Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty

This chapter rereads John William De Forest’s Civil War novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), and his story “Parole d’Honneur” (1868), which address the pressures the military state exerts on its main characters. As a Civil War veteran, De Forest traditionally has been situated as an important figure in American literary realism. White critics traditionally praise De Forest’s novel as a work of war realism sadly undermined by its sentimental romance plot, my approach looks instead to the marriage plot as the site where civilian and military lives become fatally entangled. I argue this romance of reunion is concerned not only with national reconciliation of the North and South after the war, but also with the military’s invasive and sometimes destructive presence in wartime civilian life. Miss Ravenel’s Conversion expresses De Forest’s wary sense of the military government in a time of war and presents characters who must be rescued from it.

Bureaucracy in America:De Forest's Paperwork Amanda Claybaugh (bio) John W. De Forest is remembered, when he is remembered at all, as the first important novelist of the American Civil War (1861-65). When the war broke out, De Forest was already the author of a handful of novels and travel books. During his three years in the Union Army, while serving as a captain first in Louisiana and then in Virginia, he published a number of essays about his wartime experiences in the major northern magazines.1 These essays came to the notice of a general, who detailed De Forest to his staff and charged him with publishing accounts of the battles in which the general's men had fought. In the final months of the war, this soldier-author became an administrator. He was discharged from active duty and transferred to the Reserve Veteran's Corps, and after the war had ended, he was assigned to work in the reserve corps' headquarters in Washington, where he was responsible for overseeing nine clerks in the personnel office. He was also charged with writing a report defending the corps against the generals, Ulysses S. Grant among them, who wanted it to disband. It was during this time that De Forest finished writing what would be his great Civil War novel, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867). De Forest's career as an administrator then continued into Reconstruction (1865-77). In July 1866, he was transferred to the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually referred to as the Freedmen's Bureau. He served two months in the bureau's headquarters, also in Washington, where he was part of a committee that drafted regulations specifying the precise extent of bureau authority in the occupied states. He was then assigned to a local bureau office in Greenville, South Carolina, where he served from October 1866 to January 1868, overseeing all matters concerning the nearly eighty thousand people in his district. De Forest would publish six essays about southern [End Page 203] society in the aftermath of the war and an array of short stories on southern themes, as well as four essays about his own experiences working in the local bureau office.2 To recall that De Forest served as an administrator as well as a soldier is to recall that the Civil War and Reconstruction period entailed a remarkable expansion of government. The Civil War had been fought, after all, over the question of federal power, and the demands of fighting a vast war meant that the Confederacy no less than the Union saw government centralize over the war's four years. Nor did the end of the war reverse this process. The demands of overseeing and rebuilding the occupied southern states, as well as integrating the freed men and women into the new political order, meant that the federal government would continue to grow in size and take on new functions. For the first time the federal government assumed responsibility for aiding citizens in need, both by providing pensions to wounded soldiers and their families, and by providing food, clothing, housing, and medical care to the freed people. And new executive departments were established, among them the Departments of Justice and Agriculture, and the number of federal employees multiplied, from roughly 24,000 in 1860 to 126,000 at the turn of the century.3 This expansion of government drew new attention to bureaucracy. The major northern magazines, which voiced and set elite opinion, were filled with descriptions of bureaucracies, in particular those of the Union Army and the Freedmen's Bureau. Tracking these descriptions, I have recovered an evolving nineteenth-century discourse about bureaucracy. For the most part, this discourse was quite critical of both bureaucratic institutions and bureaucrats, but not entirely so in the United States of the 1860s. The Civil War and Reconstruction prompted at least some people in the north to see possibilities in bureaucracy as a mode of both allocating authority and of structuring organizations, but also, and more surprisingly, as a mode of literary representation. It was only in the 1870s, when the conservative backlash against Reconstruction gave rise...

