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More About This Textbook
Overview
"Robert F. Martin demonstrates nicely that, beneath all of Billy Sunday’s flamboyance, the orphan-turned-baseball player-turned-evangelist embodied the tensions of his age. Martin’s prodigious research has yielded a wealth of anecdotal material that adds flavor and spice to his keen analysis."
—Randall Balmer, author of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory:
A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America
William Ashley "Billy" Sunday was the most popular and influential evangelist of his time. Between 1896 and 1935, the colorful Iowa-born evangelist toured first his native Midwest and then the nation, preaching in tent and tabernacle, espousing a simplistic but, for many, deeply satisfying interpretation of Christianity. Embodying the traditional values and attitudes of the heartland and at home in an increasingly diverse, urban, industrial America, Sunday won the hearts—and the pocketbooks—of millions of Americans.
Hero of the Heartland is an interpretive biography that focuses on the ways in which the man and his career resonated with the hopes and fears of his contemporaries as they coped with the economic, social, and cultural changes around the start of the 20th century. Robert F. Martin shows how Sunday and his revivalism helped his followers bridge the gap between the traditional past and the progressive future, and made more comfortable the transition from the old order to the new.
Editorial Reviews
Library Journal
Billy Sunday, baseball player for the Chicago Whitestockings, "entrepreneurial evangelist," and the "personification of American manliness," was a phenomenal success in the early part of the 20th century and the object of both great public admiration and criticism. Martin (history, Univ. of Northern Iowa; Howard Kester and the Struggle for Social Justice in the South, 1904-1977) argues that while Sunday was very much a man of his day and nation, he also expounded tratiditional values that the public found comforting and compelling at a time of great economic, social, and demographic change. Beautifully written and based upon exhaustive research, this book is as much a study of America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as it is a treatment of Sunday's life. Though a number of recent Sunday biographies exist, this concise scholarly study is one larger academic libraries will want to acquire even if they already own others such as Roger A. Bruns's Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism.-Theresa R. McDevitt, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.Product Details
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Meet the Author
Robert F. Martin is Professor of History at the University of Northern Iowa and author of Howard Kester and the Struggle for Social Justice in the South, 1904–77.
Table of Contents
A Son of the Middle West The Diamond and the Cross Entrepreneurial Evangelism Playing the Game for God Man Enough to be a Christian Progressive Orthodoxy Hero of the Heartland