Neither the meliorist political culture of the nascent American republic nor its later drift toward apocalyptically tinged 'fundamentalist' Protestantism and dispensationalism can be explained outside the context of the shared Anglo-American traditions and practices of millennial expectation and apocalyptic angst--whether expressed by early colonists, Milton, Blake, Miller or the Continental Congress. In this chronologically direct and thematically varied volume, five scholars working in three distinct disciplines (Religion, English literature, and History) approach millennialism and apocalypticism in the British and Anglo-American contexts, making remarkable contributions both to the study of religious, literary and political culture in the English-speaking ecumene, and, at least implicitly, to the critique of disciplinary exclusivity. Only in such mixed company does the study of the millennial nexus in English and American religion, culture, literature and politics, from the time of Milton to the time of the Millerites, come into focus.

Contributors include: Richard Connors, Andrew Escobedo, Andrew C. Gow, J.I. Little, Stephen A. Marini, Beth Quitslund, and John Howard Smith.