Richard Rankin probes the religious, intellectual, and social lives of North Carolina's antebellum elite to expose the dramatic effect of religious revival in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rankin uses family letters and church records to document an embrace of evangelism's emotionalism by the female upper class, a swift objection to evangelism's egalitarian tenets by the male upper class, and the domestic tension that ensued. Rankin evaluates the revival of the Episcopal church as a male strategy to replace evangelism with a more conservative approach to religion, and he...
Richard Rankin probes the religious, intellectual, and social lives of North Carolina's antebellum elite to expose the dramatic effect of religious re...
