In November 1860 Robert Lewis Dabney addressed the young men of Hampden-Sydney College. The Governor of Virginia called a fast day for 1 November, a not infrequent occurrence in the Nineteenth Century. Governors appointed a day for the state to fast; this did not...

A new paperback edition of Brad Birzer’s American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll has recently been published by Regnery Gateway. It’s the best standard length biography of Charles Carroll of Carrollton I know of, and its spritely style and incisive commentary...

Timothy Mason Roberts’ Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism provides one of the best scholarly treatments of American intellectual, political, and religious interactions with the rash of liberal nationalist revolutions that rocked...

Millennial impulses among American Congregationalists and Presbyterians defined Calvinist religiosity throughout the Nineteenth Century. Early Republic divines in North America tended to embrace a postmillennial eschatology. John Watson Adams, a prominent Presbyterian...

The American Civil War ignited the pens of Protestant clerics, particularly when it came to writing political sermons. Sermons and discourses on war and politics proliferated in both the North and the South. George Rable noted in his God’s Almost Chosen People that...

In the summer of 1848, Francis Wayland, president of Brown University and perhaps the preeminent Baptist intellectual in the United States, preached a sermon at Brown’s chapel that focused on the revolutions that overtook Europe beginning in February of that same...

When the Mexican War began in 1846, American Protestants split over whether the war was justified or not. Northern Protestants denounced the war as a pro-slavery landgrab by expansionist Democrat James K. Polk. That the war pitted a liberal and expansionist United...

In the Spring of 1848, Anglicans in the British Empire watched warily as revolution spread across Europe. Paris revolted in February and overthrew liberal King Louis-Philippe. Revolutions in the German states and in the Austrian empire followed in quick succession....

Between 1848 and 1871, Western Europe and North America underwent a series of political upheavals, many of them violent, that pitted broadly liberal nationalist movements against conservative (and even sometimes liberal) monarchies. The liberal revolutions of 1848...