Published: 2005
Reconstruction/Religious Studies
304 pages, 6 x 9
978-0-86554-962-3
Illustrations, index, bibliography
MUP/H685,

November 2005

Reconstruction/Religious Studies

304 pages, 6 x 9

0-86554-987-7

$25.00t, Paper

Illustrations, index, bibliography

MUP/P322,

Edward J. Blum and W. Scott Poole, editors
Foreword by Charles Reagan Wilson

Interdisciplinary Essays on Religion and Reconstruction

Vale of Tears: New Essays in Religion and Reconstruction offers a window into the exciting work being done by historians, social scientists, and scholars of religious studies on the epoch of Reconstruction. A time of both peril and promise, Reconstruction in America became a cauldron of transformation and change. This collection argues that religion provided the idiom and symbol, as often the very substance, of those changes. The authors of this collection examine how African Americans and white Southerners, New England Abolitionists and former Confederate soldiers, Catholics and Protestants on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line brought their sense of the sacred into collaboration and conflict. Together, these essays mark an important new departure in a still-contested period of American history. Interdisciplinary in scope and content, it promises to challenge many of the traditional parameters of Reconstruction historiography. The range of contributors to the project, including Gaines Foster and Paul Harvey, will draw a great deal of attention from Southern historians, literary scholars, and scholars of American religion.

Edward J. Blum is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Kentucky. He has published several articles on race, religion, and American Reconstruction, and he is the author of Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898.

W. Scott Poole, a native of Anderson and Pickens counties in South Carolina, teaches South Carolina history at the College of Charleston. He is the author of a previous work on South Carolina in the nineteenth century and writes a monthly column on pop culture in the South for popmatters.com. He lives in Charleston with Shiloh, his Labrador retriever.

Titles of Related Interest

A Shield and a Hiding Place:
The Religious Life of Civil War Armies

Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the Civil War

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