LibGuides: HIS 403: History of Religion in the South: Books & eBooks

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Leland Speed Library uses the Dewey Decimal Classification System. The general collection is located in the basement of the library (or lower level).

You can search for books & multi-media using MICAL in the search box below.

For information about where books, DVDs, journals, etc., are located in the library, please see the Location Guide PDF linked below.

Speed Library Location Guide

The following Subject Headings can be used as a subject search for locating materials in the MC Library. These examples may be useful in your research, but this is not a comprehensive list. You may search by using the following parameters:

Topic:
Church history
Evangelical Revival
Topic and geographic region:
Southern States -- History -- Historiography
Southern States -- Church history
Protestant churches -- Southern States
Denomination or organization:
Baptist -- Mississippi
Southern Baptist Convention
Methodism
Methodist Church
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Denomination, geographic area, and/or time period:
Baptists -- History -- 20th century
Evangelicalism -- Mississippi -- History
Churches of Christ -- History
Presbyterian Church -- United States
United Methodist Church (U.S.) -- Mississippi

Suggested Books @ Speed Library

Ain't Gonna Lay My 'Ligion Down: African American religion in the South by Alonzo Johnson (Editor); Paul Jersild (Editor) This text examines how African Americans have created distinctive forms of religious expression. Contributors explore the degree to which newly imported slaves preserved their African spiritual heritage whilst meshing it with Western symbols and theological claims.
Call Number: 277.5 Ai66j
American Evangelical Christianity: an introduction by Mark A. Noll Mark Noll describes and interprets American Evangelical Christianity, utilising research by theologians, sociologists and political scientists, as well as the author's own historical interests, to explain the position Evangelicalism now occupies at the beginning of the new century.
Call Number: 277.3082 N72a
Baptists North and South by Samuel S. Hill, Jr., and Robert G. Torbet
Call Number: 286.173 H555b
Baptized in Blood: the religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 by Charles R. Wilson
Call Number: 277.5 W692b
The Church and Slavery by Albert Barnes
Call Number: Available online via Google Books
Come Shouting to Zion : African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 by Sylvia R. Frey; Betty Wood The conversion of African-born slaves and their descendants to Protestant Christianity marked one of the most important social and intellectual transformations in American history. Come Shouting to Zion is the first comprehensive exploration of the processes by which this remarkable transition occurred. Using an extraordinary array of archival sources, Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood chart the course of religious conversion from the transference of traditional African religions to the New World through the growth of Protestant Christianity in the American South and British Caribbean up to 1830. Come Shouting to Zion depicts religious transformation as a complex reciprocal movement involving black and white Christians. It highlights the role of African American preachers in the conversion process and demonstrates the extent to which African American women were responsible for developing distinctive ritual patterns of worship and divergent moral values within the black spiritual community. Finally, the book sheds light on the ways in which, by serving as a channel for the assimilation of Western culture into the slave quarters, Protestant Christianity helped transform Africans into African Americans.
Call Number: 277 F897c
A Consuming Fire: the fall of the Confederacy in the mind of the White Christian South by Eugene D. Genovese The fall of the Confederacy proved traumatic for a people who fought with the belief that God was on their side. Yet, as Eugene D. Genovese writes in A Consuming Fire, Southern Christians continued to trust in the Lord's will. The churches had long defended "southern rights" and insisted upon the divine sanction for slavery, but they also warned that God was testing His people, who must bring slavery up to biblical standards or face the wrath of an angry God. In the eyes of proslavery theorists, clerical and lay, social relations and material conditions affected the extent and pace of the spread of the Gospel and men's preparation to receive it. For proslavery spokesmen, "Christian slavery" offered the South, indeed the world, the best hope for the vital work of preparation for the Kingdom, but they acknowledged that, from a Christian point of view, the slavery practiced in the South left much to be desired. For them, the struggle to reform, or rather transform, social relations was nothing less than a struggle to justify the trust God placed in them when He sanctioned slavery. The reform campaign of prominent ministers and church laymen featured demands to secure slave marriages and family life, repeal the laws against slave literacy, and punish cruel masters. A Consuming Fire analyzes the strength, weakness, and failure of the struggle for reform and the nature and significance of southern Christian orthodoxy and its vision of a proper social order, class structure, and race relations.