Winner of Best Graduate Student Paper Award at 2006 American Culture Association Conference ... I never forgot that my main duty should consist in educating entire population around me to settle their differences by civil law; in other words, I considered myself an instrument of reconstruction. -John W. De Forest, Union Officer (29) Already a promising author when he was commissioned as Captain of Twelfth Connecticut Volunteers, John W. De Forest turned a writerly eye on war he began fighting in 1862. Then, after Appomattox, De Forest moved to South Carolina in 1866 to serve as a subassistant commissioner for Freedman's Bureau, giving him rare insight into, as well as an active role in, Reconstruction. He recorded his experiences both in and after war in a series of articles for Harper's New Monthly Magazine (and published in book form posthumously as A Volunteer's Adventures and A Union Officer in Reconstruction). De Forest's nonfiction accounts of his service constituted much of raw material for Miss Ravenel's Conversion from secession to Loyalty, his attempt at The Great American Novel (a term he would coin in 1868). De Forest, in his dual role of author and officer, is an important cultural-historical figure whose life and work highlight potential connections between political and aesthetic attempts at rebuilding Union. Because initial ideas for Reconstruction were speculative visions of a new nationhood, articulations of these ideas-even though they derived from military or political viewpoints-can themselves be considered imaginative works. Conversely, De Forest's Miss Ravenel, as an imaginative work about Civil War and Reconstruction, in a sense enacts practical politics through literary means. As we will see, De Forest's literary agenda is also a political agenda: national unification through satire. In short, politics of De Forest's aesthetic Reconstruction and aesthetics of his efforts at onthe-ground political Reconstruction collapse distance between aesthetic products and realworld politics. De Forest uses satiric realism in an aesthetic attempt to implement a conciliatory Reconstruction as imagined and expressed by his Commanderin-Chief, Abraham Lincoln. Throughout Miss Ravenel, De Forest relies on satire to reveal distance between reality and idealistic presentations of it, to aesthetically undermine what he sees as limited, socially conservative worldview of popular sentimental novels. De Forest fears that sentimental fiction's privileging of private sphere encourages provincialism and insularity, and as a result endangers what he sees as ultimate goal of postbellum art and politics: political and moral reconstruction of national Union. Through satire of sentimental novels and notions, as well as of provincial characters and feminine, domestic institutions, De Forest in Miss Ravenel purports to neutralize their political power. In their stead he imagines a Union based on trust in public institutions of a national scope, a vision of American life and literature consistent with views of Reconstruction that President Lincoln expressed before he was assassinated. Like Lincoln, De Forest-in both his war novel and his memoirs from his days in Freedman's Bureau-advocates Reconstruction through legislation that stresses the law of solidarity and fact that the perfect prosperity of whole depends on prosperity of all parts (Union Officer 198). Miss Ravenel and Satire as Realism Miss Ravenel's marriage plot-designed, like that of many Civil War-era novels, to signify an end to animosities between North and Southwas in some ways quite familiar to readers of Civil War romances, as postbellum reconciliation romance was a popular genre in years after war. Such romances, according to critic Gregory S. Jackson, elided sectional differences by staging elaborate plots in which love, sorrow, and grief-induced insanity transcended (or obscured) racial and cultural difference, interregional animosity, sectional ideology, and ultimately even internecine conflict (284). …

