religious conversion

Winthrop's specimens illustrated an alteration of the New World environment and the political economy of New England according to Winthrop's careful designs.

Although the British settlers imported Africans from the first as slaves, the earliest Virginians had yet to establish many basic rules regarding slavery.

Keeping the faith in a community facing extinction.

Born into slavery, this preacher and Underground Railroad conductor served as the inspiration for a history-making book.

Muslims came to America more than a century before Protestants, and in great numbers. How was their history forgotten?

Islamophobes today ignore the long history and contributions of Muslim Americans.

Awakening from illness, the newly risen patient announced that Jemima had died and that her body had been requisitioned by God for the salvation of humankind.

The first Jewish member of Congress was a virulent nativist and anti-immigration troll who ended his life in an insane asylum.

A digital archive of first-person accounts from the turn of the 19th century chronicling an unusual display of religious ecstasy.

How Hollywood portrays religious prayer.

Divisions in society and religion that still exist today resulted from the "Great Awakenings" of the 18th Century.

Islam in America dates to the founding fathers, says Smithsonian’s religion curator Peter Manseau.

19th century Hawai‘i attracted traders, entrepreneurs, and capitalists, who displaced, a flourishing and elaborate culture.

Patrick Blanchfield tracks the long-standing entanglement of guns and religion in the United States. Part 1 of 2.

Meet Boston Corbett, the self-castrated hatmaker who was John Wilkes Booth's Jack Ruby.

In 1964, he toured Africa and the Middle East on a journey that would both transform his outlook and reveal the limits of transnational solidarity.

In the years after her husband John’s death, the harpist discovered a sound all her own, a jazz rooted in acts of spirit and will.

After 400 years, reality has begun to replace the lies.

Shelby Foote, failed novelist and closeted member of the Tribe, turned the Civil War into a masterpiece of American literature.

The new program might strengthen personal connections to refugees, but history shows there are potential downsides, as well.

A visit to the site of Joseph Smith’s divine revelation makes for a different kind of public history experience.

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.

Southern Baptists were seeking a religion of the heart, and in Edwards they discovered a trove of treatises, biographies, and sermons on Christian spirituality.

How a massacre on March 22, 1622 irrevocably shaped relations between Indigenous Americans and English colonists.

Why three religious groups traded monogamy for celibacy, polygamy, and complex marriage.

The NPS is working with Cayuse historians and students to correct a historical lie that shaped the West.

The perils of turning the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade into a political symbol.

From “The Old Farmer’s Almanac” to “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” what do bestselling guides to self-improvement reveal about the United States?

Entangled with, yet critical of, colonial oppression and the evils of slavery, the true history of Boston can now be told.

"The Dead are Arising" may be the best Malcolm X biography yet. But its author seems unsure of how to write about a religion outside the American mainstream.