At the start of the nineteenth century, churches in Providence sought to bring together rich and poor "as Members of One great Family." Within a few decades, however, congregations had split along class lines, with plebeian men and women choosing to worship at their own meetinghouses. In this innovative and compelling history, Mark S. Schantz explores the relationship between religious culture and class formation in a New England city. Covering topics from pew auctioning to the rise of self-anointed street preachers, Schantz provides a rich sense of the daily texture of religious life. In the early national period churches were, he explains, inclusive but also firmly controlled by affluent, white men. The revival of 1820 led the poorer citizens of Providence to adopt their own religious traditions and establish their own congregations. In contrast to bourgeois churchgoers, who were wedded to decorum and rationality, the plebeians welcomed emotional outbursts and evinced an abiding belief in the supernatural. Schantz charts the ways in which these contrasting religious subcultures collided in the political turmoil of the Dorr Rebellion of 1842. Schantz concludes with a fascinating look at how, prior to the Civil War, the city's churches constructed a new understanding of religious community, one that embraced the reality of profound class divisions among Christ's followers.

Piety in Providence: Class Dimensions of Religious Experience in Antebellum Rhode Island

History

Schantz, Mark S.

Americas

NCROL

"Americans came to fight the Civil War in the midst of a wider cultural world that sent them messages about death that made it easier to kill and to be killed. They understood that death awaited all who were born and prized the ability to face death with a spirit of calm resignation. They believed that a heavenly eternity of transcendent beauty awaited them beyond the grave. They knew that their heroic achievements would be cherished forever by posterity. They grasped that death itself might be seen as artistically fascinating and even beautiful."―from Awaiting the Heavenly Country
How much loss can a nation bear? An America in which 620,000 men die at each other's hands in a war at home is almost inconceivable to us now, yet in 1861 American mothers proudly watched their sons, husbands, and fathers go off to war, knowing they would likely be killed. Today, the death of a soldier in Iraq can become headline news; during the Civil War, sometimes families did not learn of their loved ones' deaths until long after the fact. 
Did antebellum Americans hold their lives so lightly, or was death so familiar to them that it did not bear avoiding? In Awaiting the Heavenly Country, Mark S. Schantz argues that American attitudes and ideas about death helped facilitate the war's tremendous carnage. Asserting that nineteenth-century attitudes toward death were firmly in place before the war began rather than arising from a sense of resignation after the losses became apparent, Schantz has written a fascinating and chilling narrative of how a society understood death and reckoned the magnitude of destruction it was willing to tolerate.
Schantz addresses topics such as the pervasiveness of death in the culture of antebellum America; theological discourse and debate on the nature of heaven and the afterlife; the rural cemetery movement and the inheritance of the Greek revival; death as a major topic in American poetry; African American notions of death, slavery, and citizenship; and a treatment of the art of death―including memorial lithographs, postmortem photography and Rembrandt Peale's major exhibition painting The Court of Death. 
Awaiting the Heavenly Country is essential reading for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the Civil War and the ways in which antebellum Americans comprehended death and the unimaginable bloodshed on the horizon.

Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America's Culture of Death

Cornell University Press

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