In the early twentieth century, a new, American scripture appeared on the scene. It was the product of a school of theological thinking known as Dispensationalism, which offered a striking new way of reading the Bible, one that focused attention squarely on the end-times. That scripture, The Scofield Reference Bible, would become the ur-text of American apocalyptic evangelicalism. But while the Scofield took hold in the United States, the belief system from which it emerged, Dispensationalism, was not primarily a homegrown American phenomenon.

In The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible Donald Harman Akenson examines the creation and spread of Dispensationalism. The story is a transnational one: created in southern Ireland by evangelical Anglicans, who were terrified by the rise of Catholicism, then transferred to England, where it was expanded upon and next carried to British North America by "Brethren" missionaries and then subsequently embraced by American evangelicals.

Akenson combines a respect for individual human agency with an equal recognition of the complex and persuasive ideational system that apocalyptic Dispensationalism presented. For believers, the system explained the world and its future. For the wider culture, the product of this rich evolution was a series of concepts that became part of the everyday vocabulary of American life: end-times, apocalypse, Second Coming, Rapture, and millennium. The Americanization of the Apocalypse is the first book to document, using direct archival evidence, the invention of the epochal Scofield Reference Bible, and thus the provenance of modern American evangelicalism.

Donald Harman Akenson, Professor of History at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, is one of the -world's leading authorities on Irish history. He received his bachelor's degree from Yale and his Ph.D from Harvard. The author of twenty books, including five novels, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society (Canada) and of the Royal Historical Society (U.K.). He has held both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a writing fellowship at Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Como. In 1993 he received the prestigious Grawmeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, for his book God's People: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster (1992). In 1996 he was named Molson Prize Laureate; this is Canada's highest cultural award.

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"Donald Akenson has spent decades pursuing his fascination with scriptural texts, and it shows in this brilliant weaving of documents and individual biographies. Prominent among the transatlantic cast is the entrepreneurial creator of the Scofield Reference Bible. Cyrus Scofield's cross-references and annotations offered to unlock the Bible's secrets about the end of time by peddling a Dispensationalist key. Akenson makes a startling proposition: this visual framing of the KJV text created a new Bible-and in doing so changed American evangelicalism."

--Phyllis D. Airhart, Professor Emerita of the History of Christianity, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto

"The culmination of thirty years of prodigious research, written with a breathtaking intellectual range (and attention to detail) that is typical of Donald Akenson's celebrated scholarship, The Americanization of the Apocalypse is the definitive history of John Nelson Darby, the Plymouth Brethren, and an eschatological movement that would begin to reorient Anglo-American Protestantism in the nineteenth century before revolutionizing it in the twentieth. Striking for its attention to topography as well as theology, transnational currents as well as regional subtleties, Akenson's book is a must read for anyone trying to understand the roots of modern evangelicalism."

--Darren Dochuk, Author of Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America