REPORTING TRIUMPH, SAVING A NATION: "INTERESTING JUXTAPOSITIONS" IN JOHN W. DE FOREST'S CIVIL WAR Wade Newhouse Bentley College More than perhaps any other fiction of the American Civil War, John W. De Forest's 1867 novel Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty depicts warfare as an indispensable component of domestic prosperity, with veterans and civilians collaborating to realize the war's potential for social uplift. Scenes of combat show De Forest's reader what the Union veteran endured and survived for the sake of the new nation, while the central narrative of courtship, marriage , and sexual betrayal extends the cultural trauma of civil war— the perpetual threat that meaningful social structure can be lost to a domestic, internal enemy—to the comfortable world of the reader's own recognizable personal space. Writing home front and battlefield as mutually supportive rhetorical locations rather than distinct and separate narrative subjects, De Forest militarizes the postwar American family and turns the epistemology of war into a domestic commodity . Published only two years after Appomattox, De Forest's Civil War signifies neither a struggle for racial justice nor a rejuvenated federalism but a crisis of individual responsibility to complementary ideals of family and nation. For De Forest, reading and writing the war is the logical extension of fighting it, as reading and writing embody a necessary personalized reaction to the event. In such acts of introspection, however, individuality becomes an illusion, surrendered to an imaginary political collective in the service of postwar American nationalism. Personal and national destiny are linked in Miss Ravenel's Conversion from the novel's opening sentence, which aligns the beginning of the war with the first stirrings of a love story: "It was shortly after the capitulation of loyal Fort Sumter to rebellious South Carolina that Mr. Edward Colburne of New Boston made the acquaintance ofMiss Lillie Ravenel ofNew Orleans."1 The first meeting ofthe novel's protagonists is chronologically marked by the start of the war; not surprisingly, their eventual union in marriage happens only after the war has been satisfactorily concluded. In between their meeting and their marriage, these lovers—like the nation they represent—endure the tribulations of betrayal and bloodshed, family division and sacrifice . The resolution of the love story explains the parallel triumph of 166Wade Newhouse the Union victory: the once-separated lovers and the warring elements of their nation have "sailed separately over stormy seas, but now they are in a quiet haven, united so long as life shall last" (467, emphasis added). While De Forest was by no means the first or only novelist to use the creation of an American family as a metaphor for the Civil War (or perhaps to use the war as a metaphor for the nationalist potential inherent within the American family),2 he was the first to support such a metaphor with detailed descriptions of what actually happened on the battlefield based on personal combat experience. He saw a causal relationship between the war he had fought with the army and an upper middle-class stability based on the expansion of free labor that the Union victory represented to him—what James A. Hijiya calls a pursuit of New World "gentility."3 The American future, De Forest predicts, will be marked by "peaceful industry, as ennobling as [Colburne's] fighting" (468). From the opening lines quoted above, the novel establishes a narrative scheme in which the dramatic possibilities oflove and war, both readily available to the popular imagination of 1867, are comparable ways to organize knowledge and understanding across broadly symbolic political lines.4 "It was unquestionably," the narrator continues, "the southern rebellionwhich brought Miss Ravenel and Mr. Colburne into interesting juxtaposition" (3). The remainder of the novel will show that "interesting juxtaposition"—ofLillie and Colburne, ofNorth and South, of morality and vice, and ultimately of war story and love story—drives De Forest's vision ofthe war and its legacy. These juxtapositions reveal a Civil War whose themes offreedom and union must be painstakingly constructed'by fiction, not merely recorded and preserved by writers as self-evident lessons after the fact. Moreover, the novel's most basic juxtaposition, of love story and...

John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty was written from 1864 to 1867, when Reconstruction still had a chance of changing the face of American reality. It could be called the only U.S. realist novel that reports to us from within this moment of tremendous potential, an imaginative hiatus between the Civil War's derealization of the national culture and the post-Reconstruction emergence of a powerful nation-state. The novel foreshadows contemporary debates about cultural nationalism versus liberal, rights-based citizenship as it works through compelling counternarratives to constitutional patriotism, models of local attachment that De Forest recognizes as the political sensibility of “geographical morality.” Geographical morality implies allegiance to a prediscursive and so-called natural state whose limits are set by climate and human biology. Like Walt Whitman, who was also fascinated by the erotics of patriotism, De Forest explores the durability of local passions, of sectionalism and sex, in the face of constitutional idealism, the Unionism that became the hegemonic feeling-state decided by the Civil War. Through discussion of Miss Ravenel alongside Whitman's Specimen Days and De Forest's short fiction, essays, and later novels, this essay explores the larger question of how literature has attempted to make the “social passion” of patriotism available to the senses.

