Paul Keith Conkin

In a work of striking breadth and clarity, Paul Conkin offers an even-handed and in-depth look at the major American-made forms of Christianity_a diverse group of religious traditions, each of which reflects a significant break from western Christian orth

Homemade Varieties of Christianity

American Originals

I. Bernard Cohen

C. Vann Woodward

Stephan Thernstrom

Gordon Wright

John Whitney Hall

Vanderbilt University

Lawrence Stone

Lewis W. Spitz

Woodrow Borah

Richard William Leopold

Centennial Symposium on the Future of History

Centennial Symposium on the Future of History, Vanderbilt University, 1975

Kenneth Alan Lockridge

Essays in the Vanderbilt University Centennial Symposium

The Future of History

Traces Johnson's life as one of our most controversial leaders. Surveys the influence of LBJ's southern background on his political climb, his work with the New Deal, the Great Society legislation, and his tenure in the White House. He is depicted as a paternalistic wheeler-dealer politician and ingenious strategist who had a driving need to gain approval and popularity.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

Big Daddy from the Pedernales

In this long awaited volume, Paul K. Conkin, one of America's most distinguished intellectual historians, offers his commentary on almost every aspect of the American past. Delivered to a wide variety of audiences over more than a quarter of a century, these essays are simultaneously informal, profound, graceful, and self-revealing. A common theme shared by all the essays is the ambiguous results of our nation's transition from relatively homogeneous communities, villages, and regions to a cosmopolitan culture with a centralized, regulatory welfare state, and an increasingly mobile and pluralistic population. The village's sense of local autonomy has all but disappeared in the face of these trends. With an almost melancholy sense of what has been lost, Conkin charts the strains and tensions that have marked this incredible transition. But Conkin is also acutely aware of the necessities that have fueled these changes, as well as the many benefits of the new order, ranging from an unprecedented level of affluence to the full citizenship gained by minorities. A reluctant Southerner, Conkin has not forgotten the exclusivity, intolerance, and repression that often mark provincial communities. Conkin reflects on the historians' craft and the influence of his own past on the subjects he studies. A Requiem for the American Village is infused with Conkin's razor sharp sense of historical memory and historical consciousness. From the foundations of American government to the tensions of contemporary cultural pluralism, Paul Conkin offers powerful insights not only about the tortured history of the South, but the promises and pitfalls of the American experiment.

A Requiem for the American Village

What happened at or near the Cane Ridge meeting house in central Kentucky in August 1801 has become a legendary event in American religious history. Never before in America had so many thousands of people gathered for what became much more than the planned Presbyterian communion service. Never had so many families camped on the grounds. Never before had so many people been affected with involuntary physical exercises--sobbing, shouting, shaking, and swooning. And never before in American had a religious meeting led to so much national publicity, triggered so much controversy, or helped provoke such important denominational schisms. Paul Conkin tells the story of Cane Ridge in all its dimensions. The backdrop involves the convoluted history of Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism in America, the pluralistic religious environment in early Kentucky, and the gradual evolution of a new form of evangelical religious culture in eighteenth-century America. The aftermath was complex. Cane Ridge helped popularize religious camps and influenced the subsequent development of planned camp meetings. It exposed deep and developing divisions of doctrine among Presbyterian clergy, and contributed to the birth of two new denominations --Christians (Disciples of Christ) and Cumberland Presbyterians and furthered the growth of a new revival culture, keyed to a crisis-like conversion experience, even as it marked a gradual decline in sacramentalism.

America's Pentecost

Cane Ridge

Paul Keith Conkin

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