Call Number: 261.8345 G288c
Encyclopedia of Religion in the South by Samuel S. Hill (Editor); Charles H. Lippy (Editor); Charles Reagan Wilson (Editor) The publication of the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South in 1984 signaled the rise in the scholarly interest in the study of Religion in the South. Religion has always been part of the cultural heritage of that region, but scholarly investigation had been sporadic. Since the original publication of the ERS, however, the South has changed significantly in that Christianity is no longer the primary religion observed. Other religions like Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism have begun to have very important voices in Southern life. This one-volume reference, the only one of its kind, takes this expansion into consideration by updating older relevant articles and by adding new ones. After more than 20 years, the only reference book in the field of the Religion in the South has been totally revised and updated. Each article has been updated and bibliography has been expanded. The ERS has also been expanded to include more than sixty new articles on Religion in the South. New articles have been added on such topics as Elvis Presley, Appalachian Music, Buddhism, Bill Clinton, Jerry Falwell, Fannie Lou Hamer, Zora Neale Hurston, Stonewall Jackson, Popular Religion, Pat Robertson, the PTL, Sports and Religion in the South, theme parks, and much more. This is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the South, religion, or cultural history.
Call Number: 277.5 En19 2005
Evangelicalism: comparative studies of popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and beyond 1700-1990 by Mark A. Noll (Editor); David W. Bebbington (Editor); George A. Rawlyk (Editor)
Call Number: 280.4 Ev14n
Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740-1861 by Robert M. Calhoon
Call Number: 277.5 C128e
A Fire in the Bones: reflections on African-American religious history by Albert J. Raboteau "A Fire in the Bones is more than a history of black Christians: it is the compelling story of the ways in which black folk have turned to Christianity to describe their history and plight in America and to project their vision of redemption to the greater nation . . . A must read." --Craig Steven Wilder, New York Newsday "A major contribution . . . Beautifully narrated." --Rembert Weakland, The New York Times Book Review
Call Number: 277.308 R113f
Freedom's Coming: religious culture and the shaping of the South from the Civil War through the civil rights era by Paul Harvey In a sweeping analysis of religion in the post-Civil War and twentieth-century South, Freedom's Coming puts race and culture at the center, describing southern Protestant cultures as both priestly and prophetic: as southern formal theology sanctified dominant political and social hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice subtly undermined them. The seeds of subversion, Paul Harvey argues, were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Harvey explains how black and white religious folk within and outside of mainstream religious groups formed a southern "evangelical counterculture" of Christian interracialism that challenged the theologically grounded racism pervasive among white southerners and ultimately helped to end Jim Crow in the South. Moving from the folk theology of segregation to the women who organized the Montgomery bus boycott, from the hymn-inspired freedom songs of the 1960s to the influence of black Pentecostal preachers on Elvis Presley, Harvey deploys cultural history in fresh and innovative ways and fills a decades-old need for a comprehensive history of Protestant religion and its relationship to the central question of race in the South for the postbellum and twentieth-century period.
Call Number: 277.5 H262f
The Gospel Working Up: progress and the pulpit in nineteenth century Virginia by Beth Barton Schweiger The Gospel Working Up offers a history of three generations of Baptist and Methodist clergymen in nineteenth-century Virginia, and through them of the congregations and communities in which they lived and worked. Schweiger examines the religious experience both before and after the Civil War, showing how Southern Protestantism became an instrument of spiritual, moral, material, and cultural progress.
Call Number: 277.5 Sch97g
The Great Revival: beginnings of the Bible belt by John B. Boles Drawing upon the religious writings of southern evangelicals, John Boles asserts that the extraordinary crowds and miraculous transformations that distinguished the South's First Great Awakening were not simply instances of emotional excess but the expression of widespread and complex attitudes toward God. Converted southerners were starkly individualistic, interested more in gaining personal salvation in a hopelessly evil world than in improving society. As Boles shows in this landmark study, the effect of the Revival was to throw over the region a conservative cast that remains dominant in contemporary southern thought and life.
