A Divinity for All Persuasions

Tomlin offers a fresh, most welcome reading of almanacs as a unique window onto early Americas pan-Protestant religious sensibility. Rather than consigning almanacs to secular or occult popular print undeserving of serious scholarly attention, Tomlin offers a nuanced reading of 2,000 almanacs, many of which have been underutilized by scholars despite their preservation in major archives. Tomlins findings will fascinate and inform students of early American religion and print culture * Candy Gunther Brown, author of The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 *
T. J. Tomlin has mastered a genre that sprawls across early America in ways that almost defy analysis. Not in this book, however, which reveals a world of common knowledge about religion or Christianity that may have been more familiar to many Americans than what was being said in sermons and substantial books. * David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School *
With its long-needed examination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century almanacs, T.J. Tomlin's A Divinity for All Persuasions opens remarkable new perspectives on the religious culture of early America. Tomlin's compelling study of thousands of almanacs arguably the most pervasive texts in America, aside from the Bible illuminates the enduring power of the new nation's shared Protestant convictions. * Thomas S. Kidd, Professor of History, Baylor *