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About the Book

For most of the eighteenth century, British protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. Instead, it thrived as part of a complex transatlantic system that bound religious institutions to imperial politics. As Katherine Carté argues, British imperial protestantism proved remarkably effective in advancing both the interests of empire and the cause of religion until the war for American independence disrupted it. That Revolution forced a reassessment of the role of religion in public life on both sides of the Atlantic. Religious communities struggled to reorganize within and across new national borders. Religious leaders recalibrated their relationships to government. If these shifts were more pronounced in the United States than in Britain, the loss of a shared system nonetheless mattered to both nations.

Sweeping and explicitly transatlantic, Religion and the American Revolution demonstrates that if religion helped set the terms through which Anglo-Americans encountered the imperial crisis and the violence of war, it likewise set the terms through which both nations could imagine the possibilities of a new world.

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About the Author

Dr. Kate Carté is an Associate Professor of History specializing in early American and Atlantic history, particularly the history of religion. Prior to joining to Southern Methodist University in 2012, she was associate professor of history and Rothrock Fellow at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America, which was awarded the 2010 Dale W. Brown Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.

She has been a Charles A. Ryskamp Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, an affiliate fellow of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, a Franklin Fellow of the American Philosophical Society, and a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her research and teaching interests center on the role of religion in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, especially as it intersects with political and economic developments. Her current project, Religion Transformed, examines the impact of the American Revolution on religion and politics in the Anglo-American world.