The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution was to have been the next prize for women after winning the vote in 1920. This agenda—first set in 1923—was not accepted by many women or most members of the U.S. Congress until 1972. During the long generation that separated the conception and birth of the ERA, there came also the gestation of modern feminism, which differed from the earlier suffragist ideology in its understanding of gender. Suffragists, for the most part, worked within traditional definitions, insisting that complex and vexing social issues required a woman's touch; women's uniquely gendered experiences should be added to those of men to solve modern problems.

Traditionally, art historians have relied on iconography, biography, and connoisseurship as the fundamental means of studying images. These approaches and methods stress the singularity of an image, its authenticity, and its authorship; therefore, they reflect an enduring debt to the humanist tradition of individualism. The image is understood principally as the product of the unique and privileged inspiration of an individual artist and is regarded as a measure of this individual's genius. Iconographical and biographical research secure authorial intent; connoisseurship authenticates the work. While this scholarly apparatus certainly offers the art historian indispensable tools, it is important to understand that its commitment to original intent is singularly ill-equipped to assess the reception of images, the ongoing history of response that keeps images alive within a culture from generation to generation.

In 1975, Robin Gill wrote that “as yet there is a rather thin body of literature on possible correlations between sociology and theology.” Since then, a host of other writers have joined Gill in commenting on the absence of such correlations and in seeking to connect the two phenomena. Indeed, the current era in American culture might, as several commentators have noted, be understood as one of detente between social science and religion. Such a depiction, of course, rests on the assumption that sociology and theology are hostile enterprises that may be brought together. This has, however, not always been the case: the past fifteen years are not the first occasion when theology and sociology have intersected and a Christian sociology been proposed.

An “enormous mob” marching, protesting, and burning the governor in effigy does not sound like a typical description of late nineteenth-century southern religion. It more than likely conjures images of campus and urban riots of recent times. Surprisingly, such an event occurred in traditionally staid north Alabama over 100 years ago. On February 25,1891, outraged Limestone County farmers marched on the town square in Athens and demonstrated in front of the county courthouse. Across the street from the courthouse stood Theophilus West-moreland's drugstore. Here an effigy of Governor Thomas Goode Jones, with a noose around its neck, was thrown from a second floor window and set aflame, much to the mob's delight. After the governor was taken care of, Westmoreland's brother-in-law and president of the Limestone County Farmers' Alliance, Hector D. Lane, addressed the mob, stoking the passions of the Alliance's “wool hat boys and sun bonnet girls.”

In 1976, a young theologian named Donald Dayton wrote an influential book that sought to put asunder what he saw as an unholy marriage between evangelical religion and conservative politics in America. In Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, Dayton showed how revivalistic Protestantism had, in the nineteenth century, been wedded firmly to progressive political causes. Dayton began his book by frankly admitting that his own political views had been heavily influenced by the student movements—antiwar, civil rights, equal rights— of the 1960's. Separate chapters linked evangelical religion to nineteenth-century movements for racial equality, economic justice, and feminism. In his final chapter, Dayton argued that twentieth-century evangelicalism had abandoned its heritage of radical social reform under the dual influence of premillennialism imported from England and ideas about biblical inerrancy formulated at Princeton Seminary.

Recent studies of the Second Great Awakening have stressed the strong appeal of evangelical religion to female worshippers. The revival has been portrayed as a “women's awakening” that nurtured “bonds of womanhood,” promoted female benevolence, and shaped antebellum canons of domesticity. Mary Lyon (1797-1849) and the founding of Mount Holyoke Seminary, which opened in 1837, have not gone unnoticed by historians of a women's awakening. In a follow-up essay to her important study of Catherine Beecher, for example, Kathryn Kish Sklar established the educational significance of Mount Holyoke and situated Lyon's efforts in the context of the Second Great Awakening. Mount Holyoke's innovations included secure financial support funded by the evangelical community at large; a resultant low cost that enabled students from modest and even poor backgrounds to enroll; and an intellectually rigorous curriculum that eschewed “ornamentations” such as dancing and the cultivation of gentility.

How one should classsify religious groups in the United States is a persistent question. The necessity for some sort of classification system is obvious: the vast diversity of religion in the United States requires that we be able to bring order out of what would otherwise be sheer chaos. At the same time, the pluralism that raises the issue in the first place makes the development of an adequate method of classification difficult. Both the historic Judeo-Christian mainstream and the alternatives to it that have emerged throughout our history must be given their due in a way that obscures the importance of neither one.

The status reversal ritual that American religious historiography has undergone in the last two decades has done much to “mainstream” previously taboo topics within the field. Many religious groups once dismissed as odd and insignificant “cults” are now seen as “new religious movements” worthy of serious scrutiny. One subject that has benefited from this reversal of fortunes is theosophy. Thanks to the work of scholars such as Robert Ellwood and Carl Jackson, theosophists are now part of the story of American religion. Exactly what part they are to play in that story remains, however, unclear.