American Sermons, Series 1 & 2, 1652–1819

ADVISOR REVIEWS—STANDARD REVIEW American Sermons, Series 1 & 2, 1652–1819

doi:10.5260/chara.22.2.14 Date of Review: September 9, 2020

Composite Score: HHHH 1/3

Reviewed by:

Robert H. Ellison Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia Larry Sheret Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia <ellisonr@marshall.edu>

<sheret@marshall.edu>

Abstract American Sermons is one of the latest offerings from Readex, which describes itself as a publisher of “many of the most widely used collections of primary source research materials in academic libraries” (<https://www.readex.com/who-we-are-what-we-do>). This database contains over 8,000 sermons and tools to analyze quickly across multiple original source documents.

There are a handful of other sermon indexes and full-text databases, both Open Access and subscription-based; this product offers several robust and unique features that help to set it apart from others of its kind.

Pricing Options Readex states that American Sermons, 1652-1819, is available to institutions of all kinds via a range of purchase models. Pricing is based on multiple factors. Purchase models include perpetual license, rentto-own, and subscription. Contact a Readex representative for pricing by calling 800.762.8182 or e-mail <sales@readex.com>.

Product Overview/Description The company states that this collection—nearly 8,000 works in all— contains “nearly every printed work, including sermons on politics, society, religion, and family life” (<https://www.readex.com/content/ american-sermons-series-1-2-1652-1819>). The database includes every sermon digitized from the authoritative bibliographies by Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker, as well as every additional sermon digitized from the holdings of the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and many other institutions.

Home Page

This scope represents a broad definition of the term “American sermons.” The database includes all sermons printed in America, regardless of where they were actually delivered. There are sermons by preachers who spent most or all of their careers in America; by figures such as George Whitefield, who lived elsewhere but spent some time visiting the United States; and even sermons originally preached outside America but re-preached from an American pulpit by a second party.

A range of faith traditions is represented as well. The majority of the sermons in the database—some 85% to 90%—are by Protestant preachers: Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Quakers, Unitarians, Universalists, and others. There are no Islamic sermons, but Roman Catholic and Jewish discourses are also included. A few manuscripts are in French or German.

User Interface/Navigation/Searching American Sermons is divided into two parts: Series 1, covering the years 1652-1795, and Series 2, spanning from 1796 to 1819. The parts can be searched separately or as a unit.

The collection’s home page presents users with several options. They can consult “How to use this database” for a helpful overview of its scope and features, begin a search of their own, or use an innovative feature called Suggested Searches (see Figure 1). The menu has 15 categories, and each is subdivided. It is a very useful feature, especially for the novice, because it presents a quick orientation to the topics, events, and individuals that are available in the archive.

A few of the main categories are Bible; The Church and Its Mission; Historical Events; Indian and White Relations; Politics; Slavery and

FIGURE 1

Abolition; and Women and Children. Each subject category is subdi-

American Sermons

vided. For example, The Church and Its Mission is subdivided into Church dedication; Freemasonry; Hymns and religious songs; Missionaries and religious conversion; Non-English language; Ordinations; and Revivals. Once a search is performed, options on the left side of the screen allow the results to be further refined by historical era, decade, or year (see Figure 2). If a preacher’s biography is available, it can be accessed directly from the list of results as well. The era filter is especially useful to provide context. The nine options include Early Colonial Era (1607 to 1729); Development of Colonial Societies (1730 to 1753); Seven Years War (1754 to 1763); Prelude to

FIGURE 2 American Sermons Search Results

FIGURE 3 American

Sermons Explore Results Revolution (1764 to 1774); and Early Republic (1790 to 1811). If no era is preselected, the results page places the era with the most hits at the top, followed by eras with fewer hits. This makes it easy to associate hot topics with a particular era.

The Advanced Search page looks and functions like EBSCOhost, with multiple search boxes that allow Boolean searching by key word or phrase, and allows truncation. Proximity word searching can be done using both NEAR and ADJ. Researchers may also download and save copies of the manuscripts.

Users interested in “distant reading” and other digital humanities projects will also be interested in the Explore button (Figure 3) that

appears at the top of the search results. Checking the box to left of one or more of the results and clicking Explore will create a corpus that can be analyzed via Voyant Tools (<https://voyant-tools.org/>), a free, Web-based tool which allows users to quickly analyze various features of large blocks of text. Details of those features are provided in “How to use this database.”

Critical Evaluation The American Sermons website says this about itself (<https://www. readex.com/products/american-sermons-series-1-2-1652-1819>):

“…sermons are widely regarded as the earliest and most enduring literary form in America—passionately delivered, keenly argued and concerned with both spiritual questions and reflections on civic duty. Almost any topic was fair game, from local gossip to slavery to witchcraft. As such, the sermons offer intriguing research opportunities for not only religious scholars and historians, but anyone interested in the daily life, politics, society, child-rearing and educational systems of early America. Additionally, these sermons provide contemporary cultural commentary on a range of important historical events, from the American Revolution to the abolition movement to immigration debates.”

Sermons are indeed a very important source of primary documents for study in several disciplines. One of the greatest needs in sermon studies is a body of robust tools that will help scholars readily locate the texts they need for research projects. American Sermons is an important step in that direction.

If there is any weakness in the product, it lies in the quality of the scanned texts available in the database. The archive’s digitized documents retain much of the appearance of the originals, including smudges and faded letters. Early typesetting and printing presses lacked the sharpness required for accurate OCR enabled PDFs (see Figure 4).

