Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America

This book originated in papers presented at a 2004 conference sponsored by the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and focuses principally on Protestantism in postbellum and modern America. The history of religious print culture in the United States is a new interdisciplinary field, one derived from the history of the book, as developed in good measure by David D. Hall, and from religious history, as found in the seminal work of Sidney Ahlstrom. Part 1 includes essays by the editors, one on editions of the Bible, the other on mass-market paperbacks, indicating the parameters of the volume. One essay in part 2, “Printing Religious Fictions and Facts, 1800–1920,” argues that Quakers, represented as moral paragons in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novels, were not realistic models for practical reform. A more favorable view of the social influence of fiction is found in an analysis of tales for children, using excerpts and photographs from publications by medical missionaries in Asia and Africa. And the little-known Joseph B. Keeler is reassessed as pivotal in transforming the Church of the Latter-day Saints into a dynamic corporate religious institution. Part 3, “Print Culture and Religious Group Identity,” describes how publications unified two small religious communities: a few hundred scattered adherents of a tiny sect were knit together by the magazine Megiddo Message, and a small community of Jewish college students at the University of Wisconsin in the 1920s was molded by the Hillel Review.