This engrossing book traces the social history of Protestant Sunday schools from their origins in the 1790s--when they taught literacy to poor working children--to their consolidation in the 1870s, when they had become the primary source of new church members for the major Protestant denominations. Anne M. Boylan describes not only the schools themselves but also their place within a national network of evangelical institutions, their complementary relationship to local common schools, and their connection with the changing history of youth and women in the nineteenth century. Her book is a signal contribution to our understanding of American religious and social history, education history, women's history, and the history of childhood.

Novels like Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown have raised the awareness of people of all denominations to the possibility that there is much more to those quaint Bible stories than we might have been led to believe. In this book Ian Vayro has given us the facts in a way that is impossible to dispute. Ian is trained in Archaeology and Ancient History and he has spent a lifetime studying Theology. Book jacket.