“Again am I commencing another manuscript,” wrote Rachel Stearns in October of 1836, a “brief record of the most interesting events of my life, of the Lord's dealings with me, and of my own feelings and conduct. Faithful monitors in future years to warn me against departing from my God, by a detail of past sufferings in consequence of wandering; to encourage me to trust in God, by a recollection of the many deliverances I have experienced. Very joyful has been my path sometimes, at others very sad, but in sadness or in joy the Lord has never forsaken me.”

When a Yankee named George Washington rode into the town of Lebanon in central Kentucky during the summer of 1834, most townspeople grew suspicious of what they called “his eastern ways.” Washington assumed control of the eight-year-old Presbyterian school for girls and soon made it his goal to monopolize education in the area. Finding that since 1828 the Catholic Sisters of Loretto ran Saint Augustine's Female Academy in the same town, Washington, according to one report, “did all in his power to bring odium upon” the rival institution. He even encouraged some sort of ill reports about the school's principal, Sister Ann Constantia Spalding, the daughter of prominent Catholic pioneers Henrietta and Richard Spalding. Within that first year, Washington challenged Sister Spalding to select a handful of her students to face a like number of his pupils in a debate so that the public might judge, as he wrote, which “is the best of the two [schools].” “‘Which is the best of the two,’” Spalding responded, [would have been more grammatically written ‘which is the better of the two.’” Having thus asserted herself, Spalding politely declined the invitation. Embarrassed by this exchange, Washington slipped out of town at the end of the academic year.

“A New Testament which Needs neither a Glossary nor a Commentary.” So proclaimed the New York Evening Post on 21 May 1881, in a front-page story announcing the publication of the Revised Version of the Scriptures. The first major English translation since the King James Bible, the Revised New Testament was billed as the most accurate version ever, and the Post writer did not hesitate to hyperbolize. The printing of the Revision, the reporter declared, would probably “rank among the great events of the nineteenth century.” Meanwhile, as buyers snatched up the first Testaments in New York, a bigger sensation was building in Chicago. Dubbing the new translation nothing other than “the Bible as it is,” the Chicago Tribune printedthe entire Revised New Testament—from Matthew to Revelation—in its regular Sunday edition. Although the Tribune pilfered its scriptural text from the Bible's authorized publishers, the paper lambasted the rival Chicago Times (“the fraudulent newspaper concern on Wells Street”) for printing a “forged” Testament of its own. The unsavory competition in Chicago's fourth estate did not deter an eager public, who bought 107,000 copies of the Tribune's Testament alone. Demand for bound editions of the updated Bible was no less intense, with nationwide sales figures quickly surpassing one million.

Scholars have frequently noted that the American temperance movement had close ties with Protestantism throughout its long history. The Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, generally viewed as the founding father of temperance, helped spark the establishment of the American Temperance Society in 1826 with his Six Sermons on drunkenness. Later in the century devout Protestant laypersons, such as Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) leader Frances Willard and Nebraska congressman and perennial presidential hopeful William Jennings Bryan, took up leadership of the cause. In the early years of this century, as Protestants began to divide into warring liberal and evangelical camps, Prohibition was one—and perhaps the only—issue which could unite most Protestants, from the firebreathing revivalist Billy Sunday on the one hand to the scholarly, liberal Walter Rauschenbusch on the other.1

One of the most interesting Protestant sects that settled in Palestine from 1881 onwards, and that operated successfully for more than fifty years, was the American-Swedish “Colony” in Jerusalem.1 Known in its early years as the “Spaffordites,” the group was also called the “Overcomers,” since the members' journey to Jerusalem was spurred by their desire to overcome a series of personal tragedies. The history of the “American Colony,” as it was known in Jerusalem, reveals the power of religious beliefs to motivate and shape the lives of adherents. In this case, believers emigrated, built a new community with its own order and sense of purpose, demonstrated dedication, and made sacrifices in following what they considered to be divine commands. The American Colony also exemplifies the limited possibility of sustaining a religious community based upon intense beliefs, as one generation struggles to convey its religious tenets and social principles to the next. To reconstruct the religious influences, principles, and practices of this unique group in Palestine, the American Colony should be placed in the context of nineteenth-century American evangelical Protestantism, which included elements of revivalism, dispensational premillennialism, evangelism, and holiness teachings.