"Critical essay on the sources of information": pages 238-248.

This new edition expands and updates the only general interpretation of the rise and influence of perfectionist revivalism in America and Europe. Fifteen years of expanding research on the holiness movement reinforce this volume's continuing seminal value to cultural and social research. The new concluding essay describes the history of the revival through the turn of the century. This book expands our understanding of the fragmentation and coalescence of American religion by analyzing the factors which created numerous new holiness denominations. Dieter also outlines the historical and theological factors that separate this largely Wesleyan and Methodist wing of evangelicalism from the fundamentalism of Reformed evangelicals. The identification of such nuances will prove especially helpful to those struggling with the extreme diversity in American religion, especially in evangelicalism. For students and scholars of American religious movements as well as students of the feminist, temperance, abolitionist, and populist movements in American society.

The history of Christianity in America has been marked by recurring periods of religious revivals or awakenings. In this book, George M. Thomas addresses the economic and political context of evangelical revivalism and its historical linkages with economic expansion and Republicanism in the nineteenth century. Thomas argues that large-scale change results in social movements that articulate new organizations and definitions of individual, society, authority, and cosmos. Drawing on religious newspapers, party policies and agendas, and quantitative analyses of voting patterns and census data, he claims that revivalism in this period framed the rules and identities of the expanding market economy and the national policy. "Subtle and complex. . . . Fascinating."—Randolph Roth, Pennsylvania History "[Revivalism and Cultural Change] should be read with interest by those interested in religious movements as well as the connections among religion, economics, and politics."—Charles L. Harper, Contemporary Sociology "Readers old and new stand to gain much from Thomas's sophisticated study of the macrosociology of religion in the United States during the nineteenth century. . . . He has given the sociology of religion its best quantitative study of revivalism since the close of the 1970s."—Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

In this look at Americans and their politics, the authors argue for a more complex understanding of the space occupied by politics in 19th-century American society and culture.

In Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, McLoughlin draws on psychohistory, sociology, and anthropology to examine the relationship between America's five great religious awakenings and their influence on five great movements for social reform in the United States. He finds that awakenings (and the revivals that are part of them) are periods of revitalization born in times of cultural stress and eventuating in drastic social reform. Awakenings are thus the means by which a people or nation creates and sustains its identity in a changing world. "This book is sensitive, thought-provoking and stimulating. It is 'must' reading for those interested in awakenings, and even though some may not revise their views as a result of McLoughlin's suggestive outline, none can remain unmoved by the insights he has provided on the subject."—Christian Century "This is one of the best books I have read all year. Professor McLoughlin has again given us a profound analysis of our culture in the midst of revivalistic trends."—Review and Expositor

One of the most enduring images from the early years of American history is that of a preacher on horseback, slogging through mud and rain to bring folks in the backwoods the message of God and glory. Such religious revivals not only became the defining mark of American religion but also played a central role in the nation's developing identity, independence, and democratic principles. But revivalism has always generated opposition, too, even in its century of glory. In Anti-Revivalism in Antebellum America, James D. Bratt offers extensive introductions to primary anti-revivalist documents. These works range from the Philadelphia Methodist John F. Watson's protests against camp meetings in 1819, to Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "Eighty Years and More," written in 1898, in which she recalls her youthful encounter with revival preaching and her rebound into political activism and religious agnosticism. Through the recovered voices of antebellum religious critics, Bratt shows how American culture was already being reshaped a generation before the Civil War and how evangelical religion stood at the center of a "culture war." If revivals typified the era when Americans launched and defined their new nation, then objections to these revivals embodied the growing discontent at what the nation had become. An important and long overdue collection, this book urges an understanding of anti-revival literature both in the context of the era when it emerged as well as in terms of the broader dynamic of American life. Includes selections from Orestes Brownson, Horace Bushnell, Calvin Colton, Orville Dewey, Albert Baldwin Dod, George Elley, Charles G. Finney, John Williamson Nevin, Stephen Olin, Phoebe Palmer, Daniel Alexander Payne, Ephraim Perkins, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Joseph Smith, Harriet Beecher Stowe, La Roy Sunderland, John Fanning Watson, Ellen G. White, and Friedrich C. D. Wyneken.