Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America.

Anderson, Christopher J.

Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America. 2 vols.

Edited by Michael McClymond. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. Vol. 1, pp. xxxi, 515; vol. 2, pp. xii, 663. $225.

Researchers of American religion have been keenly aware of various influences and complications sparked by Christian revivals and revivalism in North America. A much-needed reference work from Greenwood Press demonstrates how these revivals, and the components that helped shape them, have been significant threads woven into the religious and cultural fabric of U.S. and Canadian history.

Michael McClymond, the Clarence Louis and Helen Irene Steber associate professor in the department of theological studies at Saint Louis University, has compiled a two-volume collection of articles and primary documents on the history of revivals and revivalism in the United States and Canada. McClymond's interesting and useful reference tool highlights the work of an impressive group of authors, including a review board of well-respected scholars of religion in the United States.

The editor of the Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America states that this new publication "is the first academic reference work devoted explicitly and wholly to the topic of religious revival in the context of the United States and Canada" (p. xv). With few exceptions, the editor and his team of contributors clearly succeed in navigating the changing currents of revivals and revivalism in the American past.

Volume 1 contains over 200 short essays organized into five broad categories: persons, events, religious affiliation, phenomena, and themes. Volume 2 includes a broad range of original source documents and a helpful introductory piece to assist with situating the accounts in their contexts. These documents range from a sixteenth-century account of a Roman Catholic Christian in the American Southwest to a report by a nineteenth-century Moravian Christian worker in Canada to the more recent revivals during the late 1990s in Pensacola, Florida.

Two extensive bibliographies, one on revivals and revivalism in the United States and Canada, the second on global Christian revivals, demonstrate the abundant material available to researchers and general readers. Compiled by McClymond and Michael A. Farley, these reference lists include nearly 5,500 books, articles, and theses from New England to New Mexico and from India to the Philippines. The final section of volume 2 includes a guide to various collections of archival material available throughout the United States and Canada. Organized by Wayne Sparkman, director of the Historical Center of the Presbyterian Church in America, the list maps the locations of materials related to topics including black Christianity, Pentecostalism, and the Salvation Army.

While McClymond and his writers very successfully treat the history of revivals and revivalism, one could hope to find more information on Canadian Christianity. The first volume is filled with interesting persons and movements from the United States, with only light attention to Canada, and fewer than ten of the more than one hundred primary documents in volume 2 provide commentary on revivals and revivalism in Canada.

This concern aside, the volumes provide readers with a fuller picture of the individuals, movements, and themes in American revivalism. The primary documents with contextual introductions speak for the participant and observer from history. Students in undergraduate and graduate work will benefit from using the material McClymond has assembled. The bibliography will also help foster new research projects and introduce readers to forgotten, though historically important, participants in the religious landscape of the United States and Canada.

Christopher J. Anderson is Methodist Librarian at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. He has published articles on American religious history and is author of Voices from the Protestant Fair: Race, Gender, and Nation at the Methodist Missionary Exposition (Scarecrow Press, forthcoming).