Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One: Geography Counts
Chapter 1: Ireland: Not the Garden of Eden
Chapter 2: Becoming True Britons
Chapter 3: Preparing for North America

Part Two: The New Continent
Chapter 4: The Great Inland Sea
Chapter 5: The Best Available Personnel
Chapter 6: Riding an Everyday Diaspora

Part Three: Mass Diffusion
Chapter 7: Import Licences
Chapter 8: Buyers' Remorse?
Chapter 9: The Wasp-Waist Passage
Chapter 10: Tall Man Standing
Chapter 11: The Mist that was Moody
Chapter 12: The Long Prophetic Party, 1875-1895

Part IV: Building a New Scripture
Chapter 13: Checking Behind the Curtain
Chapter 14: As Original as Sin?
Chapter 15: Garnering Resources
Chapter 16: Big Deal at Amen Corner
Chapter 17: Yet More Helpful Friends
Chapter 18: Unto the Last Day
Chapter 19: Audit: Taking it all in

Appendix: The Physics of Upper-Canadian Protestantism
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Donald Harman Akenson is Douglas Professor of Canadian and Colonial History at Queen's University, Ontario. He has published several award-winning books on the development of the Judeo-Christian tradition, most recently Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North-American Evangelicalism (OUP 2018).

Reviews

Donald Akenson has spent decades pursuing his fascination with scriptural texts, and it shows in this brilliant weaving of documents and individual biographies. Prominent among the transatlantic cast is the entrepreneurial creator of the Scofield Reference Bible. Cyrus Scofield's cross-references and annotations offered to unlock the Bible's secrets about the end of time by peddling a Dispensationalist key. Akenson makes a startling proposition: this visual framing of the KJV text created a new Bible-and in doing so changed American evangelicalism."
*Phyllis D. Airhart, Professor Emerita of the History of Christianity, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto*

The culmination of thirty years of prodigious research, written with a breathtaking intellectual range (and attention to detail) that is typical of Donald Akenson's celebrated scholarship, The Americanization of the Apocalypse is the definitive history of John Nelson Darby, the Plymouth Brethren, and an eschatological movement that would begin to reorient Anglo-American Protestantism in the nineteenth century before revolutionizing it in the twentieth. Striking for its attention to topography as well as theology, transnational currents as well as regional subtleties, Akenson's book is a must read for anyone trying to understand the roots of modern evangelicalism."
*Darren Dochuk, Author of Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America*

The Americanization of the Apocalypse traces what Akenson refers to as the "migration of ideas" through the peoples, events, and particular scholars and religious leaders to try to understand the foundations of this movement in America...The density of Akenson's text and the expanse of footnotes demonstrates the volume's scholarly character...Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.
*Choice*

The Americanization of the Apocalypse brings much-needed nuance to the richness of dispensational Christianity as an Anglo-Irish-American set of nineteenth-century religious innovations. The book is anchored by Akenson's deep familiarity with the primary sources and the relevant historiography. He brings an expansive view of historical interpretation to the table and also, as always, masterful writing.
*Brian Froese, The Direction*