Damned Nation: Hell In America From The Revolution To Reconstruction

hell and eternal damnation. The fear of fire and brimstone and the worm that never dies exerted a profound and lasting influence on Americans' ideas about themselves, their neighbors, and the rest of the world. Kathryn Gin Lum poses a number of vital questions: Why did the fear of hell survive Enlightenment critiques in America, after largely subsiding in Europe and elsewhere? What were the consequences for early and antebellum Americans of living with the fear of seeing themselves and many people they knew eternally damned? How did they live under the weighty obligation to save as many souls as possible? What about those who rejected this sense of obligation and fear? Gin Lum shows that beneath early Americans' vaunted millennial optimism lurked a pervasive anxiety: that rather than being favored by God, they and their nation might be the object of divine wrath.

• | Author: Kathryn Gin Lum
• | Publisher: Oxford University Press
• | Publication Date: Sep 01, 2014
• | Number of Pages: 330 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0199843112
• | ISBN-13: 9780199843114