American Religious History Exam Reading List
General Overviews and Sweeping Thematic Religious Histories (14 Readings)
1. Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the
New Age (1991).
2. Charles S. Prebish, Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in
America (1999).
3. Edward Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race
in America (2012).
4. Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (2017).
5. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990).
6. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (2004).
7. Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey eds., Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in
American History (2018).
8. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, second edition
(2012).
9. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a
Godly Nation (2016).
10. Lincoln A. Mullen, The Chance of Salvation: A History of Conversion in America (2017).
11. Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, second edition
(2019).
12. Peter Manseau, One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History (2015).
13. Peter Williams, America's Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-first Century, third
edition (2008).
14. Sylvester A. Johnson, African American Religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy,
and Freedom (2015).
Colonial Period and the American Revolution (25 Readings)
15. Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the
Revolution (1996).
16. Bronwen McShea, Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France (2019).
17. Christopher S. Grenda, The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early
America (2011).
18. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early
New England (1993).
19. Denise Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson’s Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (2013).
20. Douglas L. Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious
Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (2017).
21. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, third edition (2006).
22. Erik R. Seeman, Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800 (2011)
23. George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003).
24. James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America
(1986).
25. James P. Byrd, Sacred Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution
(2013)
26. John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994).
27. John Thornton, “African religions and Christianity in the Atlantic world,” in Africa and
Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, second edition (1998).
28. Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World
(2006).
29. Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700
(2006).
30. Katherine Carté Engel, Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America (2009).
31. Laura Arnold Leibman, Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early
American Jewish Life (2013).
32. Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native
Cultures in Early America (2012).
33. Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (2014).
34. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (1956).
35. Ramon Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality,
and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (1991).
36. Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race
(2012).
37. Spencer W. McBride, Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary
America (2016).
38. Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial
America (2007).
39. William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (2005).
The Nineteenth Century (33 Readings)
40. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South
(1978).
41. Allan D. Austin, African Muslims Antebellum America (1997).
42. Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American
Nation (2012).
43. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century
America (1989).
44. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “Jacksonian Democracy and Religion,” in The Age of Jackson
(1945).
45. Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (1998).
46. Curtis Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (2005).
47. David F. Holland, Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in
Early America (2011).
48. David Mislin, Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn
of the Secular Age (2015).
49. Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward
Beecher (2007).
50. Eddie Glaude, Exodus!: Religion, Race, And Nation In Early Nineteenth-Century Black
America (2000).
51. Edward Blum, Reforging The White Republic: Race, Religion, And American Nationalism,
1865-1898 (2005).
52. Emily Clark, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century
New Orleans (2016).
53. Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American
Republic (2015).
54. Emily Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (2018).
55. J. Spencer Fluhman, A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in
Nineteenth America (2012).
56. Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American
West (2018).
57. John C. Pinheiro, Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the MexicanAmerican War (2014).
58. John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America (2015).
59. John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of
Race (2002).
60. Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American
Judaism (2010).
61. Kathryn Gin Lum, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction
(2014).
62. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (1976).
63. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California (1994).
64. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006).
65. Michael Altman, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893
(2017).
66. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989).
67. Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation
in 19th-Century America, updated edition (2012).
68. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2007).
69. Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (2015).
70. Sharin Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America
(2017).
71. Thomas Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture
and the Limits of Dissent, second edition (2000).
72. Zev Eleff, Who Rules the Synagogue?: Religious Authority and the Formation of American
Judaism (2016).
Twentieth Century and Twenty-First Century (28 Readings)
73. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of
Transnational Religion Elizabeth Perez, Religion in the Kitchen (2015).
74. Alison Collis Greene, No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal,
and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta (2015).
75. Angela Tarango, Choosing the Jesus Way: American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for
the Indigenous Principle (2014).
76. Anthony M. Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion
(2015).
77. Benjamin E. Zeller, Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion (2014).
78. Candida R. and Joel S. Baden, Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (2017).
79. David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to
Change the World but Changed America (2017).
80. David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (1986).
81. George Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis
of Liberal Belief (2014).
82. Hugh B. Urban, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (2011).
83. Jana Reisss, The Next Mormons: How Millennials Are Changing the LDS Church (2019).
84. Jeff Wilson, Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and
American Culture (2014).
85. John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (2018).
86. Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the
Great Migration (2016).
87. Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (2013).
88. Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed
Smoot, Mormon Apostle (2004).
89. Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011).
90. Kenneth L. Woodward, Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics from the Age of
Eisenhower to the Era of Obama (2016).
91. Larry Eskridge, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (2013).
92. Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and
Other Pagans in America, second edition (2006).
93. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (2004).
94. Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism
(2014).
95. Matthew Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism
in the Great Migration (2017).
96. Mel Scult, The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (2014).
97. Michael Lienesch, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making
of the Anti-Evolution Movement (2007).
98. Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the
Problem of Race in America (2000).
99. Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism
(2016).
100. Moustafa Bayoumi, This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror
(2015).