Reviewed by: War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861–1914 J. Matthew Gallman (bio) War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861–1914. By Cynthia Wachtell. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Pp. 233. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $18.95.) In this short study, Cynthia Wachtell proposes a reconsideration of American antiwar literature from the outbreak of the Civil War to the eve of World War I. An initial chapter on three responses to the Battle of Chickamauga sets the scene. In his unpublished wartime journal, Illinois [End Page 447] captain Allen L. Fahnestock offered a detailed chronicle of the bloody battle that left “our army badly demoralized” (17). In stark contrast to Fahnestock’s realistic account, a poem published by Texas teenager Mollie Moore titled “Chickamauga” traded grim realism for “euphemism and romantic flourish,” Wachtell explains (18). Sixteen years later, Union veteran Ambrose Bierce—who had fought in the battle—published his celebrated short story, “Chickamauga.” While Moore had placed a war hero at the center of her poem, Bierce’s terrifying tale centers on the experiences of a six-year-old deaf-mute boy, who stumbles onto the battlefield. Like most of Bierce’s war fiction, this story presents the Civil War as “horrific and utterly unredemptive” (20). This, then, is the fundamental framework of Wachtell’s argument. Most Civil War fiction and poetry, like Moore’s saccharine verse, romanticized the conflict, while the “real war” as experienced by men like Fahnestock never seemed to “get in the books.” But while the dominant culture clung to romantic portrayals of the war’s horrors, a handful of contrarian voices joined Bierce in rejecting war as a glorious and manly exercise. Much of Wachtell’s analysis concentrates on the usual suspects: Melville, Whitman, De Forest, Hawthorne, Bierce, Crane, Twain all get their due. Readers familiar with the foundational work on Civil War fiction by Edmund Wilson and Daniel Aaron will find no large surprises here, although Wachtell offers valuable brief summaries and some innovative analysis.1 One thread concerns the ways in which these authors navigated a world of changing literary tastes as well as gradually evolving notions about warfare. De Forest—who Wachtell cleverly describes as a “loose cannon on the literary battlefield”—flaunted romantic conventions in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, but contemporary readers demonstrated little interest in the novel’s grim realism (73). Whitman, who famously predicted that the “real war will never get in the books,” seemed intentionally to sanitize his wartime writings, perhaps in the name of patriotism. Wachtell compares unpublished passages in Melville’s “Inscription for the Dead at Fredericksburgh” with the published version, concluding that in his careful editing Melville was pursuing a literary compromise between romanticism and realism. But insofar as Melville refused to “pander to popular taste” in his war poetry, he also failed to find an appreciative audience (59). He ended up burning many of his war poems, and when his collected Battle-Pieces sold a mere five hundred copies, Melville retired his pen for good. Wachtell’s most important contributions to the scholarship on anti-war literature concern those authors who wrote in the decades between [End Page 448] the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I. Critics have commonly traced modern antiwar literature to the powerful international responses to the horrors of World War I, which were followed by equally eloquent commentaries on World War II, Vietnam, and other modern conflicts. The honor roll of authors who raised serious questions about warfare after World War I is long, including Dos Passos, Hemingway, Remarque, Mailer, Vonnegut, Heller, O’Brien, Caputo, and many, many more. These modern writers generally combined literary excellence with contemporary popularity, whereas the handful of Civil War–era writers who questioned war more broadly seemed to sacrifice one or both virtues when they wrote about their own war. In the half century after Appomattox, new dissenting voices emerged. Some, like Bierce and Twain, had seen Civil War fighting and continued to process those experiences in their writings decades later. Others, most notably Stephen Crane, applied late-century realism to reconsider the sectional conflict. In Wachtell’s view, the literature...

The Relationship between Religion and the Public Square: Freedom of Religion in the Public Space

The Office of The Dead Letter Elizabeth Duquette (bio) The inaugural issue of Beadle's Monthly, a Magazine of To-day (January 1866) opened with "Ball's Bluff," a poem by Augustine J. H. Duganne about the failed Union attempt to cross the Potomac at Harrison's Island in October 1861.1 Best described as a rout, the battle of Ball's Bluff was not one the magazine's predominantly Northern readers were likely to recall with pleasure; seventeen hundred Union soldiers assaulted the river's steep banks—fewer than half returned. Mere weeks after the battle, T. Hal Eliott captured Northern horror at its devastation in the poem "Ball's Bluff—October 21, 1861," in which an enraged speaker orders mothers, fathers, and lovers to ask, "Who answers for these lives,— / Who let them die?" (Friedlander 1588). These questions linger for Eliott, but they are answered decisively five years later in Duganne's poem, which has no problem assigning blame for Ball's Bluff; the soldiers were not allowed to die but were murdered by the "false" and "hostile" South (5). "Heroic" Union soldiers were, he writes, "mowed down like cattle" by "wild" Confederate "demons," "reckless with rebel spleen" (5). If the battle of Ball's Buff revealed the "unchivalric character of the Civil War" to Eliott's readers in 1861 (Friedlander 1588), five years later "Ball's Bluff " would transform the battle's "grand despair" into the storied stuff of legend, Union soldiers into martyrs to "Freedom's Will" and "Freedom's Cause" (5).2 This brief comparison provides a crucial context for reading the next item in Beadle's Monthly: the first installment of Metta Victor's The Dead Letter, An American Romance.3 Identified by Catherine Nickerson as the first full-length detective narrative by a woman in the United States, The Dead Letter follows "Ball's Bluff " literally and thematically, for it too considers the horror of murder in the context of the Civil War. Like Duganne, Victor is eager to identify the guilty, but her ambitions [End Page 25] are national, not regional or partisan, in scale. Whereas the speaker in "Ball's Bluff " notes "Our teeth were set with hate," Victor's characters struggle, sometimes failing, to contain their strong emotions, as the novel works to diffuse the "grand despair" caused by murder (5).4 Relying on a key trope for the taming of chance—the dead letter and its office—The Dead Letter regularizes events that appear inexplicable or random in an attempt to repair the damage done to the (national) family by (widespread) murder. In marked contrast to early reunion romances such as John W. De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), The Dead Letter recognizes that "a house divided" will continue to be torn apart, not brought together, by strong feelings.5 Although Victor's narrative of domestic security restored speaks to the conditions that made reunion romances compelling, her vision of reconstruction is shaped—even scarred—by violence and murder. Whereas the romance of reunion focuses on affective conversion, Victor's strategy in The Dead Letter proposes instead that the resolution of uncertainty and the reconstruction of law are necessary preconditions for reunion.6 In reading this early detective novel as offering a substantial argument about the Civil War and Reconstruction, this essay participates in the reevaluation of how the war shaped American literary history, a project that has energized scholars in recent years. No longer content to discount literature written during or about the Civil War as uninteresting propaganda, scholars have developed new ways of engaging the vast literary output of the period, in the process raising key questions about genre, race, gender, and the nature of war itself.7 These emergent modes of reading—some built on practices designed to engage with popular genres from adjacent periods, others that rely on methodological premises or innovations in related fields like history, sociology, or political philosophy—have made it possible to challenge categories of analysis that have long structured nineteenth-century literary history, including the sharp differentiation of the ante- and postbellum periods, a divide marked most notably by the narrative of realism's...

