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This book draws on the life of Presbyterian minister and diarist Archibald Simpson (17341795) to examine the history of evangelical Protestantism in South Carolina and the British Atlantic during the last half of the eighteenth century. Although he grew up in the evangelical heartland of Scotland in the wake of the great mid-century revivals, Simpson spurned revivalism and devoted himself instead to the grinding work of the parish ministry. At age nineteen he immigrated to South Carolina, where he spent the next eighteen years serving slaveholding Reformed congregations in the lowcountry plantation district. Here powerful planters held sway over slaves, families, churches, and communities, and Simpson was constantly embattled as he sought to impose an evangelical order on his parishes. In refusing to put the gospel in the pockets of planters who scorned itand who were accustomed to controlling their parish churcheshe earned their enmity. As a result, every relationship was freighted with deceit and danger, and every practicesermons, funerals, baptisms, pastoral visits, death narratives, sickness, courtship, friendship, domestic concernswas contested and politicized. In this context, the cause of the gospel made little headway in Simpson's corner of the world. Despite the great midcentury revivals, the steady stream of religious dissenters who poured into the province, and all the noise they made about slave conversions, Simpson's story suggests that there was no evangelical movement in colonial South Carolina, just a tired and frustrating evangelical slog.

This study examines the transformation of American Methodist camp meeting revivalism from the Gilded Age through the twenty-first century. It analyzes middle-class Protestants as they struggled with economic and social change, industrialization, moral leisure, theological controversies, and radically changing city life and landscape.

This study examines the nature of public involvement in American diplomacy over the past one hundred years. The author provides a political-religious history of the Council on Foreign Relations and of Francis and Helen Miller to explain the foreign policy of the United States today.

This book looks at the interaction of slavery, religion, and race in antebellum Missouri and how they influenced and shaped each other. The author argues that for African Americans, religion was an arena where they sought control over their own lives and where they created their own form of Christianity.