Description
"Freedom's Coming" provides an interpretive narritive history of religion in the American South from the Civil War to the present. Based both on primary research as well as a synthetic reading of the secondary literature, the work employs a multiracial model for understanding southern religion and culture since the Civil War. It focuses especially on intersections of religion and race. The burgeoning field of southern religious history needs a work that integrates findings from diverse disciplines--anthropology, history, religious studies, and musicology--into a narrative synthesis that bases itself on extensive primary source research and the best contemporary scholarship while remaining accessible to the general reader. "Freedom's Coming" pursues the interrelated themes of race, religion, and culture in the South from a broad perspective and time frame, including not only the biracial white/black south, but additionally the lesser-known stories of the Jewish, Catholic (and Pentecostal) Latino, and (most recently) Asian Buddhist South. The work synthesizes two major strands of recent scholarship in a unique and valuable way. By combining research in white and black sources, and by acknowledging the stories of Jewish, Latino, and Asian southerners who ill fit the white/black paradigm, this work brings together scholarship on elements of southern cultural history too long left unconnected.
