"Gods of the Mississippi examines how religion moved and adapted along the Mississippi River and its banks from expeditions to its source to living in its delta.... What follows the Introduction are nine excellent essays and an epilogue by Thomas Tweed.... Gods of the Mississippi bucks against an east-to-west story of American religious history and narrates a story from the continent?s interior." ?Religion in American History
Michael Pasquier is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. He is author of Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789-1870 and co-editor of the Journal of Southern Religion.
"Gods of the Mississippi succeeds on two fronts. It will certainly serve as an essential resource for scholars of religion in the South, not to mention those interested specifically in religion on and along the great river. What is more, this collection now stands as an invaluable example of precisely how scholars can retell religious history in the United States and across the Americas." ?Journal of Southern Religion Introduction: Religious Life on the Mississippi \ Michael Pasquier Contributors
Acknowledgments
1. "The Singing of the Mississippi": The River and Religions of the Black Atlantic \ Jon F. Sensbach
2. Religion and American Empire in Mississippi, 1790?1833 \ Sylvester Johnson
3. Movement, Maps, and Wonder: Civil Religious Competition at the Source of the Mississippi River, 1805?1832 \ Arthur Remillard
4. Looking for the New Jerusalem: Antebellum New Religious Movements and the Mississippi River \ Thomas Ruys Smith
5. "Go Down into Jordan: No, Mississippi": Mormon Nauvoo and the Rhetoric of Landscape \ Seth Perry
6. The Mississippi River and the Transformation of Black Religion in the Delta, 1877?1915 \ John M. Giggie
7. The Redemption of Souls and Soils: Religion and the Rural Crisis in the Delta \ Alison Collis Greene
8. Bonfires on the Levee: Place, Memory, and the Sacred in River Road Catholicism \ Justin D. Poché
9. "Big River": Johnny Cash and the Currents of History \ John Hayes
Afterword: "No Home Like a Raft": Repositioning the Narratives of U.S. Religious History \ Thomas A. Tweed
Index