Sarah Osborn's World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Directions in Narrative History)

About this book

A colonial womans riveting personal journal and correspondence opens a window on Americas first-generation evangelicals In 1743 sitting quietly with pen in hand Sarah Osborn pondered how to tell the story of her life how to make sense of both her spiritual awakening and the sudden destitution of her family. Remarkably the memoir she created that year survives today as do more than two thousand additional pages she composed over the following three decades. Sarah Osborns World is the first book to mine this remarkable womans prolific personal and spiritual record. Catherine Brekus recovers the largely forgotten story of Sarah Osborns life as one of the most charismatic female religious leaders of her time while also connecting her captivating story to the rising evangelical movement in eighteenth-century America. A schoolteacher in Rhode Island a wife and a mother Sarah Osborn led a remarkable revival in the 1760s that brought hundreds of people including many slaves to her house each week. Her extensive written recordencompassing issues ranging from the desire to be "born again" to a suspicion of capitalismprovides a unique vantage point from which to view the emergence of evangelicalism. Brekus sets Sarah Osborns experience in the context of her revivalist era and expands our understanding of the birth of the evangelical movementa movement that transformed Protestantism in the decades before the American Revolution.