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Religion and the American Mind
From the Great Awakening to the Revolution
by Alan Heimert
Foreword by Andrew Delbanco
Series: Jonathan Edwards Classic Studies Series
Imprint: Wipf and Stock
Exploring the richness of American thought and experience in the mid-eighteenth century, Alan Heimert develops the intellectual and cultural significance of the religious divisions and debates engendered by one of the most critical episodes in American intellectual history, the Great Awakening of the 1740's. The author's concern throughout is to discover what were the essential issues in a dispute that was not so much a controversy between theologians as a vital competition for the ideological allegiance of the American people. This is not a standard history of any one area of ideas. Mr. Heimert's sources include nearly everything published in America from 1735. His study, in its range and conception, is an original contribution to an understanding of the relationship between colonial religious thought and the evolution of American history.
Alan Heimert (1928 - 1999) was the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. A legendary teacher and scholar, his work made an indelible mark on the field of American Studies. 'Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution' has been called "the most significant and provocative book on American religious history."
Like an iceberg whose bulk is only one-eighth above sea level, Heimert's Religion and the American Mind, for forty years, has languished in historiographical backwaters, only occasionally recognized for its import. Now, scholars armed with more finely tuned navigational equipment recognize it as a true benchmark in American intellectual history.
Philip F. Gura, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Forty years ago, American scholars were not ready for Alan Heimert's radical reversal of American cultural priorities from politics to religion. They wanted a secular, enlightened republic where religion was consigned to the dust bins of nostalgia. But two generations of "born again" politics later (to say nothing of brutal wars fought in the name of religion) bear out the relevance of Heimert's work to our deeply conflicted world today, in ways that none of his critical peers could begin to do.
Harry S. Stout, Yale University
It is rare when we can say that a history book was ahead of its time. But that is precisely the case with Alan Heimert's Religion and the American Mind. Initially vilified and discounted for its method and arguments, it came to mark a touchstone for a new generation of scholars working in colonial American history. Rarely today can historians write about religion in eighteenth-century America without reference to, and often, dependence upon, Heimert's book. No one saw it coming in the 1960s, but Religion and the American Mind is now a classic.
Philip Goff, Purdue University, Indianapolis