Book description
In many ways, religion was the United States' first prejudice-both an
early source of bigotry and the object of the first sustained efforts
to limit its effects. Spanning more than two centuries across colonial
British America and the United States, The First Prejudice
offers a groundbreaking exploration of the early history of
persecution and toleration. The twelve essays in this volume were
composed by leading historians with an eye to the larger significance
of religious tolerance and intolerance. Individual chapters examine
the prosecution of religious crimes, the biblical sources of tolerance
and intolerance, the British imperial context of toleration, the
bounds of Native American spiritual independence, the nuances of
anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, the resilience of African American
faiths, and the challenges confronted by skeptics and freethinkers.
The First Prejudice presents a revealing portrait of the
rhetoric, regulations, and customs that shaped the relationships
between people of different faiths in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century America. It relates changes in law and language to
the lived experience of religious conflict and religious cooperation,
highlighting the crucial ways in which they molded U. S. culture and
politics. By incorporating a broad range of groups and religious
differences in its accounts of tolerance and intolerance, The First
Prejudice opens a significant new vista on the understanding of
America's long experience with diversity.
Chris Beneke is Associate Professor of History and Director of the
Valente Center for Arts and Sciences at Bentley University. Christopher
S. Grenda is Associate Professor of History at Bronx Community College
of the City University of New York.
