A Divinity for All Persuasions: Almanacs and Early American Religious Life

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 innovative interpretation 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 religious lives.

About the Author :
T.J. Tomlin is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado.

Review :
"T.J. Tomlin's first book is a very important one...The historiographic contributions of this slim volume are undeniable. It expands our understanding of the relationship between cheap print and popular religion and, perhaps more importantly, outlines a shared religious sensibility that coursed through the pages of Early America's most accessible printed materials...It is a work of seminal importance for students of early American religion, popular culture, and the history of the book."--Anglican and Episcopal History "A significant contribution to early American religious and book history, A Dvinity for All Persuasions is historiographically ambitious, intensively researched, and well written. It deserves to be read as the authoritative book on the subject of early American almanacs."--Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography "The remarkable breadth of Tomlin's reading is the book's greatest strength...A Divinity for All Persuasions is impressive in its careful archival research and persuasive in its argument...Tomlin takes this often-overlooked piece of the print sphere seriously as an object of study, and in so doing reveals the complex forces at work in this humble piece of the early American archive. The book will appeal to scholars interested in a richly textured understanding of early American print culture, especially those who find debates over theological nuance too elitist, and who are searching instead for some measure of the intellectual currents circulating in the tavern as opposed to the pulpit."--Early American Literature "A Divinity for All Persuasions provides a fresh interpretation of almanacs Tomlin's close reading of almanacs reveals an important and often overlooked means of conveying and reinforcing biblical teachings among a wide readership. In a fresh and persuasive interpretation of almanacs Tomlin rejects the oft repeated assessment that almanacs were filled with superstitions, the occult, and magic that reflected a non-Christian element in colonial popular religion Tomlin has made an important contribution to our understanding of both almanacs and popular religion."--Reviews in American History "[Tomlin's] advocacy for almanacs as data for analyzing popular thought in early America is an accomplishment."--Journal of American History "A survey of almanacs from the colonial era to the early nineteenth century... [W]onderfully presented." --Religion in American History "Tomlin offers a fresh, most welcome reading of almanacs as a unique window onto early America's 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. Tomlin's findings will fascinate and inform students of early American religion and print culture." --Candy Gunther Brown, author of The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 "T. J. Tomlin will persuade you in his new book, A Divinity for All Persuasions, that almanacs mattered."--Journal of Religion "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." --David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School "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." --Thomas S. Kidd, Professor of History, Baylor University "Valuable for their data on the early American environment, economy, politics, society, and family, these quirky-even quaint-colonial texts seldom provide the sustained religious content found in the introspective diaries and journals of prominent figures such as Francis Asbury or Sarah Osborn, the subjects of two outstanding recent biographies. And the seemingly vapid 'filler' content-a wide range of borrowed or penned maxims, poems, essays, and humorous anecdotes-that surrounded the annual calendar pages has rarely been considered on its own and almost never examined for its religious significance. This is the uncharted terrain into which T. J. Tomlin ventures in his concise, beautifully written, painstakingly researched, and carefully argued monograph, A Divinity for All Persuasions." --William and Mary Quarterly