To early Americans the Old Testament and its scenes, even its speech and names, were as familiar as their own backyard
The foremost student of a belief held by nearly half of all Americans traces its history from Darwin’s bombshell through the storms of the Scopes trial to today’s “scientific creationists”—who find William Jennings Bryan too liberal
A chance meeting in a raucous hotel lobby nearly one hundred years ago led two drummers to make a spiritual mark on hostelries worldwide
He was a capitalist. He was an urban reformer. He was a country boy. He was “Comrade Jesus,” a hardworking socialist. He was the world’s first ad man. For a century and a half, novelists have been trying to recapture the “real” Jesus.
No city has more energetically obliterated the remnants of its past. And yet no city has a greater sense of its history.
In early Georgia, the founders of Methodism got off to a terrible start
In the shadow of Bunker Hill, bigots perpetrated an atrocity that showed a shocked nation that the fires of the Reformation still burned in the New World
He could build castles at his whim, but the ancient home of a small band of monks defeated him
To mark the birthdays of our two great Presidents, a new look at the legends that surround their memory …
An admiring re-appraisal of the Cherry Tree Fable and its author, by Garry Wills , together with the
Curious Story of Abraham Lincoln’s Lost Love Letters, by Don E. Fehrenbacher
In founding Groton, Endicott Peabody was sure that muscular Christianity would protect
boys from the perils of loaferism
The Shakers as a Nineteenth-Century Tourist Attraction
Unschooled and uncompromising, she founded her own faith
Maligned and misunderstood throughout much of their history, the Penitentes of the American Southwest have nevertheless given their people a sense of community and spiritual security. But for how much longer?
The quietly compelling legend of America’s gentlest pioneer
The mysterious diseases that nearly wiped out the Indians of New England were the work of the Christian God — or so both Pilgrims and Indians believed.
From Poverty and Persecution to Prosperity and Power
“Your body is a temple,” our ancestors told their pubescent youngsters. ‘Now go take a cold bath”
Anthony Comstock spent a lifetime on a crusade to clean the nation’ Augean stables of smut, vice, and nudity. Sometimes it seems as if he pried in vain
Three Centuries of Divorce, American Style
THE EARNEST QUAKER JOHN WOOLMAN PREACHED AND ACTUALLY PRACTICED THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN
Shocking, exuberant, exalted, the camp meeting answered the pioneers' demand for religion and helped shape the character of the West.