First published in 1956, Rev. David S. Bradley Sr. wrote what was at the time and remains today the most thorough, scholarly history of the beginnings and growth of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Beginning with the birth of A. M. E. Zion Chapel in a humble chapel in New York City, Part 1 traces the growth of the church into a powerful and agile denomination, expanding from the settled coast into the frontiers of upstate New York and western Pennsylvania. The advancing denomination, with natural and inherited "antagonism to slavery," attracted "freedmen, seeking spiritual freedom," including the famous black Abolitionist activists—Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass, who learned and honed his rhetorical skills as an exhorter in the A. M. E. Zion congregation in New Bedford, Massachusetts, under Reverend Thomas James. "No road was too pioneering no thought too liberal, for these were freedmen, seeking spiritual freedom . . . All along the Mason Dixon Line, and further West, in Ohio and Indiana, Zion Churchmen became beacon points of hope to the escaped slave and A. M. E. Zion became the church of freedom."

With the conclusion of the Civil War, the beginnings of Reconstruction, and the realities of emancipation, former slaves were confronted with the possibility of freedom and, with it, a new way of life. In The Times Were Strange and Stirring, Reginald F. Hildebrand examines the role of the Methodist Church in the process of emancipation—and in shaping a new world at a unique moment in American, African American, and Methodist history. Hildebrand explores the ideas and ideals of missionaries from several branches of Methodism—the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and the northern-based Methodist Episcopal Church—and the significant and highly charged battle waged between them over the challenge and meaning of freedom. He traces the various strategies and goals pursued by these competing visions and develops a typology of some of the ways in which emancipation was approached and understood. Focusing on individual church leaders such as Lucius H. Holsey, Richard Harvey Cain, and Gilbert Haven, and with the benefit of extensive research in church archives and newspapers, Hildebrand tells the dramatic and sometimes moving story of how missionaries labored to organize their denominations in the black South, and of how they were overwhelmed at times by the struggles of freedom.

A study of skilled artisans in the 1820s and 1830s whose evangelical faith raised suspicions toward capitalist innovations.When industrialization swept through American society in the nineteenth century, it brought with it turmoil for skilled artisans. Changes in technology and work offered unprecedented opportunity for some, but the deskilling of craft and the rise of factory work meant dislocation for others. Journeymen for Jesus explores how the artisan community in one city, Baltimore, responded to these life-changing developments during the years of the early republic.Baltimore in the Jacksonian years (1820s and 1830s) was America's third largest city. Its unions rivaled those of New York and Philadelphia in organization and militancy, and it was also a stronghold of evangelical Methodism. These circumstances created a powerful mix at a time when workers were confronting the negative effects of industrialism. Many of them found within Methodism and its populist spirituality an empowering force that inspired their refusal to accept dependency and second-class citizenship.Historians often portray evangelical Protestantism as either a top-down means of social control or as a bottom-up process that created passive workers. Sutton, however, reveals a populist evangelicalism that undergirded the producer tradition dominant among those supportive of trade union goals. Producers were not socialists or social democrats, but they were anticapitalist and reform-minded. In populist evangelicalism they discovered a potent language and ethic for their discontent.Journeymen for Jesus presents a rich and unromanticized portrait of artisan culture in early America. In the process, itadds to our understanding of the class tensions present in Jacksonian America.