Book Review

There are now two histories of the Salvation Army in the United States written by academics since 1980. Edward McKinley's Marching to Glory is an institutional history that describes the organization's development without placing the story within the broader literature of class, gender, social, or cultural history. Diane Winston's book combines the history of ideas with an American studies approach. Probing Salvation Army publications from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, Winston reveals stories Salvationists told about themselves and uses New York's secular press to gauge public response. She analyzes the Salvationists' evolving public narrative and their relationship to the urban middle-class culture of commerce and consumption they sought to change. The army, she says, sought to "sacralize secular space" by borrowing elements of commercial culture and using them for religious ends. Shifts in army self-representation, however, reveal that the secular culture it sought to sacralize instead changed the army. In the process of trying to "religionize" the city, the army and its image became "less sectarian."

. . .