Description
Book SynopsisThis book presents a historical study of the phenomenon of Holy Land tourism among American Protestants during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. During this period, overseas travel was newly available to the Protestant middle class due to the invention and steady popularization of steamship travel. Protestants at home in America consumed vast quantities of printed literature via the popular medium of Holy Land pilgrimage narratives. A new mental geography resulted, in which Americans forged a fresh awareness of the Middle East and began to focus millennial hopes upon the political and social concept of a Jewish remnant of the last days in a Protestant theological and historical framework. Protestant support for Zionism was born. What surfaces from the study of hundreds of pilgrimage narratives from this period is the emergence of Palestine as an iconic place for American Protestants. Through pilgrimage narratives, American Protestant''s understa
Trade ReviewStephanie Stidham Rogers's Inventing the Holy Land provides a rich and nuanced account of how American Protestant engagements with the Holy Land shaped both the development of American Protestantism and the history of the Near East. Of particular interest is her analysis of a number of writers, especially women, who have often been left out of earlier discussions. Her consideration of the environmental aspects of Holy Land writing, of Palestine as a 'fifth gospel' for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestants, and of the engagement of varieties of Protestantism with Judaism and Islam all make this a substantial contribution to our understanding of what the Holy Land has made of American Protestants, and what American Protestants have made of the Holy Land. -- Brian Yothers, University of Texas at El Paso
Rogers offers a narrative that centers on the ways in which American Protestants during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries crafted, through an elaborate textual community, an image of the “Holy Land” that accurately reflected their historical and theological preconceptions Rogers succeeds in weaving a narrative that expertly historicizes contemporary instantiations of Christian Zionism, while contributing to the wider discourses on colonial and postcolonial theory * Religious Studies Review *
