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Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 . By Catherine A. Brekus. Gender and American Culture. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xii + 466 pp. $49.95 cloth; $17.95 paper.

By and large Dwight emerges in these pages as a backward-looking and culturally conservative figure, at home in the receding eighteenth century rather than the emerging nineteenth. Fitzmier goes so far as to call him a "tragic figure" (179). He challenges the conventional wisdom (supported by Lyman Beecher's Autobiography) that Dwight was the leader of a Second Great Awakening centered on Yale College during his early years as college president (15, 57-59, 99-102). It seems that the Yale College church did not grow significantly until some years after Dwight's presidency began in 1795, and other religious revivals in Connecticut preceded that of Yale College. Moreover, the 1818 church disestablishment in Connecticut, which Beecher learned to welcome as a stimulus to Christian voluntarism, was antithetical to Dwight's "Godly Federalism." Yet, conceding these points to Fitzmier, Dwight's influence over such Yale graduates as Lyman Beecher and Nathaniel Taylor needs fully to be taken into account. By highlighting "Godly Federalism" rather than revivalism, Fitzmier may have detracted from Dwight's nineteenthcentury significance. The rise of social and cultural history in recent decades has sometimes led to the neglect of elite groups that deserve renewed attention and investigation. Moral Legislator is proof that the elites can be as intriguing as the outsiders. Indeed one of the great strengths of the book is the breadth of its cultural resonances. The book is a fitting complement to Nathan Hatch's examination of popular religion in The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). While a ranter like Lorenzo Dow and an aristocrat like Timothy Dwight had every reason to disavow one another (135), both are a part of the larger story of American religion in the early republican period. Fitzmier's superb book offers a fresh view of New England's cultural elite during this era.