Of all the writers at the time, John William De Forest saw the most action as a Civil War soldier. Through it all he kept writing: letters home, journal entries, essays for literary magazines, the beginnings of a novel. Ten years after the war, William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly praised De Forest as “the first to treat the war really and artistically.” Just months prior to the firing on Fort Sumter, De Forest was in Charleston, South Carolina, visiting his wife, whose father was a professor at Charleston Medical College. In an essay entitled “Charleston Under Arms,” he assessed the mood of the region. He condemned the South for laboring under assorted delusions, but he did so without deriding Southerners. As with so many other chronically ill young men, war provided De Forest with an opportunity to refashion himself into an energetic and fearless officer. His writings reveal considerable talents as observer, story-teller, and scene-setter.

Over the past years, popular uprisings across the Middle East continue to grow. Throughout these movements, public spaces have played a crucial role in allowing citizens to express their demands. Public spaces have brought people together, providing the space for citizens to assert their rights to freedom of speech and demanding basic rights. Since 17 October 2019, Lebanon has been experiencing a similar civic movement. Expressions and manifestations of this movement have used underutilized public spaces across the country. For instance, in Beirut, the retrieve of public spaces has taken place on three levels: - Multi-purpose public spaces: where the protestors are reshaping the wide formal streets of Beirut Central District to active and lively urban spaces. - Open public spaces: such as Samir Kassir garden, which was once a meditative space, is now a vibrant social place. - Public urban facilities: such as the abandoned Egg [1] and the deteriorated Grand Theatre are being brought to life by becoming respectively a community centre and an observatory. To date, the act of placemaking and the reclamation of public spaces has been observed throughout the 2019 Lebanese Uprising. It has reconfigured public spaces into ones of unity, thereby reuniting citizens of all ages, religions, gender and walks of life. Some see the uprising as a genuine end to the 1975 Civil War – a war that gave birth to religious, political, and social boundaries – by organically bringing together the country as one, demonstrating under one flag, the Lebanese flag. [1] The Egg, an unfinished cinema built in the 1960s, is a landmark urban facility that was closed to the public for a long time. The Egg is located in the heart of the city near the former Civil War green zone line. Designed by Architect Joseph Philippe Karam, work on this unfinished structure started in the 1960s, interrupted by the Lebanese Civil War during which the building was abandoned and suffered major structural damage.

