| 204 John Munroe Hall | Newark, DE 19716 | <div class="ExternalClass8C826E620E0647AF8EA2BFED83571886"><p>Christine Leigh Heyrman specializes in early American social and cultural history. She received her B.A. from Macalester College in 1971 and her Ph.D. from Yale in 1977. Her publications include <em>Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750</em> and <em>Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. </em>Her most recent book, <em>American Apostles</em>, explores the first encounters of American evangelicals with the Islamic world.</p></div> | <div class="ExternalClass2B797A4E9DB24F83B28722037707438C"><h4>Books:</h4><ul><li><em>American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam</em> (Hill and Wang, 2015).</li><li><em>Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt</em> (The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).</li><li><em>Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750</em> (W.W. Norton & Company, 1986).</li></ul></div> | | | | | Publications | | | | | | cheyrman@udel.edu | | Heyrman, Christine | | | <img alt="Professor Christine Heyrman" src="/Images%20Bios/faculty/Heyman_Christine.jpg" style="BORDER:0px solid;" /> | Robert W. and Shirley P. Grimble Professor of American History | | | | M 10am-12pm; Zoom | http://primus.nss.udel.edu/CoursesSearch/search-results?first_instr_name=Heyrman | | |
| American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World of Islam | Heyrman, Christine | | Hill and Wang | | 2015 | https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780809023981 | <p><strong>The surprising tale of the first American Protestant missionaries to proselytize in the Muslim world</strong></p><p>In <em>American Apostles</em>,
the Bancroft Prize-winning historian Christine Leigh Heyrman
brilliantly chronicles the first fateful collision between American
missionaries and the diverse religious cultures of the Levant. Pliny
Fisk, Levi Parsons, Jonas King: though virtually unknown today, these
three young New Englanders commanded attention across the United States
two hundred years ago. Poor boys steeped in the biblical prophecies of
evangelical Protestantism, they became the founding members of the
Palestine mission and ventured to Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, and Syria,
where they sought to expose the falsity of Muhammad's creed and to
restore these bastions of Islam to true Christianity. Not only among the
first Americans to travel throughout the Middle East, the Palestine
missionaries also played a crucial role in shaping their compatriots'
understanding of the Muslim world.As Heyrman shows, the missionaries
thrilled their American readers with tales of crossing the Sinai on
camel, sailing a canal boat up the Nile, and exploring the ancient city
of Jerusalem. But their private journals and letters often tell a story
far removed from the tales they spun for home consumption, revealing
that their missions did not go according to plan. Instead of converting
the Middle East, the members of the Palestine mission themselves
experienced unforeseen spiritual challenges as they debated with
Muslims, Jews, and Eastern Christians and pursued an elusive Bostonian
convert to Islam. As events confounded their expectations, some of the
missionaries developed a cosmopolitan curiosity about-even an
appreciation of-Islam. But others devised images of Muslims for their
American audiences that would both fuel the first wave of Islamophobia
in the United States and forge the future character of evangelical
Protestantism itself.</p><p><em>American Apostles </em>brings to life
evangelicals' first encounters with the Middle East and uncovers their
complicated legacy. The Palestine mission held the promise of
acquainting Americans with a fuller and more accurate understanding of
Islam, but ultimately it bolstered a more militant Christianity, one
that became the unofficial creed of the United States over the course of
the nineteenth century. The political and religious consequences of
that outcome endure to this day.</p> | | |
| Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt | Heyrman, Christine | | The University of North Carolina Press | | 1998 | https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807847169/southern-cross/?title_id=249 | <p>
</p><h4>Awards & distinctions</h4><p>
</p><p>1998 Bancroft Prize, Columbia University</p><p>
</p><p>
</p><p>Revealing
a surprising paradox at the heart of America's "Bible Belt," Christine
Leigh Heyrman examines how the conservative religious traditions so
strongly associated with the South evolved out of an evangelical
Protestantism that began with very different social and political
attitudes.</p><p> Although the American Revolution swept away the
institutional structures of the Anglican Church in the South, the
itinerant evangelical preachers who subsequently flooded the region at
first encountered resistance from southern whites, who were affronted by
their opposition to slaveholding and traditional ideals of masculinity,
their lack of respect for generational hierarchy, their encouragement
of women's public involvement in church affairs, and their allowance for
spiritual intimacy with blacks. As Heyrman shows, these evangelicals
achieved dominance in the region over the course of a century by
deliberately changing their own "traditional values" and assimilating
the conventional southern understandings of family relationships,
masculine prerogatives, classic patriotism, and martial honor. In so
doing, religious groups earlier associated with nonviolence and
antislavery activity came to the defense of slavery and secession and
the holy cause of upholding both by force of arms--and adopted the
values we now associate with the "Bible Belt."</p> | | |
| Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750 | Heyrman, Christine | | W.W. Norton & Company | | 1986 | http://books.wwnorton.com/books/webad.aspx?id=11192 | <p>Examines the history of the maritime communities of Gloucester and
Marblehead and notes the paradoxical retention of their conservative
lifestyle in the face of economic prosperity.</p> | | |
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