A Divinity for All Persuasions: Almanacs And Early American Religious Life (Religion In America) - Softcover

Tomlin, T.J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0190669586 ISBN 13: 9780190669584

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2017

Synopsis

A Divinity for All Persuasions uncovers the religious signifiance of early America's most ubiquitous popular genre. Other than a Bible and perhaps a few schoolbooks and sermons, almanacs were the only printed items most Americans owned before 1820. Purchased annually, the almanac was a calendar and astrologically-based medical handbook surrounded by poetry, essays, anecdotes, and a variety of practical information.

Employing a wealth of archival material, T.J. Tomlin analyzes the pan-Protestant sensibility distributed through the almanac's pages between 1730 and 1820. By disseminating a collection of Protestant concepts regarding God's existence, divine revelation, the human condition, and the afterlife, almanacs played an unparalleled role in early American religious life. Influenced by readers' opinions and printers' pragmatism, the religious content of everyday print supports an innovative interpretation of early American cultural and religious history. In sharp contrast to a historiography centered on intra-Protestant competition, Tomlin shows that most early Americans relied on a handful of Protestant "essentials" rather than denominational specifics to define and organize their religious lives.

About this title

Review:

A Divinity for All Persuasions provides a fresh interpretation of almanacs Tomlin's close reading of almanacs reveals an important and often overlooked means of conveying and reinforcing biblical teachings among a wide readership. In a fresh and persuasive interpretation of almanacs Tomlin rejects the oft repeated assessment that almanacs were filled with superstitions, the occult, and magic that reflected a non-Christian element in colonial popular religion Tomlin has made an important contribution to our understanding of both almanacs and popular religion. (Reviews in American History)

[Tomlin's] advocacy for almanacs as data for analyzing popular thought in early America is an accomplishment. (Journal of American History)

A survey of almanacs from the colonial era to the early nineteenth century... [W]onderfully presented. (Religion in American History)

Tomlin offers a fresh, most welcome reading of almanacs as a unique window onto early America's pan-Protestant religious sensibility. Rather than consigning almanacs to 'secular' or 'occult' popular print undeserving of serious scholarly attention, Tomlin offers a nuanced reading of 2,000 almanacs, many of which have been underutilized by scholars despite their preservation in major archives. Tomlin's findings will fascinate and inform students of early American religion and print culture. (Candy Gunther Brown, author of The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880)

T. J. Tomlin will persuade you in his new book, A Divinity for All Persuasions, that almanacs mattered. (Journal of Religion)

T. J. Tomlin has mastered a genre that sprawls across early America in ways that almost defy analysis. Not in this book, however, which reveals a world of common knowledge about religion or Christianity that may have been more familiar to many Americans than what was being said in sermons and substantial books. (David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School)

With its long-needed examination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century almanacs, T.J. Tomlin's A Divinity for All Persuasions opens remarkable new perspectives on the religious culture of early America. Tomlin's compelling study of thousands of almanacs - arguably the most pervasive texts in America, aside from the Bible - illuminates the enduring power of the new nation's shared Protestant convictions. (Thomas S. Kidd, Professor of History, Baylor University)

About the Author:

T.J. Tomlin is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0190669586
• ISBN 13: 9780190669584
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 234