Call Number: 269.2 B637g 1996
Handbook of Denominations in the United States by Frank S. Mead; Craig D. Atwood (Revised by); Samuel S. Hill (Revised by) Entries on major Christian denominations in the US give information on their historical background, their teachings, and their polity or structure of governance. Included are statistics on the number of churches and church members and information about church-related schools and institutions. There
Call Number: 280 M461h 2001 [Reference Room]
A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada by Mark A. Noll
Call Number: 277.3 N72h
Interpreting Southern History : historiographical essays in honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham by John B. Boles (Editor); Evelyn T. Nolen (Editor)
Call Number: On order
Negro Slavery Unjustifiable: A Discourse by Alexander McLeod
Call Number: Available online via Archive.org
The new encyclopedia of Southern culture (24 vols) by Charles Reagan Wilson (Editor); James G. Thomas; Ann J. Abadie; University of Mississippi, Center for the Study of Southern Culture Staff (Contribution by); Samuel S. Hill (Editor) Evangelical Protestant groups have dominated religious life in the South since the early nineteenth century. Even as the conservative Protestantism typically associated with the South has risen in social and political prominence throughout the United States in recent decades, however, religious culture in the South itself has grown increasingly diverse. The region has seen a surge of immigration from other parts of the United States as well as from Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, bringing increased visibility to Catholicism, Islam, and Asian religions in the once solidly Protestant Christian South. In this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, contributors have revised entries from the original Encyclopedia on topics ranging from religious broadcasting to snake handling and added new entries on such topics as Asian religions, Latino religion, New Age religion, Islam, Native American religion, and social activism. With the contributions of more than 60 authorities in the field--including Paul Harvey, Loyal Jones, Wayne Flynt, and Samuel F. Weber--this volume is an accessibly written, up-to-date reference to religious culture in the American South.
Call Number: 975 En19w 2006 [Reference Room]
On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773-1876 by Randy J. Sparks "On Jordan's Stormy Banks is a social history of southern evangelicalism from the late eighteenth century to the end of Reconstruction. By focusing on the three largest evangelical denominations in a single state - Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian - Randy J. Sparks charts the rise of evangelicals on the southern frontier and their remarkable increase in numbers, wealth, and influence throughout the remainder of the period." "Beginning as a rebellious movement of the plain folk, evangelicals set themselves up to challenge the social hierarchy and even welcomed slaves into their congregations on terms approaching equality. Although evangelicals had largely abandoned formal opposition to slavery by the time the movement reached Mississippi, their relationship to the institution was complex and conflicted. Sparks demonstrates that the typical evangelical church was biracial and that the African-American influence in ritual and practice left an indelible imprint on southern religion. The egalitarian nature of these early churches created unique opportunities for women and blacks, and Sparks pays close attention to the important role of the female majority of church members. Similarly, evangelical practice and rhetoric was consciously democratic, linking the movement with republican virtue." "By the 1830s, the evangelicals in Mississippi had so prospered that their churches grew from sects to major denominations. This shift to the establishment divided the traditionalists from the modernists within each denomination. As the evangelicals began to have a marked influence on southern society, they sought to perfect rather than abolish slavery, and egalitarian biracialism gave way to separate worship services, a practice that fueled the development of independent African-American churches following the Civil War." "The orderly society that evangelicals labored to create - one organized around the patriarchal household - unraveled at the end of the Civil War, says Sparks. For whites, evangelicalism became entwined with the Religion of the Lost Cause; for African Americans, the Confederate defeat came as an answered prayer as they began to carve out an autonomous religious life for themselves that would prove to be the bedrock of the African-American community. This separation of Mississippi's major denominations along racial lines dramatically marked the end of the evangelical movement's first century."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Call Number: 277.6208 Sp26o
Redeeming the South: religious cultures and racial identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 by Paul Harvey Together, and separately, black and white Baptists created different but intertwined cultures that profoundly shaped the South. Adopting a biracial and bicultural focus, Paul Harvey works to redefine southern religious history, and by extension southern culture, as the product of such interaction--the result of whites and blacks having drawn from and influenced each other even while remaining separate and distinct. Harvey explores the parallels and divergences of black and white religious institutions as manifested through differences in worship styles, sacred music, and political agendas. He examines the relationship of broad social phenomena like progressivism and modernization to the development of southern religion, focusing on the clash between rural southern folk religious expression and models of spirituality drawn from northern Victorian standards. In tracing the growth of Baptist churches from small outposts of radically democratic plain-folk religion in the mid-eighteenth century to conservative and culturally dominant institutions in the twentieth century, Harvey explores one of the most impressive evolutions of American religious and cultural history.
