The history of Christianity in America has been marked by recurring periods of religious revivals or awakenings. In this book, George M. Thomas addresses the economic and political context of evangelical revivalism and its historical linkages with economic expansion and Republicanism in the nineteenth century. Thomas argues that large-scale change results in social movements that articulate new organizations and definitions of individual, society, authority, and cosmos. Drawing on religious newspapers, party policies and agendas, and quantitative analyses of voting patterns and census data,...

This book illuminates the central role played by international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) in the emergence and development of a comprehensive world polity. The contributors argue that the enormous proliferation of INGOs since 1875--including international environmental organizations, human rights groups, bodies formed to regulate technical standards, and economic development organizations, among others--both reflects and contributes to the spread of global institutions and cultural principles based on models of rationality, individualism, progress, and universalism. The...