She begins the story, appropriately, with the 18th-century revivals of the First Great Awakening, the birthplace of American evangelicalism. She demonstrates that from the beginning the movement was primarily religious and theological, with political overtones, and quite diverse.

Paragraph by paragraph I could say to myself, There’s Marsden, McLoughlin, Kidd, Dochuk, Hatch, Marsden again, me, Diamond, Carpenter, Green, Noll, and so on. Her bibliography of more than 250 books would make a good preliminary reading list in the PhD program here at Baylor University. Exhaustive History of the Christian RightįitzGerald has read most of the scholarship on evangelicals and synthesized it into a masterful narrative. I suspect that interest launched her latest book, because it seems her animating research question is something like: Where did the fundamentalists and evangelicals of the Christian Right come from? The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape Americais her answer. Among other types of research, she spent time at Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church and Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. In the 1980s, she became interested in the Christian Right. Its immense success catapulted FitzGerald to the top level of journalist-historians, where she has remained ever since.

In addition to the Pulitzer, the book also won the Bancroft Prize for best historical work as well as the National Book Award. I first encountered Frances FitzGerald in the 1970s when I read her Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Vietnam War, Fire in the Lake, to which I still refer when I lecture on the war.

The evangelicals by frances fitzgerald