Binding Trauma

Conservation and management issues of Prespa National Park

In the context of a tormented Middle East geopolitics and the ongoing Arabo-Israeli conflict, a civil war erupted in Lebanon in 1975 and went uninterrupted for fifteen long years. As early as the first two-years-round of civil war in 1975-77, violent armed conflict manifested itself in an urban nature and contextualized in the capital Beirut. Back then, the civil war targeted systematically the public spaces and achieved purposefully the dual objective of mutating social practice and mutilating their urban form into a geography of fear. Intriguingly, during the unreconciled civil war aftermath, the display of instability and conflict kept on marking sporadically the same public spaces at different incidents. Three decades following the eruption of urban violence in 1975, intermittent events of social and political nature took place between 2005 and 2015, triggered by the assassination of the prime minister. This paper will tackle the two case studies of public spaces which are the pivots of the recurrent warscape: Place des Martyrs and the seaside hotels’ area, both symbols of social and geographic contestations at simultaneous times of peace and war. Based on an interdisciplinary literature, the socio political manifestations will be highlighted by unfolding them across time and space. Signs of discontentment and instability are manifested under different facets and patterns varying from passive intangible representations to active outbursts. The perpetuation of events hitherto occurring in the same urban spaces will be studied from the perspective of the social and political realities. In the absence of a mono-causal factor for warscape recurrence, mapping conflict in the urban space is a suggested tool to approach the perpetuation issue from a context-specific perspective. It is as well an opportunity to raise the question on the relation between the socio-political claims and their reverberation in the same urban spaces.

Neighborhood Communication Design in the Smart City

In tracing the development of Methodist open air preaching in America, Russell Richey covers some ground already trodden in some of his previous books, notably Early American Methodism (1991). However in this new work, the backdrop of forests and glades is examined not just as location but as an agent for identity formation and a potential resource for theological reflection, albeit one that that Richey laments is under-utilized by both nineteenth-century pioneers and twentieth-century denominational consolidators.Richey begins by looking at Wesley's own practice of outdoor preaching before examining the adaptation of the resulting Methodist discipline for the American context. Some fascinating accounts follow from early American itinerants, and from these, Richey posits the idea of woodland as preaching place being tamed into ‘cathedral’ (shady grove) and resorted to for confession (garden).He then traces the augmentation of quarterly meetings by the introduction of camp meetings at the turn of the nineteenth century. Gathering in forest clearings, it was often possible, as in few places else, for racial mixing to take place, and Richey gives absorbing insights into many roles camp meetings played in the antebellum period in the divisions of American Methodism over issues of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, as well as the development of institutional ecclesiology, all of which led to the emergence of rival Methodisms organizing their own outdoor gatherings.Following the Civil War, camp meetings and their settings became domesticated in a number of ways. Martha's Vineyard camp meeting had begun in 1835, but by the 1860s it developed into Wesleyan Grove, a permanent camp ground that Richey describes as a vocation-friendly ‘heavenly home, a resting place, a religious colony’ (160). Both in the rise of The National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness and in the Chautauqua education programme meetings, the emphasis became focused not on the conversion of those outside the faith but the improvement of those within it, either through entire sanctification or more instruction. Here, Richey claims, the taming of the great outdoors into permanent camp grounds consolidated a growing division between evangelical and liberal approaches to Christian discipleship which continues in the United Methodist Church and elsewhere today.Richey's book is a thoroughly absorbing and welcome exploration of a subject which, as he himself acknowledges, has been comparatively under-recorded or analysed since Charles A. Johnson's The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion's Harvest Time in 1955. Most of the minor criticisms I have of Richey's book arise from being a British reader. It would have been very useful to have had the inclusion of a map and illustrations, particularly in the treatment of the establishment of permanent camp grounds toward the end of the book. A separate bibliography would have been invaluable, too, in order to follow up more easily on Richey's many sources. Also, James M. Buckley, whose A History of Methodists in the United States Richey refers to, does not attribute the origin of the British connexion which became established in the United States in 1840 as ‘Lorenzo Dow's Primitive Methodists’ (171), even though Buckley does repeatedly get William Clowes's name wrong!Perhaps Richey's most original claim is that early American Methodism missed an opportunity in not reflecting upon its sylvan ministry to develop a lived Wesleyan creation theology. Here it would have been helpful to have had contemporaneous examples from other traditions to avoid reading back from a twenty-first-century perspective what such theologizing might have looked like in the service of itinerant evangelistic ministry in the early nineteenth century. If Richey's appendix, giving entries of ‘John Wesley Preaching under Trees and in Groves’ from his Journal, is anything to go by, there is little indication that the British countryside impacted much upon Wesley's theological understanding of his preaching ministry as he documented it. In this outlook at least, his earliest American preachers seem to have followed his lead without adaptation.