Much that is commonly accepted about slavery and religion in the Old South is challenged in this significant book. The eight essays included here show that throughout the antebellum period, southern whites and blacks worshipped together, heard the same sermons, took communion and were baptized together, were subject to the same church discipline, and were buried in the same cemeteries. What was the black perception of white-controlled religious ceremonies? How did whites reconcile their faith with their racism? Why did freedmen, as soon as possible after the Civil War, withdraw from the biracial churches and establish black denominations? This book is essential reading for historians of religion, the South, and the Afro-American experience.

In this enlightening study, Clarence L. Mohr follows the demise of chattel slavery in one state of the Confederate South. Like the slavery regime itself, Mohr’s story is biracial in character, embracing the perspectives of both blacks and whites as they struggled to comprehend the approach of black freedom within a framework of attitudes and assumptions shaped by decades of mutual exposure to Georgia’s peculiar institution. By exploring in detail the changing patterns of black-white interaction that preceded legal emancipation in 1865, On the Threshold of Freedom defines central tendencies within Georgia slavery and suggests important links between antebellum life and the events of early Reconstruction.

Issue for 1909 includes the annual report of the American Baptist Missionary Union; for 1909-40 include the annual reports of the American Baptist Home Mission Society and the American Baptist Publication Society; for 1910-40 of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society and the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society; for 1912-40 of the American Baptist Historical Society; for 1914-40 of the Woman's Baptist Foreign Missionary Society and the Woman's Baptist Foreign Missionary Society of the West, which merged in 1915 to form the Woman's American Baptist Foreign Mission Society.