For 250 years after its introduction to Europe around 1600, the method of decorating paper known as marbling reigned supreme as the chief means of embellishing the fine work of hand-bookbinders. Richard J. Wolfe reconstructs the rise and fall of the craft and offers the most comprehensive account available of its history, techniques, and patterns. A publication of the A.S.W. Rosenbach Fellowship in Bibliography Series

A provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic "The so-called Second Great Awakening was the shaping epoch of American Protestantism, and this book is the most important study of it ever published."—James Turner, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Winner of the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic book prize, and the Albert C. Outler Prize In this provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, Nathan O. Hatch argues that during this period American Christianity was democratized and common people became powerful actors on the religious scene. Hatch examines five distinct traditions or mass movements that emerged early in the nineteenth century—the Christian movement, Methodism, the Baptist movement, the black churches, and the Mormons—showing how all offered compelling visions of individual potential and collective aspiration to the unschooled and unsophisticated.

"Perhaps more than any other nation, America has been shaped by the Bible. In The Bible in America, a group of young scholars explore the ambiguous and complex ways in which the Word has been both a radical and conservative force in America, from the days of the Puritans through Sam Ervin and Jimmy Carter: how through three centuries the Bible has influenced civil religion and written culture, church life and political rhetoric, and the ways in which it has created a distinct view of history and a unique national consciousness in the United States."--Back cover.