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TITLE:

The Kingdom, the Power, & the Glory: The Millennial Impulse in Early American Literature: General Introduction

AUTHOR(S):
Reiner Smolinski , Editor, Georgia State University

DOCUMENT TYPE: Article

This docuemnt (of approximately 50 pages) includes the frontmatter, table of contents, preface, and general introduction to the anthology The Kingdom, The Power, & The Glory: The Millennial Impulse in Early American Literature, published in 1998 by Kendall-Hunt.
Copyright © 1998 by Reiner Smolinski.

ABSTRACT:

This anthology, The Kingdom, The Power, & The Glory: The Millennial Impulse in Early American Literature, seeks to redress some of the problems of access to texts of early American literature by providing a thematic approach to one of colonial America’s most trenchant ideologies: the rising glory of America. The selections included represent a wide spread of authors and texts that discuss America’s place in the millenarian cosmologies from the colonial to the Federalist period (c. 1600-1800). The texts address such issues as the great migration, the transformation of the howling wilderness into an agricultural Eden, the jeremiad, King Philip’s War, Salem witchcraft, the Great Awakening, the French-Indian War, the Revolution, and Manifest Destiny. The mortar for these seemingly unrelated building blocks is provided in my introduction, which discusses the colonists’ millenarian sense of mission and destiny within the progressively unfolding cycles (or rather gyres) of a historical continuum.