Drawing upon the religious writings of southern evangelicals, John Boles asserts that the extraordinary crowds and miraculous transformations that distinguished the South's First Great Awakening were not simply instances of emotional excess but the expression of widespread and complex attitudes toward God. Converted southerners were starkly individualistic, interested more in gaining personal salvation in a hopelessly evil world than in improving society. As Boles shows in this landmark study, the effect of the Revival was to throw over the region a conservative cast that remains dominant in contemporary southern thought and life.

Rot and Revival is one of the first scholarly works to comprehensively theorize and document how politics make American constitutional law and how the courts affect the path of partisan politics. Rejecting the idea that the Constitution's significance and interpretation can be divorced from contemporary political realities, Anthony Michael Kreis explains how American constitutional law reflects the ideological commitments of dominant political coalitions, the consequences of major public policy choices, and the influences of intervening social movements. Drawing on rich historical research and political science methodologies, Kreis convincingly demonstrates that the courts have never been—and cannot be—institutions lying outside the currents of national politics.

In this book, James Lewis demonstrates the centrality of American ideas about and concern for the union of the states in the policymaking of the early republic. For four decades after the nation's founding in the 1780s, he says, this focus on securing a union operated to blur the line between foreign policies and domestic concerns. Such leading policymakers as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay worried about the challenges to the goals of the Revolution that would arise from a hostile neighborhood--whether composed of new nations outside the union or the existing states following a division of the union. At the center of Lewis's story is the American response to the dissolution of Spain's empire in the New World, from the transfer of Louisiana to France in 1800 to the independence of Spain's mainland colonies in the 1820s. The breakup of the Spanish empire, he argues, presented a series of crises for the unionist logic of American policymakers, leading them, finally, to abandon a crucial element of the distinctly American approach to international relations embodied in their own federal union.