This book brings together 13 short biographies of women in the Transcendentalist movement. Each chapter details that particular subject's connection to Transcendentalism, while the book begins with a working definition of the movement. Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted to address transcendence in nature, while Henry David Thoreau focused on self-reliance. While they are familiar names in American history, Elizabeth Peabody, Sarah Freeman Clark, Pauline Hopkins, Edmonia Highgate and the others in this volume deserve to be more familiar to the public too. These women...

Although religious innovation in America has historically been the norm rather than the exception, mainstream Americans have often viewed new religious movements with suspicion and occasionally with outright alarm. The question motivating many studies of new religious movements has been “why would someone join these religions?” In Antiquity and Social Reform, Dawn Hutchinson offers at least one answer to this often repeated query. She argues that followers of new religious movements in the 1960s–1980s, specifically the Unification Church, Feminist Wicca and the Nation of Yahweh,...