While much of the world still faces restrictions on religion, America's unique approach brought about both religious freedom and spiritual vibrancy.
Divisions in society and religion that still exist today resulted from the "Great Awakenings" of the 18th Century
Thomas Jefferson took his scissors to the Bible in search of truth
Calling millions to repentance, Moody and Sankey devised a new method of spreading the gospel
A visit to two villages that still share the nineteenth century’s conviction that we can communicate with the dead
A century and a half ago two young girls started hearing noises they said came from beyond the grave—and embarked on a lifetime career that began a national obsession with spiritualism that has lasted to this day
Our ancestors look gravely and steadily upon things that we cannot
How Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture sent an eccentric Russian mystic on a sensitive mission to Asia and thereby created diplomatic havoc, personal humiliation, and embarrassment for the administration
Forget your conventional picture of America in 1810. In the first half of the nineteenth century, we were not at all the placid, straitlaced, white-picket-fence nation we imagine ourselves to have been. By looing at the patterns of everyday life as recorded by contemporary foreign and native observers of the young republic and by asking the questions that historians don't think to ask of another time—what were people really like? how did they greet one another in the street? how did they occupy their leisure time? what did they eat?—Jakc Larking brings us a portrait of another Americna, an America that was so different from both our conception of its past life and its present-day reality as to seem a foreign country.
He built a career and a fortune out of shocking his fellow Americans
Eight generations back, the author discovered a forebear hanging on the family tree
The Founding, Fathers never did agree about the proper relationship between church and state. No wonder the Supreme Court has been backing and filling on the principle ever since.
In early Georgia, the founders of Methodism got off to a terrible start
The largest Gothic cathedral in the Western Hemisphere has the strangest stained-glass windows in the world
Did the fifty-five statesmen meeting in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention know that a witch-hunt was taking place while they deliberated? Did they care?
In 1913 the Ouija board dictated a novel. Twenty years later it commanded a murder. It is most popular in times of national catastrophe, and it’s selling pretty briskly just now.
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
The Shakers as a Nineteenth-Century Tourist Attraction
Unschooled and uncompromising, she founded her own faith
The Brief, Sentimental Age of the Rural Cemetery
TRUSTING OURSELVES
From Poverty and Persecution to Prosperity and Power
The Sunday afternoon broadcasts of Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, once described as the "voice of God," were avidly followed by a radio audience of thirty to fifty million Americans during the Thirties.
Mrs. Piper and the Professors
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.