The original of this handbill is in the Boston Public Library’s Rare Book collection. It is part of the papers, manuscripts, and diaries of abolitionist and controversial Unitarian clergyman Theodore Parker, who composed it and had it printed and distributed.

At the time he posted it around Boston, Parker was the head of the Boston Vigilance Committee, a group of white and black abolitionists, eventually numbering more than 200, who agitated in various legal and extra-legal ways to frustrate slaveholding. The committee set up a secret network of operators on the Underground Railroad, who transported escaped slaves through the area. The committee also looked for slave-catchers in Boston who had come north to search for fugitive slaves. Parker and his fellow committee members alerted the sympathetic white and black community in the area, and sometimes threatened the slave-catchers and scared them off, and even rushed the jail to free captured slaves.

The committee’s semi-secretive efforts increased in intensity after the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (part of the Compromise of 1850), which specifically required Northern states to remit or return fugitive slaves to their Southern owners. The committee’s collective outrage peaked during the 1851 trial and return to Georgia of escaped slave Thomas Sims (the handbill is from this period), the capture and freeing of fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins in 1851, and the riots during the capture and return under Federal guard of fugitive slave Anthony Burns to Virginia in 1854.

Having or keeping your top eye open simply meant keeping a careful watch, no matter what else you were doing. It most often carried the idea that you had to keep a lookout for threatening intruders, enemies, or competitors.

The phrase appears to be an Americanism. I see written evidence for its use, among both uneducated and educated and among both whites and African Americans, as early as 1828 and as late as 1911. Those who used it probably felt it to be a bit unusual because it often appeared with quotation marks around it, as if they understood it as slang.

Today, we would say something like “keep your eyes peeled” or “keep one eye open” or “sleep with one eye open.” When you lie down to sleep, one eye is uppermost and is therefore your “top eye,” the one with the slightly better vantage point. “Top” probably also connoted “best,” so that your “top eye” was the one that could see farther and clearer.

John S. Skinner, for example, in an 1828 issue of The American Farmer, counseled his readers, “So that as small sands form the mountain, and economy is said to be wealth, perhaps it would be as well to keep our top-eye open a little sharper towards those smaller items of family expenses.” The satirist John S. Robb, in a backwoods story he published in an 1845 issue of The Spirit of the Times, had one of his rustic characters say: “You, Mike, keep your eye skinned for Ingins, ‘cause ef we git deep in a yard here, without a top eye open, the cussed varmints ‘ll pop on us unawars, and be stickin’ some of thur quills in us—nothing’ like havin’ your eye open and insterments ready."

The phrase was a warning to keep your guard up, but also simply to pay close attention to what was happening so that you could forestall a threat as it arose and even shrewdly turn the situation into a favorable opportunity for your own success or profit.

Theodore Parker certainly understood the phrase in this way. In a speech he gave to the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, he said, “I am glad that a ‘top eye’ is open to scrutinize the acts of public men—an eye that never slumbers nor sleeps—an eye that does not spare a friend when he falters more than a foe when he is false; I am glad of that.” And in a letter he wrote in 1854, Parker facetiously chided fellow abolitionist Samuel J. May for having tried to argue that the Bible was a pacifist tract, when there was plenty of evidence to the contrary: “But all this, O father! is a delusion of Satan, who will deceive the very elect if they do not keep a top-eye open and a bright look-out.”

The phrase also had currency among other abolitionists, who used it to describe slaves who carried on with their normal activities, but constantly watched for the moment when they could act by making their escape. The Provincial Freeman in its issue of April 21, 1855, for example, used the phrase:

The cook (a colored man) having his “top eye open,” kept quiet till the steamer had fairly reached New York, then quietly procured a carriage, and apprised the property [that is, a slave onboard] that it was at liberty to assume a more independent air; consequently, it was not unconscious of the value of time; and lo! to the utter amazement of the Mate, it was seen making quick paces in the direction of the carriage.

Abolitionist activist and writer William Still, in his 1872 history, The Underground Rail Road, described the rescue of a slave, Jane Johnson, and her children, using the phrase—“Jane had her ‘top eye open,’ and in that brief space had appealed to the sympathies of a person whom she ventured to trust, saying, ‘I and my children are slaves, and we want liberty!’”

The phrase “keep (or have) your top eye open” had this meaning all during the time it was current, through the first decade of the 20th century.

For about 15 years, from about 1885 to 1900, long after Parker had written his handbill, the phrase briefly developed another meaning before it dropped out of currency altogether. Liberal reformers and spiritual progressives, especially from New England, used it to refer to cultivating a new and higher angle of vision on the world. To keep or have your top eye open meant to look a little deeper into the reasons of things or to look behind the surface of everyday things, to take your eyes off the ground and look into the air, up to heaven, to look there for subtle signs and omens, to be high-minded, to be spiritual rather than materialistic, to be focused on the true and lasting rather than the false, the sensual, and the transitory, on the intuitive rather than the calculating.

