Kathryn Gin Lum. Damned Nation

In October 1854, twelve-year-old Mary “Minnie” Corinna Putnam wrote a letter to her “Grandmamma” in which she described what she had been reading: “warnings, threats, denunciations of sin, [and] fearful foretellings of the wrath to come” (87). Grandmamma was a Baptist leader and well understood that unconverted children were God’s enemies. Minnie and Grandmamma are part of a large cast of characters contemplating terror in Kathryn Gin Lum’s fine study Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction. Historians have long focused on political concepts like republicanism, liberalism, and democracy, writes Lum, but the nation’s tumultuous religious landscape shaped Americans’ lived experience—and spurred them into the public sphere. This may look like well-worked material, but Lum finds a fresh theme in the fear of hell. Many ministers had been dubious about the new republican regime, but they quickly found a special role within it. The threat of hellfire would foster the virtue that was needed to hold the raucous republic together. The people had once feared their sovereign; now they would tremble before God. But, as Lum shows, that strategy quickly hit a complication: Just what was hell, and who would end up there?

Art · Art history · Democracy · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Public sphere · Sociology · Sovereignty · Theme (computing) · Virtue · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies