Yale University Library Research Guides: History of the Bible &amp; the Book: Bible in America

Getting Started

The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and American Popular Culture (Online) by Dan W. Clanton (Editor); Terry R. Clark (Editor) This Handbook includes a wide range of topics organized under several broad themes, including biblical characters (such as Adam, Eve, David and Jesus) and themes (like Creation, Hell, and Apocalyptic) in popular culture; the Bible in popular cultural genres (for example, film, comics, and Jazz); and "lived" examples (such as museums and theme parks).
The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America (Online) by Paul Gutjahr (Editor) Looks at the role of the Bible in America in various historical moments and in relationship to specific institutions and cultural expressions. It takes seriously the fact that the Bible is both a physical object that has exercised power.

How Books Came to America: The Rise of the American Book Trade (Online) by John Hruschka Traces the development of the American book trade from the moment of European contact with the Americas, through the growth of regional book trades in the early English colonial cities, to the more or less unified national book trade that emerged after the American Civil War and flourished in the twentieth century.
Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture by Jonathan M. Yeager Tells the story of how Edwards's works were published, including the people who were involved in their publication and their motivations. This book explores what the printing, publishing, and editing of Jonathan Edwards's publications can tell us about religious print culture in the eighteenth century.
Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America (Online) by Charles L. Cohen (Editor); Paul S. Boyer (Editor) Explores how a variety of print media have shaped and been shaped by experiences of faith since the Civil War.

America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911 (Online) by Mark A. Noll Shows how the Bible shaped American national history even as that history influenced the use of Scripture. It explores the rise of a strongly Protestant Bible civilization in the early United States that was then fractured by debates over slavery, contested by growing numbers of non-Protestant Americans (Catholics, Jews, agnostics), and torn apart by the Civil War.
The Bible in the Public Square: Its Enduring Influence in American Life by Mark A. Chancey Explores perceptions and interpretations of scripture in American politics, identity, popular culture, and public education.
Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Online) by Peter J. Wosh Tells the story of how the American Bible Society grew to be a nonprofit corporate bureaucracy that managed, among other projects, what was one of the largest publishing houses in the United States.
An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880 by Paul Gutjahr Looks at the production of over 1,700 different American editions of the Bible in the century after the American Revolution. Examines how many different constituencies (both secular and religious) fought to keep the Bible the preeminent text in the United States as the country's print marketplace experienced explosive growth.

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Post-Emancipation South (Online) by Elizabeth L. Jemison Shows how southerners, black and white, drew on biblical narratives as the basis for very different political imaginaries during and after Reconstruction. Argues that the evangelical groups that dominated Mississippi shaped contesting visions of black and white rights.
The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 (Online) by Candy Gunther Brown Explores the roots of evangelical publishing in the US, from the founding of the Methodist Book Concern in 1789 to the 1880 publication of the runaway best-seller Ben-Hur. Brown shows how this distinct print community used the Word of the Bible and printed words of their own to pursue a paradoxical mission: purity from and a transformative presence in the secular world.
Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (Online) by David Paul Nord Shows how the managers of Bible and religious tract societies made themselves into large-scale manufacturers and distributors of print.
In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (Online) by Peter J. Thuesen A history of the Bible revision movement, which resulted in a vast proliferation of English scripture editions and an enduring polarization of American Christians over versions of Holy Writ.