Call Number: 286.175 H262r
Religion in Mississippi by Randy J. Sparks In the 1600s Colonial French settlers brought Christianity into the lands that are now the state of Mississippi. Throughout the period of French rule and the period of Spanish dominion that followed, Roman Catholicism remained the principal religion. By the time that statehood was achieved in 1817, Mississippi was attracting Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and other Protestant evangelical faiths at a remarkable pace, and by the twentieth century, religion in Mississippi was dominantly Protestant and evangelical. In this book Randy J. Sparks traces the roots of evangelical Christianity in the state and shows how the evangelicals became a force of cultural revolution. They embraced the poorer segments of society, welcomed high populations of both women and African Americans, and deeply influenced ritual and belief in the state's vision of Christianity. In the 1830s as the Mississippi economy boomed, so did evangelicalism. As Protestant faiths became wedded to patriarchal standards, slaveholding, and southern political tradition, seeds were sown for the war that would erupt three decades later. Until Reconstruction many Mississippi churches comprised biracial congregations and featured women in prominent roles, but as the Civil War and the racial split cooled the evangelicals' liberal fervor and drastically changed the democratic character of their religion into archconservatism, a strong but separate black church emerged. As dominance by Protestant conservatives solidified, Jews, Catholics, and Mormons struggled to retain their religious identities while conforming to standards set by white Protestant society. As Sparks explores the dissonance between the state's powerful evangelical voice and Mississippi's social and cultural mores, he reveals the striking irony of faith and society in conflict. By the time of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, religion, formerly a liberal force, had become one of the leading proponents of segregation, gender inequality, and ethnic animosity among whites in the Magnolia State. Among blacks, however, the churches were bastions of racial pride and resistance to the forces of oppression. Randy J. Sparks, an associate professor of history at Tulane University, is the author of On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Evangelical Religion in Mississippi, 1773-1876. Heritage of Mississippi Series, distributed for the Mississippi Historical Society
Call Number: 277.62 Sp26r
Religion in the American South: Protestants and others in history and culture by Beth Barton Schweiger (Editor); Donald G. Mathews (Editor) This collection of essays examines religion in the American South across three centuries--from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The first collection published on the subject in fifteen years, Religion in the American South builds upon a new generation of scholarship to push scholarly conversation about the field to a new level of sophistication by complicating "southern religion" geographically, chronologically, and thematically and by challenging the interpretive hegemony of the "Bible belt." Contributors demonstrate the importance of religion in the South not only to American religious history but also to the history of the nation as a whole. They show that religion touched every corner of society--from the nightclub to the lynching tree, from the church sanctuary to the kitchen hearth. These essays will stimulate discussions of a wide variety of subjects, including eighteenth-century religious history, conversion narratives, religion and violence, the cultural power of prayer, the importance of women in exploiting religious contexts in innovative ways, and the interracialism of southern religious history. Contributors: Kurt O. Berends, University of Notre Dame Emily Bingham, Louisville, Kentucky Anthea D. Butler, Loyola Marymount University Paul Harvey, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs Jerma Jackson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Lynn Lyerly, Boston College Donald G. Mathews, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Jon F. Sensbach, University of Florida Beth Barton Schweiger, University of Arkansas Daniel Woods, Ferrum College
Call Number: 277.5 R279s
Religion in the Old South by Donald G. Mathews
Call Number: 277.5 M422r
Religion in the South: Essays by Charles R. Wilson (Editor)
Call Number: 200.975 R279
Religion in the Southern States: a historical study by Samuel S. Hill (Editor)
Call Number: 277.5 R279
The Root of All Evil: the Protestant clergy and the economic mind of the Old South by Kenneth Moore Startup In The Root of All Evil Kenneth Moore Startup looks to the sermons and writings of Protestant clergy to better understand the driving forces behind the antebellum southern economy. During this period of unprecedented American expansion, he finds, clerics of all denominations on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line displayed a remarkable unanimity in their condemnation of mammonism--the open pursuit of wealth, conspicuous consumption, lack of charity, and contempt of honest labor. This trend, the clergy argued, was diverting both North and South from their best interests and would ultimately destroy the nation. The Root of All Evil represents a challenge to any notion of an economically disinterested southern mind and culture by revealing an Old South in line ideologically with the mainstream of nineteenth-century capitalism, and also provides useful insights into southern religious life.
