Harry S. Stout - Böcker

Universally recognized as a seminal figure in American intellectual history, Jonathan Edwards has been the focus of considerable scholarly attention in a variety of academic disciplines, including religion, history, literature, and philosophy. Because these disciplines discuss him in relation to different intellectual traditions, Edwards scholarship remains segmented. This volume represents the first attempt to provide a synthetic vision of Edwards and his contributions to American culture. Its fifteen previously unpublished essays present the best contemporary literary, historical, theological, and philosophical thinking on Edwards, locating him in his full historical context and demonstrating the continuity of his influence. Together, they provide the fullest account to date of his role in the development of the American consciousness. This volume is the first attempt to provide a synthetic vision of Edwards and his contribution to the development of the American consciousness. Fifteen previously unpublished essays present the best contemporary literary, historical, theological, and philosophical thinking on Edwards, locating him in his full historical context and demonstrating the continuity of his influence.

This is an interdisciplinary collection of comparative essays which look at aspects of the thought of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin and consider the place of these two men in American culture. The essays have their origin in a conference held at Yale University, the home of the modern editions of the papers of both these 18th century American thinkers.Franklin and Edwards are probably the two most studied colonial figures and have often been the subject of comparative exercises. In such studies, they have often been treated as having the characteristics of mutually exclusive ideal types and set into categories as different and opposed as `traditional' and `modern.' In the present volume, however, polemical contrasts disappear and Edwards and Franklin emerge as contrapuntal themes in a larger unity.

Offering a rich selection of classic and recent scholarship, this reader presents an extraordinary portrait of religion's fate across four centuries of the American experience. Its essays cover major issues in American history and religion, including American Indian religion, women, Catholics, Protestants and fundamentalism, Judaism, political activism, Mormons, religious assimilation, and religious bigotry. Selected debates encourage readers to test conflicting interpretations about religion's impact on American history, and original documents trace religion's influence on slavery, race, and politics from the colonial era to the late 20th century. Religion in American History serves as a one-volume tour through America's tumultuous, varied, and often misunderstood religious past.

The eighteen essays collected in this book originate from a conference of the same title, held at the Wingspread Conference Center in October of 1993. Leading scholars were invited to reflect on their specialties in American religious history in ways that summarized both where the field is and where it ought to move in the decades to come. The essays are organized according to four general themes: places and regions, universal themes, transformativeevents, and marginal groups and ethnocultural "outsiders." They address a wide range of specific topics including Puritanism, Protestantism and economic behavior, gender and sexuality in AmericanProtestantism, and the twentieth-century de-Christianization of American public culture. Among the contributors are such distinguished scholars as David D. Hall, Donald G. Matthews, Allen C. Guelzo, Gordon S. Wood, Daniel Walker Howe, Robert Wuthnow, Jon Butler, David A. Hollinger, Harry S. Stout, and John Higham. Taken together, these essays reveal a rapidly expanding field of study that is breaking out of its traditional confines and spilling into all of American history. The booktakes the measure of the changes of the last quarter-century and charts numerous challenges to future work.

The sixteen essays in this volume, all previously unpublished, address the little considered question of the role played by religion in the American Civil War. The authors show that religion, understood in its broadest context, as a culture and community of faith, was found wherever the war was found. Comprising essays by such scholars as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Drew Galpin Faust, Mark Noll, Reid Mitchell, Harry Stout, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and featuring an Afterword by James McPherson, this collection marks the first step towards uncovering this crucial yet neglected aspect of American history.

The sixteen essays in this volume, all previously unpublished, address the little considered question of the role played by religion in the American Civil War. The authors show that religion, understood in its broadest context as a culture and community of faith, was found wherever the war was found. Comprising essays by such scholars as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Drew Galpin Faust, Mark Noll, Reid Mitchell, Harry Stout, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and featuring an afterword by James McPherson, this collection marks the first step towards uncovering this crucial yet neglected aspect of American history.

The common view of the nineteenth-century pastoral relationship--found in both contemporary popular accounts and 20th-century scholarship--was that women and clergymen formed a natural alliance and enjoyed a particular influence over each other. In Without Benefit of Clergy, Karin Gedge tests this thesis by examining the pastoral relationship from the perspective of the minister, the female parishioner, and the larger culture. The question that troubled religious women seeking counsel, says Gedge, was: would their minister respect them, help them, honor them? Surprisingly, she finds, the answer was frequently negative. Gedge supports her conclusion with evidence from a wide range of previously untapped primary sources including pastoral manuals, seminary students' and pastors' journals, women's diaries and letters, pamphlets, sentimental and sensational novels, and The Scarlet Letter.

"Both the sources he employs and the scope of his study set his work apart from all that have precede it...The first study of New England preaching to span the entire colonial period...very important book."- Journal of American History"Simply breathtaking in scope. No one else has dared to grapple with the full sweep of Puritan preaching form the founding of New England through the American Revolution."- Nathan O. Hatch, University of Notre Dame"A massive achievement will stand as the definitive work on this important subject."- Reviews in American History"Impressive, imaginative, sensible, and lucid."- Donald G. Matthews, University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill"[Stout] has created a field of scholarship hitherto neglected - the manuscript sermon as a source of religious culture in colonial times. More than that, he has shown the extent to which sermon notes add to our knowledge of the times, notably for the period of the Great Awakening. And he has done so with great insight."- New England Quarterly"So soundly based on exhaustive research and so lucid in presentation, that even its most surprising conclusions carry conviction. An impressive achievement."- Daniel Walker Howe, author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848"One of the most impressive studies of Puritan New England society to appear in this century....Throughout the work, Stout enriches, supplements and revises much of the current knowledge about colonial New England. His language, which is both precise and playful, makes the volume a delight to read."-The Historian "Will surely become a benchmark in the study of early American history and culture."-Journal of the American Academy of Religion

The story of an ambitious family at the forefront of the great middle-class land grab that shaped early American capitalismAmerican Aristocrats is a multigenerational biography of the Andersons of Kentucky, a family of strivers who passionately believed in the promise of America. Beginning in 1773 with the family patriarch, a twice-wounded Revolutionary War hero, the Andersons amassed land throughout what was then the American west. As the eminent religious historian Harry S. Stout argues, the story of the Andersons is the story of America's experiment in republican capitalism. Congressmen, diplomats, and military generals, the Andersons enthusiastically embraced the emerging American gospel of land speculation. In the process, they became apologists for slavery and Indian removal, and worried anxiously that the volatility of the market might lead them to ruin.Drawing on a vast store of Anderson family records, Stout reconstructs their journey to great wealth as they rode out the cataclysms of their time, from financial panics to the Civil War and beyond. Through the Andersons we see how the lure of wealth shaped American capitalism and the nation's continental aspirations.

The year 2003 marked the tercentenary of the birth of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), the man perpetually hailed as "America's most original religious thinker." Edwards's impact, both on colonial religious life and on the Anglo-American world of his day, was internationally acknowledged, and his legacy for the century and a half and more after his death in 1758 has been profound. Even to this day, Edwards's life is studied and his writings consulted on a global basis more than any other American theologian. The most significant scholarly conference marking the Edwards tercentenary took place in October 2003 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The papers from that gathering are presented in this volume. They represent much of the best and most recent work being done on Edwards and reflect the wide diversity of approaches to his life, thought, and legacy.