In 1758, a Quaker tailor and sometime shopkeeper and school teacher stood up in a Quaker meeting and declared that the time had come for Friends to reject the practice of slavery. That man was John Woolman, and that moment was a significant step, among many, toward the abolition of slavery in the United States. Woolman's antislavery position was only one essential piece of his comprehensive theological vision for colonial American society. Drawing on Woolman's entire body of writing, Jon R. Kershner reveals that the theological and spiritual underpinnings of Woolman's alternative vision for the British Atlantic world were nothing less than a direct, spiritual christocracy on earth, what Woolman referred to as "the Government of Christ." Kershner argues that Woolman's theology is best understood as apocalyptic-centered on a supernatural revelation of Christ's immediate presence governing all aspects of human affairs, and envisaging the impending victory of God's reign over apostasy. John Woolman and the Government of Christ explores the theological reasoning behind Woolman's critique of the burgeoning trans-Atlantic economy, slavery, and British imperial conflicts, and fundamentally reinterprets 18th-century Quakerism by demonstrating the continuing influence of early Quaker apocalypticism.

The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748-1783 offers a detailed history of the withdrawal of the Society of Friends from mainstream America in the years between 1748 and the end of the American Revolution. Jack D. Marietta examines the causes, course, and consequences, both social and political, of the Quakers' retreat from prominent positions in civil government while at the same time developing a more distinctive and "purified" religious community. These changes amounted to a watershed in the greater history of the Society of Friends, a turning away from its engagement with the world on behalf of a Whig political philosophy and toward a role as critic and gadfly on the periphery of political society. Less conspicuously but perhaps more dramatically, the internal transformation of the Society through the strengthening of the members' commitment to a host of Quaker sectarian values—among them exogamy, "guarded" childrearing, sexual continence, honesty, simplicity, humility, and asceticism—was enforced by the reformers' stern determination that members would either conform to these mores or face expulsion from the Society. These changes resulted in the revitalization of the society and made possible the Quakers' campaign against slavery, thus distinguishing them as the first group of people in history to espouse abolition. Marietta draws on a wealth of data: over 10,000 disciplinary cases in the Society's records dating from 1682. The author's description and evaluation of the role, status, and treatment of women in the Society is sympathetic, and what emerges from his interpretation is a sensitive portrayal not only of withdrawal but of the substitution of a vision different from the one that inspired the Holy Experiment.

With our American Philosophy and Religion series, Applewood reissues many primary sources published throughout American history. Through these books, scholars, interpreters, students, and non-academics alike can see the thoughts and beliefs of Americans who came before us.

Historians have long been aware that the encounter with Europeans affected all aspects of Native American life. But were Indians the only ones changed by these cross-cultural meetings? Might the newcomers' ways, including their religious beliefs and practices, have also been altered amid their myriad contacts with native peoples? In Encounters of the Spirit, Richard W. Pointer takes up these intriguing questions in an innovative study of the religious encounter between Indians and Euro-Americans in early America. Exploring a series of episodes across the three centuries of the colonial era and stretching from New Spain to New France and the English settlements, he finds that the flow of cultural influence was more often reciprocal than unidirectional.