A Divinity for All Persuasions Almanacs and Early American Religious Life

The almanac was early America's most affordable and widespread form of print. At its core, it was a calendar and an astrologically-based medical handbook punctuated by poetry, moral axioms, and amusing anecdotes. A Divinity for All Persuasions investigates the religious significance of early America's most ubiquitous popular genre. Other than a Bible and perhaps a few sermons and schoolbooks, an almanac was the only printed item most people owned before 1820 and almanac-makers became astute arbiters of popular opinion. Catering to consumer demand by drawing on the religious works of their day, early American almanac-makers placed a distilled Protestant vernacular at the center of their publications. By disseminating a recognizable collection of Protestant concepts regarding God's existence, divine revelation, the human condition, and the afterlife, almanacs played an unparalleled role in reinforcing British North America's "shared religious culture."Employing a wealth of archival material, T.J. Tomlin analyzes the pan-Protestant sensibility distributed through the almanacs' pages between 1730 and 1820. Influenced by readers' opinions and printers' pragmatism, the religious content of popular print supports a fresh 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" (the Bible, the afterlife, and a recognizably moral life) rather than denominational specifics to define and organize their religious lives.A Divinity for All Persuasions uncovers the prevailing religious sensibility at the center of early America's most popular form of print.