<p><span class="deck"> Shocking, exuberant, exalted, the camp meeting answered the pioneers' demand for religion and helped shape the character of the West.</span> </p>
<p>The Sunday afternoon broadcasts of Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, once described as the "voice of God," were avidly followed by a radio audience of thirty to fifty million Americans during the Thirties.</p>
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">In the shadow of Bunker Hill, bigots perpetrated an atrocity that showed a shocked nation that the fires of the Reformation still burned in the New World</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> In 1913 the Ouija board dictated a novel. Twenty years later it commanded a murder. It is most popular in times of national catastrophe, and it’s selling pretty briskly just now.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> Did the fifty-five statesmen meeting in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention know that a witch-hunt was taking place while they deliberated? Did they care?</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The largest Gothic cathedral in the Western Hemisphere has the strangest stained-glass windows in the world</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> The Founding, Fathers never did agree about the proper relationship between church and state. No wonder the Supreme Court has been backing and filling on the principle ever since.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Forget your conventional picture of America in 1810. In the first half of the 19th century, we were not at all the placid, straitlaced, white-picket-fence nation we imagine ourselves to have been. By looking at the patterns of everyday life as recorded by contemporary foreign and native observers of the young republic, and by asking the questions that historians don't think to ask of another time</span><span style="line-height: 1.3;">—What were people really like? How did they greet one another in the street? How did they occupy their leisure time? What did they eat?</span><span style="line-height: 1.3;">—Jack Larking brings us a portrait of another America, an America that was so different from both our conception of its past life and its present-day reality as to seem a foreign country.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">How Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture sent an eccentric Russian mystic on a sensitive mission to Asia and thereby created diplomatic havoc, personal humiliation, and embarrassment for the administration.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A century and a half ago, two young girls started hearing noises they said came from beyond the grave, and then embarked on a lifetime career that began a national obsession with spiritualism that has lasted to this day.</span></p>
<p>While much of the world still faces restrictions on religion, America's unique approach brought about both religious freedom and spiritual vibrancy.</p>
