Divinity for All Persuasions

A Divinity for All Persuasions uncovers the religious signifiance of early America's most ubiquitous popular genre. Other than a Bible and perhaps a few schoolbooks and sermons, almanacs were the only printed items most Americans owned before 1820. Purchased annually, the almanac was a calendar and astrologically-based medical handbook surrounded by poetry, essays, anecdotes, and a variety of practical information. Employing a wealth of archival material, T.J. Tomlin analyzes the pan-Protestant sensibility distributed through the almanac's pages between 1730 and 1820. By disseminating a collection of Protestant concepts regarding God's existence, divine revelation, the human condition, and the afterlife, almanacs played an unparalleled role in early American religious life. Influenced by readers' opinions and printers' pragmatism, the religious content of everyday print supports an innovativeinterpretation of early American cultural and religious history. In sharp contrast to a historiography centered on intra-Protestant competition, Tomlin shows that most early Americans relied on a handful of Protestant "essentials" rather than denominational specifics to define and organize their religiouslives.

Tomlin offers a fresh, most welcome reading of almanacs as a unique window onto early Americas pan-Protestant religious sensibility. Rather than consigning almanacs to secular or occult popular print undeserving of serious scholarly attention, Tomlin offers a nuanced reading of 2,000 almanacs, many of which have been underutilized by scholars despite their preservation in major archives. Tomlins findings will fascinate and inform students of early American religion and print culture, T. J. Tomlin has mastered a genre that sprawls across early America in ways that almost defy analysis. Not in this book, however, which reveals a world of common knowledge about religion or Christianity that may have been more familiar to many Americans than what was being said in sermons and substantial books., With its long-needed examination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century almanacs, T.J. Tomlin's A Divinity for All Persuasions opens remarkable new perspectives on the religious culture of early America. Tomlin's compelling study of thousands of almanacs arguably the most pervasive texts in America, aside from the Bible illuminates the enduring power of the new nation's shared Protestant convictions.

T. J. Tomlin is an assistant professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.