Bibliography of American Religious History

Compiled by Mark Stoll

For an excellent overview of important books in American religious history, see Catherine Albanese's American Religious History: A Historiographical Essay, available online as a pdf file.

Index

 

General

Albanese, Catherine L. Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Albanese, Catherine L. A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Appelbaum, Patricia Faith. St. Francis of America: How a Thirteenth-Century Friar Became America's Most Popular Saint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Balmer, Randall Herbert. Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022.

Bowler, Kate. Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Cox, Robert S. Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.

DelFattore, Joan. The Fourth R: Conflicts Over Religion in America's Public Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Ellis, Bill. Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004.

Fea, John. The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Fox, Richard Wightman. Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

Green, Steven K. The Bible, the School, and the Constitution: The Clash That Shaped Modern Church-State Doctrine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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

Hutchison, William R. Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Jenkins, Jack. American Prophets: The Religious Roots of Progressive Politics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of the Country. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

Jenkins, Philip. Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Meyer, Donald B. The Positive Thinkers: A Study of the American Quest for Health, Wealth and Personal Power from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 1965.

Moore, R. Laurence. Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Moore, R. Laurence. Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of Sacred and Secular in American History. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2003.

Morone, James A. Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Preston, Andrew. Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. New York: Knopf, 2012.

Prothero, Stephen. American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Village Atheists: How America's Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Stoll, Mark R. Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Thuesen, Peter Johannes. In Discordance With the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Thuesen, Peter Johannes. Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Thuesen, Peter Johannes. Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Tyrrell, Ian R. Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Wuthnow, Robert. Red State Religion: Faith and Politics in America's Heartland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Wuthnow, Robert. Rough Country: How Texas Became America's Most Powerful Bible-Belt State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Adventists

Baptists

Congregationalists

Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts. The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Episcopalians

Williams, Peter W. Religion, Art, and Money: Episcopalians and American Culture from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Jews

Ashton, Dianne. Hanukkah in America: A History. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

Ben-Ur, Aviva. Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Horowitz, Roger. Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Nadell, Pamela Susan. America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today. New York: Norton, 2020.

Lutherans

Methodists

Latter-day Saints (Mormons)

Gordon, Sarah Barringer. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Gutjahr, Paul C. The Book of Mormon: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Harline, Paula Kelly. The Polygamous Wives Writing Club: From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Pentecostals and Holiness

Stephens, Randall J. The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Roman Catholics

Cummings, Kathleen Sprows. A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Dolan, Jay P. In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Matovina, Timothy M. Guadalupe and Her Faithful: Latino Catholics in San Antonio, from Colonial Origins to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

McGreevy, John T. Catholicism and American Freedom: A History. New York: Norton, 2003.

Tentler, Leslie Woodcock. Catholics and Contraception: An American History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

 Quakers

 

Native Americans

Bross, Kristina. Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Fisher, Linford D. The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Graber, Jennifer. The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Jenkins, Philip. Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Jortner, Adam Joseph. The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Tarango, Angela. Choosing the Jesus Way: American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Wenger, Tisa Joy. We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

 

Puritans

Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Bozeman, Theodore Dwight. To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Bunker, Nick. Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

Cohen, Charles Lloyd. God's Caress. The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Cooper, James. Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Daniels, Bruce Colin. Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.

Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Hall, David D. A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

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

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958.

Morgan, Edmund S. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. New York: New York University Press, 1963.

Moyer, Paul Benjamin. Detestable and Wicked Arts: New England and Witchcraft in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2020.

Turner, John. They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.

Colonial Religion

Atwood, Craig D. Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

Bell, James B. The Imperial Origins of the King's Church in Early America, 1607–1783. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Brekus, Catherine A. Sarah Osborn's World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Farrelly, Maura Jane. Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Fogleman, Aaron Spencer. Jesus Is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Glasson, Travis. Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Murphy, Andrew R. William Penn: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Nelson, John K. A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Noll, Mark A. In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1989; 2nd ed., Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001.

Weddle, Meredith Baldwin. Walking in the Way of Peace: Quaker Pacifism in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Winner, Lauren F. A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

 

The Great Awakening

Gaustad, Edwin Scott. The Great Awakening in New England. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957.

Lambert, Frank. ”Pedlar in Divinity”: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Stout, Harry S. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991.

 

The Revolutionary Era and Early Republic

Andrews, Dee E. The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Bowers, J. D. Joseph Priestley and English Unitarianism in America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.

Carté, Katherine. Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Frazer, Gregg L. God against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy's Case against the American Revolution. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018.

Grasso, Christopher. Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Green, Steven K. Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Lambert, Frank. The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Mailer, Gideon. John Witherspoon’s American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

McBride, Spencer W. Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,  2017.

McLoughlin, William Gerald. New England Dissent, 1630-1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Miller, Nicholas Patrick. The Religious Roots of the First Amendment: Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Morrison, Jeffrey H.

Muñoz, Vincent Phillip. God and the Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

O’Donnell, Catherine. Elizabeth Seton: American Saint. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018.

Porterfield, Amanda. Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Ragosta, John A. Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia's Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Waldman, Steven. Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. New York: Random House, 2008.

