Spreading The Word: Bible Business Nineteenth-Century America in Bloomington, MN

Civil war, the completion of transcontinental railroads, rapid urbanization and industrialization, the rise of managerial capitalism, and new entanglements abroad rent the fabric of life in nineteenth-century America. Through all the turmoil, the American Bible Society thrived. This engaging book tells how a modest antebellum reform agency responded to cataclysmic social change and grew to be a nonprofit corporate bureaucracy that managed, among other projects, what was one of the largest publishing houses in the United States.