New Book Contract Signed!
Merry Christmas, newsletter friends! I hope you'll consider using one of those Amazon gift cards to buy yourself or a family member a copy of Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh! So many of you have already bought and reviewed it - for which I am so grateful.
Great news: I recently signed with Yale University Press for my next book, tentatively titled The Second Great Awakening and the Transformation of American Christianity. The Second Great Awakening is one of those topics that everyone talks about but is hard to define. When did it begin and end? Who was involved? The answers are surprisingly elusive, so this is going to be my shot at writing a major overview.
Obviously this is somewhat of a companion book to my 2007 book on the First Great Awakening. But compared to the First, the Second Great Awakening seems more sprawling and ill-defined. Is the Cane Ridge revival in 1801 the same "awakening" as Charles Finney's revivals in the 1830s? What do the sober and quiet New England revivals of the 1790s have to do with the noisy frontier revivals of the early 1800s? Was the Second Great Awakening more of a process than an event? I'll be dealing with all these issues and more.
The manuscript is due to the press in mid-2024, and I've already made good progress on writing it this Fall. Assuming all stays on schedule, this should hopefully mean a published book by the Fall of 2025. Stay tuned!
From around the web:
Miller's Book Review (to which you should subscribe!) named Thomas Jefferson its #1 book of 2022!