 

The Second Great Awakening

Braude, Anne. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth Century America. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Cross, Whitney R. The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950.

Demos, John. The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic. New York: Vintage, 2014.

Haselby, Sam. The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Heyrman, Christine L. Southern Cross: The Beginning of the Bible Belt. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revival in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

Koester, Nancy. We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2023.

Numbers, Ronald L., and Jonathan M. Butler. The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Wigger, John H. Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Wigger, John H. American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Yacovazzi, Cassandra L. True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

 

Mormons

Blythe, Christopher James. Terrible Revolution: Latter-Day Saints and the American Apocalypse. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Fluhman, J. Spencer. A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Park, Benjamin E. Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. New York: Liveright, 2020.

Underwood, Grant. The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

 

Transcendentalism

 

Religion, Slavery, and the Civil War

Byrd, James P. A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Gerbner, Katharine. Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Harper, Matthew. The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Haynes, Stephen R. Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Jemison, Elizabeth L. Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Koester, Nancy. We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2023.

Moore, Joseph S. Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Noll, Mark A. The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Oshatz, Molly. Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Rable, George C. God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

 

Religion in the Nineteenth Century

Avery, Valeen Tippetts. From Mission to Madness: Last Son of the Mormon Prophet. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998.

Boyer, Paul. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Bressler, Ann Lee. The Universalist Movement in America, 1770–1880. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Conkin, Paul Keith. American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Carroll, Bret E. Spiritualism in Antebellum America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Carter, Paul A. The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971.

D’Agostino, Peter R. Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Evansen, Bruce J. God's Man for the Gilded Age: D. L. Moody and the Rise of Modern Mass Evangelism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Fogarty, Robert S. All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements,1860-1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Foster, Lawrence. Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984 (1981).

Gin Lum, Kathryn. Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Gjerde, Jon. Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Handy, Robert T. The Protestant Quest for a Christian America, 1830–1930. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967.

Kilde, Jeanne Halgren. When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Mason, Patrick Q. The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

McGarry, Molly. Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Noll, Mark A. America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Nord, David Paul. Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Pinheiro, John C. Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican American War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Rabin, Shari. Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press, 2017.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.

Schultz, Nancy Lusignan. Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834. New York: Free Press, 2000.

Smith, Frank. Robert G. Ingersoll: A Life. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1990.

Smith, Ryan K. Gothic Arches, Latin Crosses: Anti-Catholicism and American Church Designs in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Turner, James. Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

Walther, Karine V. Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Wright, Conrad Edick. American Unitarianism, 1805-1865. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989.

Young, Michael P. Bearing Witness against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

 

Religion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century and the Social Gospel

Burnidge, Cara Lea. A Peaceful Conquest: Woodrow Wilson, Religion, and the New World Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Burns, David. The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Butler, Anne M. Across God's Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Carter, Heath W. Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Cohen, Michael R. The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Compton, John W. The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Cummings, Kathleen Sprows. New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Crunden, Robert Morse. Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920. New York: Basic Books, 1982.

Davis, Morris L. The Methodist Unification: Christianity and the Politics of Race in the Jim Crow Era. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Ebel, Jonathan H. Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Evans, Christopher Hodge. The Kingdom Is Always but Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004.

Flake, Kathleen. The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Gloege, Timothy E. W. Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Hopkins, Charles Howard. The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925. Second ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

McCullough, Matthew. The Cross of War: Christian Nationalism and U.S. Expansion in the Spanish American War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.

McMullen, Josh. Under the Big Top: Big Tent Revivalism and American Culture, 1885–1925. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Danger on the Doorstep: Anti-Catholicism and American Print Culture in the Progressive Era. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.

Putney, Clifford. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Rieser, Andrew Chamberlin. The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Setran, David P. The College "Y": Student Religion in the Era of Secularization. New York: Palgrave, 2007.

Taiz, Lillian. Hallelujah Lads & Lasses: Remaking the Salvation Army in America, 1880–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Wetzel, Benjamin James. Theodore Roosevelt: Preaching from the Bully Pulpit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Woods, Thomas E. The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

 

Twentieth-Century Religion before World War II

Appelbaum, Patricia Faith. Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Blumhofer, Edith Waldvogel. Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody's Sister. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1993.

Butler, Jon. God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020.

Carter, Paul A. The Decline and Revival of the Social Gospel: Social and Political Liberalism in American Protestant Churches, 1920-1940. Hamden, Ct.: Archon Books, 1971.

Coffman, Elesha J. The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Dorsett, Lyle W. Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1991.

Hangen, Tona J. Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Hedstrom, Matthew S. The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Hutchison, William R. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Kosek, Joseph Kip. Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Lindvall, Terry. Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

Loughery, John, and Blythe Randolph. Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.

Meyer, Donald. The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919–1941. 2nd ed. Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

Neary, Timothy B. Crossing Parish Boundaries: Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago, 1914–1954. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Orsi, Robert. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Orsi, Robert A. Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Prothero, Stephen R. God the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time. New York: HarperCollins, 2023.

