drink, religion, social customs, and technology, this two-volume set provides an in-depth, accessible look at the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of the American Civil War. The American Civil War caused dramatic changes in every aspect of life and society, affecting combatants and noncombatants at all levels of the socioeconomic scale. The World of the Civil War: A Daily Life Encyclopedia offers an accessible and reliable reference for the major topics that defined American life during the nation's most tumultuous era. Taking a blended approach to history, this book covers the military and political history of the era and examines the social and human experiences of the war, thereby offering a comprehensive look at the Civil War era's most significant events, people, places, and experiences. The thematic organization of this encyclopedia helps readers to more readily explore related topics. The subject matter explored in some 250 entries includes religious beliefs and practices; rites of passage; soldiers' lives and experiences; rural and urban life; social structure of the Civil War era—aristocrats, landowners, and slaves; men's and women's roles and responsibilities; holidays, festivals, and other celebrations; tools, machinery, and inventions; and justice and punishment. Readers will come away with an understanding of many aspects of daily life during the Civil War era and gain appreciation for the vast differences between life today and 150 years ago.

Among the pressing concerns of Americans in the first century of nationhood were day-to-day survival, political harmony, exploration of the continent, foreign policy, and--fixed deeply in the collective consciousness--hell and eternal damnation. The fear of fire and brimstone and the worm that never dies exerted a profound and lasting influence on Americans' ideas about themselves, their neighbors, and the rest of the world. Kathryn Gin Lum poses a number of vital questions: Why did the fear of hell survive Enlightenment critiques in America, after largely subsiding in Europe and elsewhere? What were the consequences for early and antebellum Americans of living with the fear of seeing themselves and many people they knew eternally damned? How did they live under the weighty obligation to save as many souls as possible? What about those who rejected this sense of obligation and fear? Gin Lum shows that beneath early Americans' vaunted millennial optimism lurked a pervasive anxiety: that rather than being favored by God, they and their nation might be the object of divine wrath. As time-honored social hierarchies crumbled before revival fire, economic unease, and political chaos, "saved" and "damned" became as crucial distinctions as race, class, and gender. The threat of damnation became an impetus for or deterrent from all kinds of behaviors, from reading novels to owning slaves. Gin Lum tracks the idea of hell from the Revolution to Reconstruction. She considers the ideas of theological leaders like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney, as well as those of ordinary women and men. She discusses the views of Native Americans, Americans of European and African descent, residents of Northern insane asylums and Southern plantations, New England's clergy and missionaries overseas, and even proponents of Swedenborgianism and annihilationism. Damned Nation offers a captivating account of an idea that played a transformative role in America's intellectual and cultural history.

How did white Southerners in the nineteenth century reconcile a Christian faith that instructed them to turn the other cheek with a pervasive code of honor that instructed them to do just the opposite—to demand satisfaction for perceived insults? In Edgefield, South Carolina, in the 1830s, white Southerners combined these seemingly antithetical ideals to forge a new compound: a wrathful moral ethic of righteous honor. Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies investigates the formation and proliferation of this white supremacist ideology that merged masculine bellicosity with religious devotion. In 1856, when Edgefield native Preston Smith Brooks viciously beat the abolitionist Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, the ideology of righteous honor reached its apogee and took national center stage. Welborn analyzes the birth of this peculiar moral ethic in Edgefield and traces its increasing dominance across the American South in the buildup to the Civil War, as white Southerners sought to cloak a war fought in defense of slavery in the language of honor and Christian piety.

Together, and separately, black and white Baptists created different but intertwined cultures that profoundly shaped the South. Adopting a biracial and bicultural focus, Paul Harvey works to redefine southern religious history, and by extension southern c

Explore the beauty, tradition, and stylish renovation of rustic mountain homes across the Southern Appalachians in this gorgeously photographed book. The cool, wooded mountains of the South are dotted with log cabins, each with its own rich history and aesthetic charm. In The Southern Rustic Cabin, photographer Emily Followill captures the rugged beauty and unique personality of thirteen mountain homes located across Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia. The homeowners have lovingly preserved the age-old qualities of their cabins while renovating, revitalizing, and redecorating them to support modern living and reflect their personal style. Alongside her stunning photography of interiors and exteriors, Followill tells the story of how each cabin and owner came together; as the owners changed their cabins, the cabins invariably changed the owners as well.

Lucid, authoritative overview of a major movement in American history The history of American evangelicalism is perhaps best understood by examining its turning points—those moments when it took on a new scope, challenge, or influence. The Great Awakening, the rise of fundamentalism and Pentecostalism, the emergence of Billy Graham—all these developments and many more have given shape to one of the most dynamic movements in American religious history. Taken together, these turning points serve as a clear and helpful roadmap for understanding how evangelicalism has become what it is today. Each chapter in this book has been written by one of the world's top experts in American religious history, and together they form a single narrative of evangelicalism's remarkable development. Here is an engaging, balanced, coherent history of American evangelicalism from its origins as a small movement to its status as a central player in the American religious story. Contributors & Topics Harry S. Stout on the Great Awakening Catherine A. Brekus on the evangelical encounter with the Enlightenment Jon Butler on disestablishment Richard Carwardine on antebellum reform Marguerite Van Die on the rise of the domestic ideal Luke E. Harlow on the Civil War and conservative American evangelicalism George M. Marsden on the rise of fundamentalism Edith Blumhofer on urban Pentecostalism Dennis C. Dickerson on the Great Migration Mark Hutchinson on the global turn in American evangelicalism Grant Wacker on Billy Graham's 1949 Los Angeles revival Darren Dochuk on American evangelicalism's Latin turn