Despite a wealth of martial imagery in traditional Anglophone hymnody and in English-language religious discourse broadly, modern Americans flinch at the notion of churchmen acting in a martial manner, particularly if they do so by arguing for divine sanction to back...

In 1874, the American Church Missionary Society, with the sanction of the presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, consecrated James Theodore Holly as missionary bishop to Haiti. Holly lived previously in the Black Caribbean republic...

In 1982 Grady McWhiney, then one of the deans of southern and Civil War history, and his student Perry Jamieson published Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage. The controversial book made a splash in the military history and in Civil...

In his The Novel: Who Needs it? Joseph Epstein proposes that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “beyond doubt the most important novel published in the United States.” The novel’s importance lay, says Epstein, in its effect. But “important though Uncle...

In the nineteenth century the rise of more advanced technology for oceanic exploration, the subsequent increase in maritime traffic, and the first major discovery of fossils of dinosaurs and related prehistoric reptiles, reignited the question of sea serpents and sea...

As the scale of the American Civil War became clear to Americans north and south, Protestant clerics engaged the subject of war more regularly in their preaching. By the Fall of 1861 the conflict’s first major battle—called variously First Manassas or First Bull...

In the aftermath of the American Revolution the newly Americanized Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States—the successor to the colonial Church of England, revised the Book of Common Prayer for American usage in 1785 and in 1789. The reasons given were to...

In the third week of November, 1862, William G.T. Shedd mounted the ornate pulpit of New York City’s Brick Presbyterian Church. Historian Mark Noll calls Shedd a high Calvinist comfortable with relying on Christian history to correct substandard teaching. His...

On 4 December, 1829, the Governor-General of Britain’s state-run monopoly and de-facto government of colonial India—the East India Company—issued what became the most controversial mandate of his administration. Lord William Bentinck, scion of one of Britain’s most...