PhD Reading List for "American Religious History"

Submitted to Professor Mark Stoll
Texas Tech University, October 3, 2014

So here it is, my reading list for the field of American Religious History. Occasionally, I've included a hyperlink to something I've posted about that particular title. As time goes on, I will add to the number of titles that have a link. I just have to come up with more blog posts about these books and articles. In putting this together, I spent a lot of time looking at what other people had done, coming up with categories that made sense to me, and, of course, selecting the books and placing them where they are. Since I won't be taking my comprehensive exams anytime soon, the list isn't set in stone. But I'm sure this is pretty close to what I'll be tested over when the time comes.

Background, Surveys, Historiography (14)

Ansary, Tamim. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes (2009)

Butler, Jon, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer. Religion in American Life: A Short History (2nd ed., 2011)

Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990)

__________. "Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History," Journal of American History (2004)

Hatch, Nathan O. and Mark A. Noll, editors. The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (1982)

Holifield, E. Brooks. Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (2003)

Hughes, Richard T., and C. Leonard Allen. Illusions of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America, 1630-1875 (1988)

Hutchison, William R. Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (2003)

May, Henry F. "The Recovery of American Religious History,” American Historical Review (1964)

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2005)

O'Malley, John W. Four Cultures of the West (2004)

Stendahl, Krister. "Paul and the Introspective Consciousness of the West," Harvard Theological Review 56 (1963): 199-215.

Stoll, Mark R. Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (2015)

Wilson, John F. Religion and the American Nation: Historiography and History (2003)

Religion in the British American Colonies, 1620-1775 (19)

Benedict, Philip. Christ's Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (2002)

Bonomi, Patricia. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (1986)

Bozeman, T. Dwight. To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (1988)

Butler, Jon. "Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction," Journal of American History (1982)

Foster, Stephen. The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700 (1991)

Griffin, Patrick. The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689-1764 (2001)

Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989)

__________. A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (2011)

Knight, Janice. Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (1994)

Lambert, Frank. Inventing the “Great Awakening" (1999)

McGiffert, Michael, "American Puritan Studies in the 1960s," William and Mary Quarterly (1970)

McMillon, Lynn A. Restoration Roots: The Scottish Origins of the American Restoration Movement (1983)

Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness (1956)

Morgan, Edmund. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (1963)

__________. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, 3rd ed. (2006)

Pestana, Carla Gardina. Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (2009)

Valeri, Mark. Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (2010)

Westerkamp, Marilyn J. Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625-1760 (1988)

Winship, Michael. Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (2002)

Revolutionary Era (7)

Kidd, Thomas S. God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (2010)

Lambert, Frank. The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (2003)

May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America (1976)

Miller, Perry. "From the Covenant to the Revival" in Nature's Nation (1967)

Porterfield, Amanda. Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (2012)

Smith, John Howard. The Perfect Rule of the Christian Religion: Sandemanianism in the Eighteenth Century (2008)

Wright, Conrad. The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (1955)

Second Great Awakening (9)

Boles, John B. The Great Revival, 1787-1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind (1972)

Conkin, Paul. Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost (1990)

Cross, Whitney R. The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (1981)

Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity (1989)

Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (1978, 2004)

Lyerly, Cynthia Lynn. Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810 (1998)

Mathews, Donald G. "The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780-1830: An Hypothesis," American Quarterly (1969)

Miller, Perry. "From the Covenant to the Revival" in Nature's Nation (1967)

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism (2nd ed., 2001)

Nineteenth Century Religion including the Civil War (13)

Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005)

Frei, Hans W. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (1974)

Gordon, Sarah Barringer. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (2002)

Hughes, Richard. Reviving the Ancient Faith: A History of Churches of Christ (1996)

Johnson, Paul E. and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America (2nd ed., 2012)

Lee, Michael J. The Erosion of Biblical Certainty: Battles over Authority and Interpretation in America (2013)

McGarry, Molly. Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (2008)

Makdisi, Ussama. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (2008)

Mason, Patrick. The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (2011)

Noll, Mark. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006)

Rable, George C. God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (2010)

Walters, Ronald G. American Reformers, 1815-1860 (1978)

Wigger, John. American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (2009)

Woodall, Jonathan Franklin. "The Post-Termination Rhetoric of the American Restoration Movment." PhD diss., University of Memphis (2014)

Religion in the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and Beyond (11)

Carter, Paul Allen. The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (1971)

Flake, Kathleen. The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (2004)

Hutchison, William R. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (1992)

Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997)

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd ed. (2006)

May, Henry F. Protestant Churches and Industrial America (1949)

Evans, Christopher H. The Kingdom Is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch (2004)

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. “The Commercialization of the Calendar: American Holidays and the Culture of Consumption, 1870-1930,” Journal of American History (1991)

Sutton, Matthew Avery. Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (2007)

Wacker, Grant. Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (2003)

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, (1980, 2009)

Religion in Post-World War II America (13)

Balmer, Randall. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. Twenty-fifth Anniversary edition. (2014)

Dochuk, Darren. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (2011)

Eck, Diana L. A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Become the World's Most Religiously-Diverse Nation (2001)

Flippen, J. Brooks. Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right (2011)

Herzog, Jonathan P. The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (2011)

Lawrence, Bruce B. New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life (2004)

Marsden, George M. The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (2014)

Mathisen, James A. "Reviving 'Muscular Christianity': Gil Dodds and the Institutionalization of Sport Evangelism," Sociological Focus (1990)

Miller, Steven P. The Age of Evangelicalism: America's Born-Again Years (2014)

Oppenheimer, Mark. Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (2003)

Turner, John G., Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (2008)

Worthen, Molly. Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (2014)

Wuthnow, Robert. After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (New ed., 1988)

African-Americans and Religion (7)

Callahan, Allan D. The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible (2008)

Chappell, David L. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (2004)

Daulatzai, Sohail. Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (2012)

Frey, Sylvia R. and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (1998)

Haley, Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Raboteau, Albert. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (updated ed., 2004)

Richards, Phillip. "The 'Joseph Story' as Slave Narrative: On Genesis and Exodus as Prototypes for Early Black Anglophone Writing," in African Americans and the Bible (2000)

Judaism and American History (5)

Adler, Selig. "The United States and the Holocaust." American Jewish Historical Quarterly 64 (September 1974): 14-23.

Berman, Lila Corwin. Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (2009)

Diner, Haisa R. The Jews of the United States, 1654-2000 (2004)

Sarna, Jonathan. American Judaism: A History (2004)

Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (1984)

Native Americans and Religion (4)

Fisher, Linford D. The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (2012)

Greer, Allan. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (2004)

Salisbury, Neal. Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (1982)

Smoak, Gregory Ellis. Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (2008)

Roman Catholicism and American History (4)

McGreevey. John T. Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (2003)

Orsi, Robert A. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (3rd ed., 2010)

Orsi, Robert A. Thank you, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (1996)

O'Toole, James M. The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America (2008)

Women and American Religion (6)

Braude, Ann. "Women's History Is American Religious History," in Retelling U.S. Religious History (1997)

Brekus, Catherine A. The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past (2007)

Koehler, Lyle. A Search for Power: The "Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth-Century New England (1980)

Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (1993)

Tolley, Kim. Heading South to Teach: The World of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815-1845 (2015)

Welter, Barbara. "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860" American Quarterly (1966)