Margaret Bendroth
Former Director of the Congregational Library and Archives
Margaret (Peggy) Bendroth is Executive Director of the Congregational Library and Archives and a historian of American religion. She received her Ph.D. in history from the Johns Hopkins University and was professor of history at Calvin College from 1998 to 2004. She is the author of several books, including Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (Yale 1993) and Fundamentalists and the City: Conflict and Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885 to 1950 (Oxford 2005). Peggy has co-edited several other volumes, including Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism (Illinois 2002), with Virginia Brereton. Her most recent books include The Spiritual Practice of Remembering (Eerdmans 2013) and The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past (UNC 2015) tells the story of how Congregationalists engaged deeply with their denomination’s storied past and recast their modern identity. Peggy recently served as President of the American Society of Church History. She retired in 2020.
Featured Publications
The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Review of David Harrington Watt, Anti-Fundamentalism (Critical Research on Religion, forthcoming)
Good and Mad: Mainline Protestant Churchwomen, 1920-1980 Oxford 2022
“Christianity in Nineteenth-Century North America,” in History of Global Christianity, Volume II: History of Christianity in the Nineteenth Century. Ed Jens Holger Schjorring and Norman A. Hjelm. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
“Fundamentalism and Christianity,” in Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History, ed. Simon A. Wood and David Harrington Watt, University of South Carolina Press, 2014.
“The Evangelical Mind and the Historians,” in American Evangelicalism: George Marsden and the Shape of American Religious HistoryUniversity of Notre Dame Press, 2014.
