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This book provides a fresh, in-depth examination of the Revival of 1857-58, a widespread religious awakening most famous for urban prayer meetings in major metropolitan centers across the United States. Often mentioned in religious history texts and articles but overshadowed by scholarly attention ...

This book provides a fresh, in-depth examination of the Revival of 1857-58, a widespread religious awakening most famous for urban prayer meetings in major metropolitan centers across the United States. Often mentioned in religious history texts and articles but overshadowed by scholarly attention to the first and second "Great Awakenings," the revival has lacked a critical, book-length analysis. This study will help to fill this gap and to place the event within the context of Protestant revival traditions in America. The Revival of 1857-58 was a multifaceted religious movement that Long suggests may have been the closest thing to a truly national revival in American history. The awakening marked the coming together of formalist and populist evangelical groups, particularly in urban areas, and helped to create the beginnings of a transdenominational religious identity among middle-class American evangelicals. Long explores the revival from various angles, emphasizing the importance of historiography and examining the way Calvinist clergy and the editors of the daily press canonized particular versions of the revival story, most notably its role in the history of great awakenings and its character as a masculine "businessmen's revival." She gives attention to grassroots perspectives on the awakening and also pursues wider social and cultural questions, including whether the revival actually affected evangelical involvement in social reform. The book combines insights from contemporary scholarship concerning revivals, women's history, and nineteenth-century mass print with extensive primary source research. The result is a clearly written study that blends careful description with nuanced analysis.

Not long ago, neighborhoods such as the South Bronx, South Central Los Angeles, and Boston's Roxbury were crime-ridden wastelands of vacant lots and burned-out buildings, notorious symbols of urban decay. In House by House, Block by Block, Alexander von Hoffman tells the remarkable stories of how ...

Not long ago, neighborhoods such as the South Bronx, South Central Los Angeles, and Boston's Roxbury were crime-ridden wastelands of vacant lots and burned-out buildings, notorious symbols of urban decay. In House by House, Block by Block, Alexander von Hoffman tells the remarkable stories of how local activists and community groups helped turn these areas around. For sixty years, federal policy has attempted with little success to solve the problems of housing and poverty in America's inner cities. Yet increasingly, local organizations are picking up where Washington has left off. In a series of dramatic and colorful narratives, von Hoffman shows how these groups are revitalizing once desperate neighborhoods in five major cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The unlikely heroes include: the tough-talking Bronx priest who made apartment buildings for low-income people glisten in the midst of ruins and despair; the "crazy white man" who scrambled to save Chicago's historic Black Metropolis from the wrecking ball; the Boston cops who built a task force that put the brakes on youth gangs. Thanks to locally-based, bootstrap efforts like these, in inner-city neighborhoods across the country, crime rates are falling, real estate values are rising, and businesses are returning. Von Hoffman also shows that grass-roots work can't do it alone: successful revitalization needs the support of local government and access to business and foundation capital. Based on years of research and more than a hundred interviews, this book is the first systematic account of the dramatic urban revival now going on in the United States. House by House, Block by Block will be a must-read for anyone who cares about the fate of America's cities.