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Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet . Edited by Terrie Dopp Aamodt , Gary Land and Ronald L. Numbers . New York : Oxford University Press , 2014. ix + 365 pp. $34.95 paper.
Book Reviews and Notes
This book grows out of a 2009 conference of historians and scholars affiliated with the Association of Seventh-day Adventist Historians held in Ellen Harmon White's birthplace, Portland, ME. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Adventists in general and Ellen White in particular were seen as inhabiting the margins of protestant Christianity despite their dramatic growth in the United States, Australia, and much of the developing world.
The 44 scholars who gathered to mark the 165th anniversary of the Adventist "great disappointment" included contributors to this volume. Ellen Harmon White wrote over 70,000 pages during her long career, and since her death a voluminous apologetic literature about her has been produced within Seventh-day Adventism. But little historical and theological scholarship has emerged until recently, and this work represents the fruit of the emerging field of Ellen Harmon White studies as a distinctive subset of Seventh-day Adventist and Adventist studies.
The eighteen chapters are framed by historians Grant Wacker and Jonathan Butler. Wacker reminds readers that the nineteenth century in which the major portion of Ellen White's ministry took place was a time when "Victorian America witnessed a degree of change . . . that progressed from the effervescence of the Second Great Awakening to the stable ordering of the Industrial Revolution," a transition from "a premodern to a modern way of life" (ix). In that context, Butler emphasizes that Ellen White cannot be understood apart from her roots as a "shouting" Methodist, "whose upbringing...