The Declaration of Independence proclaimed freedom for Americans from the domination of Great Britain, yet for millions of African Americas caught up in a brutal system of racially based slavery, freedom would be denied for ninety additional years until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Freedom’s Delay: America’s Struggle for Emancipation, 1776–1865 probes the slow, painful, yet ultimately successful crusade to end slavery throughout the nation, North and South. This work fills an important gap in the literature of slavery’s demise. Unlike other authors who focus largely on specific time periods or regional areas, Allen Carden presents a thematically structured national synthesis of emancipation. Freedom’s Delay offers a comprehensive and unique overview of the process of manumission commencing in 1776 when slavery was a national institution, not just the southern experience known historically by most Americans. In this volume, the entire country is examined, and major emancipatory efforts—political, literary, legal, moral, and social—made by black and white, free and enslaved individuals are documented over the years from independence through the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Freedom’s Delay dispels many of the myths about slavery and abolition, including that racial servitude was of little consequence in the North, and, where it did exist, it ended quickly and easily; that abolition was a white man’s cause and blacks were passive recipients of liberty; that the South seceded primarily to protect states’ rights, not slavery; and that the North fought the Civil War primarily to end the subjugation of African Americans. By putting these misunderstandings aside, this book reveals what actually transpired in the fight for human rights during this critical era. Carden’s inclusion of a cogent preface and epilogue assures that Freedom’s Delay will find a significant place in the literature of American slavery and freedom. With a compelling preface and epilogue, notes, illustrations and tables, and a detailed bibliography, this volume will be of great value not only in courses on American history and African American history but also to the general reading public. Allen Carden is professor of history at Fresno Pacific University in Fresno, California. He is the author of Puritan Christianity in America: Religion and Life in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts.

The great, pre-Civil War attempt of Protestant missionaries to Christianize Native Americans is found by Robert F. Berkofer, Jr. to be a significant point of contact with enduring lessons for American thought. The irony displayed by this relationship, he says, did not really lie in the disparity between Anglo-Saxon ideals and the actual treatment of first peoples but in the failure of all, including the missions, to see that both sides had ultimately behaved according to their cultural values. Using the records of missions to sixteen tribes in various regions of the United States, Berkofer has carefully followed the hopeful efforts of sixty-five years. The ultimate outcome, when the Civil War brought most of the missions to an end, was only a nominal conversion of Native Americans, despite the unflagging optimism of missionaries struggling against cultural barriers.

Confronting Christianity explores the history of religious encounters between Christian missionaries and Thai Buddhists during the nineteenth century, a period of Western imperialism in Southeast Asia that fundamentally transformed Siamese society and religious institutions. From about 1830 onwards, discussions on religion became a central arena of conflict between rival regimes of knowledge in Thailand, confronting traditional Buddhist views on nature and man’s existence with the ideals and practices of science and rationalism coming from the West. Protestant missionaries, mostly from the United States, became important brokers of knowledge, as one of their strengths was the ability to offer religion in tandem with modern science and technology. Historian Sven Trakulhun explains why the intrusion of evangelical Christianity strengthened the position of Theravāda Buddhism rather than undermining people’s belief in traditional forms of worship. Based on a wide range of Thai and Western primary sources, the volume describes how Christian missionaries unwittingly contributed to the making of what scholars of Buddhism have later rendered as “Buddhist modernism.” In response to Christian assaults on the traditional cosmology, Buddhist reformers fashioned an orthodox version of Buddhism that acknowledged the findings of modern science and at the same time deemed even more rational than Christianity. This new orthodoxy became a major source of moral authority for Thai kings and an important ideology for pushing their claims for religious leadership in the Theravāda Buddhist world. Trakulhun offers a thorough study of the encounter between Christianity and Buddhism and places the history of Siamese Theravāda Buddhism within the broad context of global intellectual history.

Brief biographical sketches of ... ministers ... and as far as practicable a sermon from each.