Many of the documents use the long S, which may appear as ſ, f, or ∫. OCR usually recognizes the long S as an f, but sometimes as a j or an i, or something else. A search in all time periods for the term

FIGURE 4

Original Text Sample from American Sermons

“sanctification” produces 487 hits and fanctification 105. Given how many words use the long S within most of these documents, research is more complicated because OCR software is considerably less than 100% effective. To see how problematic this is, here are the results for “Christ” (5,254 hits): Chrift 4,381; Chriist 1,606; Chrijt 349. A wildcard search for “Chri?t” yields 7,412 and truncation “Chri*t” yields 7,418, which only represents about 80% of potential hits.

Text recognition problems are compounded by spelling variants. A search for “complete” (2,303 hits) would need to include “compleat” (728 hits) in order to be “compleet” (1 hit). Although this site is ADA compliant, the manuscripts themselves are not because the manuscripts are in PNG format. Ctrl-F will not work on the PNG images; however, a search box enables searches within single or multiple documents. The keywords within manuscripts are highlighted, but this option may be toggled off.

PNG is excellent for the digital preservation and presentation of old manuscripts, but it is not a friend to accessibility. This would only be resolved if the database were to undertake an expensive manual cleanup of manuscripts running in the background as OCR enabled PDFs. Users may download PDFs of every manuscript, but they are not OCR enabled.

These limitations, however, are hardly a fatal flaw. The documents may not be in perfect condition, but they are important primary documents nonetheless; by making them available to scholars who cannot travel to the American Antiquarian Society or the Library Company of Philadelphia, Readex is providing a valuable service to scholars working on various aspects of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century America.

Competitive Products There are other options for accessing some of the materials in American Sermons. Jonathan Edwards, who has 53 sermons in the database, is also the focus of The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University (<http://edwards.yale.edu/>). The site is robust and user-friendly, offering not only browsing and searching capability, but also an encyclopedia, a peer-reviewed journal, and opportunities to volunteer as an editor of Edwards’ sermons.

Other resources encompassing multiple preachers vary widely in their scope, features, and stages of development. The most similar in terms of chronology is Transcribing Early American Manuscript Sermons, or TEAMS (<http://earlyamericansermons.org/>). It has definite potential, but only 34 transcripts had been posted as of May 15, 2020. A much more extensive manuscript project, at over 17,000 records, is the Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons (<http:// gemmsproject.blogspot.com/>). It covers the UK, Ireland, and North America from 1530 to 1715, but it is a finding aid rather than a database, providing information about where the manuscripts can be found rather than transcripts or scans of the texts themselves.

The largest project of which we are aware is the Classic Sermon Index (<https://classicsermonindex.com/>), a subscription-based reference work that correlates 60,000 sermons to the verses they reference in the Bible and provides links to these resources on the open web if they are available. American Sermons is a database with several entry points to search for sermons according to topic, American culture, history, subject and author/preacher, with the ability to search and parse between and within documents and to run word usage anal-

American Sermons Review Scores Composite: HHHH 1/3

The maximum number of stars in each category is 5.

Content: HHHHH American Sermons provides access to the full corpus of extant sermon manuscripts for the period covered.

User Interface/Searchability: HHHH Search options range from basic, for the general public, to moderately advanced, for scholars. Integration with Voyant provides robust text-analysis tools. OCR is often inaccurate due to the condition of the original texts.

Pricing: N/A Readex does not publish pricing which is based on multiple factors and customized for every institution.

Purchase/Contract Options: HHHH Multiple options. Text and data mining rights can be secured through the execution of an additional license agreement. The vendor is willing to consider any and all contract options.

Free Text Keywords: American History | Religion | Preaching | Sermons

Primary Category: Philosophy & Religion

Secondary Categories: History & Area Studies; Humanities; Multidisciplinary (or interdisciplinary); Philosophy & Religion; Sociology, Education, Anthropology, Psychology

Type of product being reviewed: Primary source digital content

Target Audience: General public; Graduate/Faculty/Researcher

Access: Subscription

ysis. In other words, Classic Sermons Index and American Sermons are not competitive, but complementary products.

Targeting different audiences and serving different needs, each of these is a valuable resource. None, however, is as feature-rich as American Sermons; among other things, this collection’s integration with Voyant Tools, author biographies and suggested search paths for

Contact Information

Readex, a Division of NewsBank

5801 Pelican Bay Boulevard, Suite 600 Naples, Florida 34108-2734 Phone: (800) 762-8182 E-mail: <sales@newsbank.com> Producer URL: <www.readex.com> Product URL: <https://www.readex.com/content/americansermons-series-1-2-1652-1819> easy browsing and discovery make it a welcome addition to the sermon studies marketplace.

Purchase & Contract Provisions Interlibrary Loan is allowed in accordance with CONTU guidelines. COUNTER compliant use statistics are available. MARC records are not available for this specific collection from Readex. Text and data mining rights can be secured through the execution of an additional license agreement. Archiving or ongoing availability is made possible should Readex go out of business.

Authentication American Sermons and all Readex databases, support authentication via IP address, student/library barcode (with patterned IDs), referring URL, user ID with password, and embedded ID, in addition to cookie, OpenAthens, Shibboleth, and HTTPS authentication. There is no limit on the number of institutional users; remote access is limited to authorized users.

About the Authors

Robert H. Ellison is Associate Professor of English and director of the Center for Sermon Studies at Marshall University. His current projects include curating the Library of Appalachian Preaching (<https://mds.marshall.edu/sermons/>), an online collection of sermons preached in Appalachia, or elsewhere by preachers with ties to the Appalachian region. n Larry Sheret is the Scholarly Communication & Open Educational Resources Librarian at Marshall University. He serves on the board of the Center for Sermon Studies located on the Marshall University campus and helps to maintain Marshall’s OAIR. n