Call Number: 975.03 St28r
Slave Religion: the "invisible institution" in the Antebellum South by Albert J. Rabotcau
Call Number: 299.6 R113s
Southern Cross: the beginnings of the Bible Belt by Christine Leigh Heyrman In Southern Cross Christine Leigh Heyrman reveals the surprising paradox at the heart of America's Bible Belt: how such currently conservative religions groups as the Southern Baptists and Methodists evolved out of an evangelical Protestantism that began with totally different social and political attitudes. Heyrman argues that evangelicalism did not flow rapidly into the religious vacuum created by the American Revolution, because southern whites of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were affronted by many aspects of early evangelical teaching and practice, including opposition to slaveholding, to class privilege, and to traditional ideals of masculinity; a lack of respect for generational hierarchy; the encouragement of women's public involvement in church affairs; and an insistence on spiritual intimacy with blacks. They felt threatened as well by the unsparing evangelical emphasis on sin, hell's torments, and Satan's wiles - and by the often wrenching experiences that accompanied conversion. What happened? What changed? How did the very religious groups that at first offended most white southerners eventually come to claim the soul of the South? Heyrman shows how, over the span of a century, the evangelicals came to be dominant in the region by deliberately changing their own traditional values and assimilating the conventional southern understandings of family relationships, masculine prerogatives, classic patriotism, and martial honor. In so doing, religious groups earlier associated with nonviolence and antislavery activity came to the defense of slavery and secession and the holy cause of upholding both by force of arms - and adopted the values that we nowassociate with the Bible Belt.
Call Number: 270.81 H518s
Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800-1860 by Anne C. Loveland
Call Number: 280.4 L943s
Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century by Kenneth K. Bailey
Call Number: 284 B153s
Unitarianism in the Antebellum South by John MacAulay Macaulay challenges the prevailing belief that religion in the South developed solely through "revivalistic emotion" and not by religious rationalism. John Macaulay's model study of Unitarianism in the antebellum South reestablishes the denomination's position as an influential religious movement in the early history of the region. By looking at benevolent societies, lay meetings, professional and civic activity, ecumenical interchange, intellectual forums, business partnerships, literary correspondence, friendships, and other associa-tions in which southern Unitarians were engaged with other southerners on a daily basis, Macaulay sees a much greater Unitarian presence than has been previously recognized. Instead of relying on a count of church steeples to gauge numbers, this volume blurs the lines between southern Unitarianism and orthodoxy by demonstrating how their theologies coexisted and intertwined. Macaulay posits that just beneath the surface of organized religion in the South was an "invisible institution" not unlike Franklin Frazier's Black Church, a nebulous network of liberal faith that represented a sustained and continued strand of Enlightenment religious rationalism alongside and within an increasingly evangelical culture. He shows that there were in fact two invisible religious institutions in the antebellum South, one in the slave quarters and the other in the urban landscape of southern towns. Whereas slave preachers rediscovered in music and bodily movement and in themes of suffering a vibrant Christian community, Unitarians witnessed the simple spiritual truth that reason and belief are one unified whole. In offering this fresh argument, Macaulay has chipped away at stereotypes of the mid-19th-century South as unreservedly "evangelical" and contributed greatly to historians' understanding of the diversity and complexity in southern religion.
Call Number: 289.1 M128u
ISBN: 9780817310868
Publication Date: 2001
Wrestlin Jacob: a portrait of religion in the Old South by Erskine Clark
Call Number: 277.5 C551w