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.
Earlier this year, I reviewed Jonathan Todd Hancock’s fascinating new book on the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811, Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). A great read—essential scholarship for historians of religion in the early American republic. Here’s my review in the Journal of Church and State 64 (2022): 354–356.