Joseph Brown’s Adventures with the Jerks

The People Called New Lights Blog

From maritime Canada to the Carolina backcountry, New England to the Illinois prairies, Protestants in British North America and the new United States influenced by the evangelical awakenings of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were known as the "people called New Lights." This occasional blog features news, reviews, and research notes, along with dispatches from the archives and edited transcriptions of notable, obscure, and downright quirky manuscripts chronicling the religious beliefs, practices, and experiences of the people called New Lights from 1730 to 1850.

I was recently invited to contribute a blog post for a roundtable discussion of religion in The Panorama, the online forum of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. In “Joseph Brown’s Adventures with the Jerks,” I reflect briefly on my recent work on the history of the jerking exercise and consider the “tangled legacy” of American evangelicalism, “settler colonialism, Native American dispossession, and the expansion of slavery.”

Hope you’ll consider checking it out and sharing your reactions on the SHEAR website.

Blog Post

Col. Joseph Brown (1772–1868), n.d., photographic print. Source: Picture Collection, ca. 1800–1970, Box 2, Folder 35, THS 193, Tennessee Historical Society, Nashville. Courtesy of Tennessee State Library and Archives.