Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876

The development, and costs, of the idea that God has a special plan for America.

Nicholas Guyatt (Author)

9780521867887, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 July 2007

352 pages
24 x 16 x 2.4 cm, 0.618 kg

"Guyatt presents a rich, complex argument about the uses of national providential ideas in early America...This work should receive serious attention from scholars of the early republic" --Journal of the Early Republic

Nicholas Guyatt offers a completely new understanding of a central question in American history: how did Americans come to think that God favored the United States above other nations? Tracing the story of American providentialism, this book uncovers the British roots of American religious nationalism before the American Revolution and the extraordinary struggles of white Americans to reconcile their ideas of national mission with the racial diversity of the early republic. Making sense of previously diffuse debates on manifest destiny, millenarianism, and American mission, Providence and the Invention of the United States explains the origins and development of the idea that God has a special plan for America. This conviction supplied the United States with a powerful sense of national purpose, but it also prevented Americans from clearly understanding events and people that could not easily be fitted into the providential scheme.

Part I. Britain, America, and the Emergence of Providential Separatism: 1. Providence and the problem of England in early America
2. 'Empires are mortal': the origins of providential separatism, 1756–1775
3. 'Becoming a nation at once': providentialism and the American Revolution
Part II. Providence, Race, and the Limits of Revolution: 4. 'One glorious example': the limits of Revolutionary providentialism
5. 'Deifying prejudice': race and removal in the early republic
6. 'Divided destinies': the providential meanings of American slavery
7. 'The regenerated nation': the Civil War and the price of reunion
8. William Lloyd Garrison's complaint.

Subject Areas: History of religion [HRAX], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL]