one of the urgent issues of american citizens within the first century of nationhood have been daily survival, political concord, exploration of the continent, overseas coverage, and--fixed deeply within the collective consciousness--hell and everlasting damnation. the terror of fireplace and brimstone and the trojan horse that by no means dies exerted a profound and lasting effect on americans' principles approximately themselves, their acquaintances, and the remainder of the world.

Kathryn Gin Lum poses a few very important questions: Why did the phobia of hell live to tell the tale Enlightenment opinions in the US, after mostly subsiding in Europe and in other places? What have been the implications for early and antebellum americans of residing with the terror of seeing themselves and plenty of humans they knew forever damned? How did they stay less than the weighty legal responsibility to avoid wasting as many souls as attainable? What approximately those that rejected this feeling of legal responsibility and worry? Gin Lum exhibits that underneath early american citizens' vaunted millennial optimism lurked a pervasive nervousness: that instead of being preferred via God, they and their kingdom can be the thing of divine wrath. As commonly used social hierarchies crumbled earlier than revival hearth, monetary unease, and political chaos, "saved" and "damned" turned as the most important differences as race, category, and gender. the specter of damnation turned an impetus for or deterrent from every kind of behaviors, from studying novels to possessing slaves.

Gin Lum tracks the belief of hell from the Revolution to Reconstruction. She considers the guidelines of theological leaders like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney, in addition to these of normal men and women. She discusses the perspectives of local americans, american citizens of eu and African descent, citizens of Northern insane asylums and Southern plantations, New England's clergy and missionaries in another country, or even proponents of Swedenborgianism and annihilationism. Damned kingdom offers a charming account of an idea that performed a transformative position in America's highbrow and cultural history.