Romanowski, William D. Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Rosen, Christine. Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Ruotsila, Markku. The Origins of Christian Anti-Internationalism: Conservative Evangelicals and the League of Nations. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2008.

Smith, Erin A. What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Sutton, Matthew Avery. Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Sutton, Matthew Avery. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Wacker, Grant. Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

 

Religion since World War II

Badillo, David A. Latinos and the New Immigrant Church. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Barrett-Fox, Rebecca. God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2016.

Boyer, Paul S. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Burkee, James C. Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod: A Conflict That Changed American Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011.

Cajka, Peter. Follow Your Conscience: The Catholic Church and the Spirit of the Sixties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Carenen, Caitlin. The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants, Evangelicals, and Israel. New York: New York University Press, 2012.

Chidester, David. Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Revised Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003 (1988).

Clark, Victoria. Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

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

Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright, 2020.

Eskridge, Larry. God's Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Evans, Richard Kent. MOVE: An American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Finstuen, Andrew S. Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Flippen, J. Brooks. Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Green, Steven K. The Third Disestablishment: Church, State, and American Culture, 1940–1975. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Henold, Mary J. Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Henold, Mary J. The Laywoman Project: Remaking Catholic Womanhood in the Vatican II Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Herzog, Jonathan P. The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Kosek, Joseph Kip. Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

McAlister, Melani. The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

McAndrews, Lawrence J. What They Wished For: American Catholics and American Presidents, 1960-2004. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014.

Miller, Steven P. The Age of Evangelicalism: America's Born-Again Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Nabhan-Warren, Kristy. The Cursillo Movement in America: Catholics, Protestants, and Fourth-Day Spirituality. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Nabhan-Warren, Kristy. The Virgin of El Barrio: Marian Apparitions, Catholic Evangelizing, and Mexican American Activism. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

Peters, Shawn Francis. The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Pogue, Neall W. The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2022.

Settje, David E. Faith and War: How Christians Debated the Cold and Vietnam Wars. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Settje, David E. Evil Deeds in High Places : Christian America's Moral Struggle with Watergate. New York: New York University Press, 2020.

Sinitiere, Phillip Luke. Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Stephens, Randall J. The Devil's Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock 'n' Roll. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Sutton, Matthew Avery. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Turner, John G. Bill Bright & Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Wacker, Grant. America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

White, Heather Rachelle. Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Whitt, Jacqueline E. Bringing God to Men: American Military Chaplains and the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Wigger, John H. PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Evangelical Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Wuthnow, Robert. Rough Country: How Texas Became America's Most Powerful Bible-Belt State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

 

Business and Religion

Dochuk, Darren. Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 2019.

Grem, Darren E. The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Hudnut-Beumler, James. In Pursuit of the Almighty's Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Kruse, Kevin Michael. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

Moore, R. Laurence. Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Moreton, Bethany. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009.

 

Women

Braude, Anne. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth Century America. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Braude, Ann. Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Butler, Anthea D. Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Coburn, Carol K., and Martha Smith. Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Cummings, Kathleen Sprows. New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Devens, Carol. Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Harline, Paula Kelly. The Polygamous Wives Writing Club: From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Henold, Mary J. Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Hunter, Jane. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Johnson, Emily Suzanne. This Is Our Message: Women’s Leadership in the New Christian Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Lindley, Susan Hill. You Have Stept Out of Your Place: A History of Women and Religion in America. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996.

Nadell, Pamela S. Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination, 1889-1985. Boston: Beacon, 1998.

Nadell, Pamela Susan. America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today. New York: Norton, 2020.

 

African Americans

Best, Wallace D. Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Booker, Vaughn A. Lift Every Voice and Swing: Black Musicians and Religious Culture in the Jazz Century. New York: New York University Press, 2020.

Botham, Fay. Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, & American Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Butler, Anthea D. Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Callahan, Allen Dwight. The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Chappell, David L. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Clark, Emily Suzanne. A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Collier-Thomas, Bettye. Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion. New York: Knopf, 2010.   

Curtis, Edward E. Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960-1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Dew, Spencer. The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Dorman, Jacob S. Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Evans, Richard Kent. MOVE: An American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Felber, Garrett. Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Frey, Sylvia R., and Betty Wood. Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Johnson, Karen J. One in Christ: Chicago Catholics and the Quest for Interracial Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Newman, Richard S. Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Salvatore, Nick. Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America. New York: Little, Brown, 2005.

Savage, Barbara Dianne. Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Sernett, Milton C. Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Sobel, Mechal. Travelin' On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Thompson, H. Paul.

Weisenfeld, Judith. Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

 

Science and Religion

Artigas, Mariano, Thomas F. Glick, and Rafael A. Martínez. Negotiating Darwin: The Vatican Confronts Evolution, 1877-1902. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Bozeman, Theodore Dwight. Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Ante-bellum American Religious Thought. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977.

Hovenkamp, Herbert. Science and Religion in America, 1800-1860. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978.

Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Moore, James R. The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

 

Missions

Demos, John. The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic. New York: Vintage, 2014.

Strasburg, James D. God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Tyrrell, Ian R. Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Walther, Karine V. Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.


This page was last edited Friday, November 17, 2023.