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 thoughtful commentary on my book and recent scholarly debates over the definition of evangelicalism by George Mason University scholar John Turner. For an excellent related discussion published shortly after Darkness Falls on the Land of Light went to press, see Linford D. Fisher, “Evangelicals and Unevangelicals: The Contested History of a Word, 1500–1950,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 26 (2016): 184–226.