Presbyterian pastor Archibald Simpson was one of the most prolific diarists in the colonial American South. His voluminous entries have gone largely untapped by historians until now. In Peter N. Moore’s capable hands, Simpson’s writings yield a fascinating account of religion and society in eighteenth-century South Carolina and the British Atlantic world.

- Thomas S. Kidd, Baylor University,

Peter N. Moore’s biography of Archibald Simpson is important, sweeping, and evocative. Moore writes with well-earned confidence and his rendering of Simpson’s fascinating life is sure to attract a wide readership. While revealing the transnational context of religious revivalism, Moore never loses sight of the specific contexts of the localities that Simpson made home. Along the way, Moore’s work illuminates plantation life and agriculture, racial slavery, deathways, medicine and sickness, eighteenth-century wars, and family values. Most impressive is Moore’s singular capacity to understand and make accessible to present-day readers the mindset and spiritual struggles of eighteenth-century evangelicals. He explains that world with sensitivity, specificity, and nuance.

- Lorri Glover, Saint Louis University,

In this gem of a book, Peter N. Moore captures both the expansive scope and the intimate details of a life lived amidst powerful transformations of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Archibald Simpson was neither famous nor particularly heroic, but his experiences of economic disruption, religious revival, enlightenment education, transatlantic evangelicalism, political revolution, and the paradoxes of slaveholding Christianity connected him to central events and figures in the making of that world. Moore’s engaging reconstruction of Simpson’s biography provides a sensitive account of these forces and how they shaped both individual and communal experiences from Scotland to South Carolina and beyond.

- Randolph Scully, George Mason University,