Gregory S. Jackson

This project explores how 19th-century religious activism helped Americans form political and social communities during a century when slavery, secession, immigration, industrialization, and urbanization shattered long-standing mechanisms of social cohesion. Each chapter explores how humanism and emerging evangelical technologies nurtured socio-religious awakenings that included old and new oral and visual literary forms. Modes of religious experience generated formal innovations of literary realism, such as the sermon hybrids I call "virtual-tour narratives" and "homiletic novels." Ultimately, my study shows how Americans created forms of civic attachment based not on the abtract, impersonal norms of nationality but on local, personal and religious connections of community.