| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism. By Ellen Eslinger. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. xxii, 306 pp. $38.00, isbn 1-57233-033-3.)

Ellen Eslinger's Citizens of Zion is a useful account of the origins of camp meeting revivalism. Focusing on its Kentucky origins and rejecting "frontier" explanations of the camp meeting's rise and spread, Eslinger examines the conditions of life in a region that, as she says, was beset by the tensions and strains of a rapidly changing social, political, and economic environment. In these tensions and strains, she attempts to locate the camp meeting's appeal. 1

Much of Eslinger's book deals only tangentially with religion as such. The first six of her nine chapters explore, topically, the factors she sees contributing to social tensions. These include problems of land distribution and social order, the instabilities created by increasingly democratized state and local politics, and national policies, especially tax policies, that added to political ferment. In all, she argues, what Kentuckians faced was not a frontier environment—Kentucky had moved beyond the condition of a frontier—but an uncertain one in which social ties and boundaries were not as clear as people might have wished. . . .

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