19th century
A01=Kyle B. Roberts
american revolution
anti slavery movements
Author_Kyle B. Roberts
Category=NHK
Category=QRAX
Category=QRM
christianity
christians
church
cities
civil war
commerce
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
evangelical
evangelicalism
forthcoming
gender
historical
immigration
influences
meetinghouse
missionary work
morality
morals
new york city
prayer
public history
real estate
reform
religion
religious
sunday school
temperance
united states of america
urban spaces
usa
Product details
- ISBN 9780226854540
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 Oct 2026
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A portrait of born-again Protestantism in New York City from the American Revolution to the Civil War. At first glance, evangelical and Gotham seem like an odd pair. What does a movement of pious converts and reformers have to do with a city notoriously full of temptation and sin? More than you might think, says Kyle B. Roberts, who argues that religion must be considered alongside immigration, commerce, and real estate scarcity as one of the forces that shaped the New York City we know today. In Evangelical Gotham, Roberts explores the role of the urban evangelical community in the development of New York between the American Revolution and the Civil War. As developers prepared to open new neighborhoods uptown, evangelicals stood ready to build meetinghouses. As the city’s financial center emerged and solidified, evangelicals capitalized on the resultant wealth, technology, and resources to expand their missionary and benevolent causes. When they began to feel that the city’s morals had degenerated, evangelicals turned to temperance, Sunday school, prayer meetings, antislavery causes, and urban missions to reform their neighbors. The result of these efforts was Evangelical Gotham—a complicated and contradictory world whose influence spread far beyond the shores of Manhattan.
Kyle B. Roberts is assistant professor of public history and new media at Loyola University Chicago and director of the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project.
