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Beginning in 1760, this comprehensive history charts the growth and development of the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren church family up and through the year 2000. Extraordinarily well-documented study with elaborate notes that will guide the reader to recent and standard literature on the numerous topics, figures, developments, and events covered. The volume is a companion to and designed to be used with THE METHODIST EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA: A SOURCEBOOK, for which it provides background, context and interpretation. Contents include: Launching the Methodist Movements 1760-1768 Structuring the Immigrant Initiatives 1769-1778 Making Church 1777-1784 Constituting Methodism 1784-1792 Spreaking Scriptural Holiness 1792-1816 Snapshot I- Methodism in 1816: Baltimore 1816 Building for Ministry and Nuture 1816-1850s Dividing by Mission, Ethnicity, Gender, and Vision 1816-1850s Dividing over Slavery, Region, Authority, and Race 1830-1860s Embracing the War Cause(s) 1860-1865 Reconstructing Methodism(s) 1866-1884 Snapshot II- Methodism in 1884: Wilker-Barre, PA 1884 Reshaping the Church for Mission 1884-1939 Taking on the World 1884-1939 Warring for World Order and Against Worldliness Within 1930-1968 Snapshot III- Methodism in 1968: Denver 1968 Merging and Reappraising 1968-1984 Holding Fast/Pressing On 1984-2000 A wide-angled narrative that attends to religious life at the local level, to missions and missionary societies , to justice struggles, to camp and quarterly meetings, to the Sunday school and catechisms, to architecture and worship, to higher education, to hospitals and homes, to temperance, to deaconesses and to Methodist experiences in war and in peace-making A volume that attends critically to Methodism’s dilemmas over and initiatives with regard to race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and relation to culture A documentation and display of the rich diversity of the Methodist experience A retelling of the contests over and evolution of Methodist/EUB organization, authority, ministerial orders and ethical/doctrinal emphases

“A ground-breaking analysis of the intertwined political, racial, and religious dynamics” in the early twentieth century Methodist Church (Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards, United Theological Seminary, Dayton Ohio). In 1939, America’s three major Methodist Churches sent delegates to Kansas City, Missouri, for what they called the Uniting Conference. They formed the largest, and arguably the most powerful, Protestant church in the country. Yet this newly “unified” denomination was segregated to its core. In The Methodist Unification, Morris L. Davis examines this unification process, and how it came to institutionalize racism and segregation in unprecedented ways. Davis shows that Methodists in the early twentieth century—including high-profile African American clergy—were very much against integration. Many feared that mixing the races would lead to interracial marriages and threaten the social order of American society. The Methodist Unification illuminates the religious culture of Methodism, Methodists' self-identification as the primary carriers of “American Christian Civilization,” and their influence on the crystallization of whiteness during the Jim Crow Era as a legal category and cultural symbol.