“Historical Monument Text Marking John Wesley’s Landing in Georgia, 1736,” Used by Permission: Center for Study of the Life and Work of William Carey, D.D. (1761-1834), William Carey University, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA

The American Methodism project contains roughly 4,000 digital versions of interdisciplinary and historical published materials that were selected to promote better understanding of Methodism in the United States.

From 2010-2013 the librarians of the United Methodist Seminary Libraries, the Methodist Librarian’s Fellowship (which meets annually at the American Theological Library Association) and the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History collaborated with Internet Archive to both identify items already in Internet Archive’s public domain/creative commons licensed materials related to Methodism in the United States and to digitize additional materials from their respective holdings. Although the collection may be accessed on the Internet Archive site, https://archive.org/details/americanmethodism , it was desirable to provide this back-up version of the materials on servers at Duke Divinity School. Duke Divinity School Library is one of the United Methodist Seminary Libraries that was involved with the project from its inception.

As was pointed out in the original Internet Archive introduction to the collection, American Methodism is especially well-documented and can provide significant insights into the debates and developments of local communities, regions, and the nation. Once established, Methodism grew with the United States so that it included more than 34 percent of all American church members by 1850. Nathan Hatch and others have noted how American Methodism uniquely parallels the development of the United States and its culture over time. Methodists established hospitals, orphanages, and colleges (at one point more than one per year), and even today the United Methodist Church claims to be the only Christian body to have established a congregation in every county of the United States. The varied sources, voices, and perspectives of these documents will provide a rich resource for interpreting the past. The project also hopes to stimulate the creation of tools to analyze this corpus of material.

This collection is open for expansion with additional materials. Potential contributors of published items that are in public domain, or rights holders of materials that are willing to share materials on any aspect of Methodism in the United States, may send an email inquiry to divlib@duke.edu for information conerning how items might be included in the collection.