From maritime Canada to the Carolina backcountry, New England to the Illinois prairies, Protestants in British North America and the new United States influenced by the evangelical awakenings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were known as the "people called New Lights." This occasional blog features news, reviews, and research notes, along with dispatches from the archives and edited transcriptions of notable, obscure, and downright quirky manuscripts chronicling the religious beliefs, practices, and experiences of the people called New Lights from 1730 to 1850.
A Divinity for All Persuasions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), by University of Northern Colorado historian T.J. Tomlin, provides a powerful new analysis of early American religious culture through the understudied but ubiquitous genre of almanacs. I recently was invited to review this important book for the William & Mary Quarterly.