Parker’s use of the phrase in 1851 has nothing in it, even implicitly, that connects it to this later meaning. However, the distant origins of the image that this later meaning captures probably lay in Parker’s friend and fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Nature,” written in 1836, where he described an “exaltation” he experienced one day at twilight staring into snow puddles: "Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."

The “top eye” was the “skylight of the soul,” like the oculus at the top of the Pantheon in Rome. It saw, not the waves, but “Him who walks upon the waves,” in the words of ex-Quaker, Temperance worker and suffragist Hannah Whitall Smith. For her, opening one’s top eye was a mystical experience, a religious conversion, a reception of holiness and sanctification into one’s life. In 1883, Smith’s coworker and friend, Frances Elizabeth Willard, the President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, described Mrs. Smith’s home and family:

There is no fear of the “next thing,” because it is the next and not the last. There is no looking back, after the puerile fashion of Lot’s wife, but, with earnest gaze forward and upward, this family group moves forward, blessing and blessed. “Keep your top eye open,” is the mother’s constant motto for her children.

About the same time, Congregationalist lecturer, Joseph Cook, at one of his weekly prayer meetings at Boston’s Tremont Temple, told his audience:

British advanced thought believes in its frontal eye, but not in its coronal eye. This is a defect of the English mind and of the American. When you reach India, in your tour of the globe, you will find people who believe in their coronal eye; who see God in an intuitive way, as Emerson did. … The Scotch have an eye in the dome of their souls; but they have such an immense front window that they are chiefly occupied in gazing out of it. Rarely, except in periods of mighty religious fervor, do they look aloft through the dome. … In general, Scotchmen, Englishmen, and Americans believe in experience, observation, definition, induction, the scientific method, and nothing else. You notice thus one of the defects of Anglo-Saxon advanced thought, that it sees with its front eye, and not with its top eye.

I think that if your intention is to study occultism and mythology, you should major in economics, focusing especially on monetary policy. (Just kidding!)

In truth, many colleges and universities have established departments of religious studies, as opposed to theology or divinity studies. Generally speaking, in the somewhat vaguely defined academic field of religious studies, historians, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists take religion, religious beliefs, practices, and believers as their objects of study. This is a different sort of academic undertaking than, say, studying religion in preparation for a ministry.

It is also common for colleges and universities to have individual courses on religion in other departments, such as philosophy, literature, classics, history, anthropology, or folklore.

Most academic study of American religious history has focused on the main streams of belief and practice. Because you bring up the issue of getting a job, I will say that this means that academics who might be capable of demonstrating expertise only in what might be regarded as the byways of religion—the occult and all that implies—have found themselves with fewer opportunities to land teaching positions. Developing a broad academic expertise, therefore, in the history of American religion would be a strategy that would maximize a young Ph.D.’s chances of landing a teaching position, no matter what he or she had specialized in.

However, as you might guess, now that the children of the 1960s and 1970s have become the academic old guard, as it were, scholars of American religious history have turned more attention not only to the history in America of the belief and practice of systems that have been explicitly “on the margins,” that is, occultist, but also to the way in which even mainstream religious groups have been influenced by the “alternative spiritualities” that have germinated and taken root here. This would include the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Masons, for example, as well as communal utopians, Swedenborgians, Spiritualists, Theosophists, Christian Scientists, proponents of the “New Thought” movement, and such 20th-century groups as Scientologists and those loosely linked under the name of the “New Age” movement. An example of a recent academic look at American religious history in this vein is Catherine L. Albanese’s 2007 book, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion.

On the material culture of Plymouth Colony, including descriptions of housing, furniture, clothing, and family life and relationships, you could look at John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, or his, Remarkable Providences: Readings on Early American History. Also good is David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, section on “The Exodus of the English Puritans, 1629-41.”

Easily the most influential book about the New England Puritans' religion has been Perry Miller's 1956, Errand into the Wilderness. More recent and well-regarded books include Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self and David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England.

Online, Professor Donna M. Campbell’s valuable web pages on “Puritanism in New England” may help begin to clarify some of the Puritans’ religious beliefs.

Also online, you can find plenty to read and assign in volumes 1 and 2 of A Library of American Literature, edited by Edmund Stedman and Ellen Hutchinson, and compiled and published in 1887, and which is available via Google Books. The editors included diverse short selections from Puritan writers describing their inner and outer lives and their adventures in settling in America.

A newer anthology of Puritan writings, focusing exclusively on religion (and not available on the web), is The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology, edited by Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, published in 1985 by Harvard University Press.

Teaching The Scarlet Letter and also reading historical works from and about the Puritans provides an opportunity to emphasize to students that Hawthorne's work was one of historical fiction, written almost two centuries after the events it imagined. Students can easily understand that the book is fiction because the specific people and events its described did not actually exist. They may need some help, however, in understanding that Hawthorne's Puritan world might differ from the real Puritans' world, or in understanding that Hawthorne's fictional enterprise was deeply imbued with mid-19th-century sensibilities and preoccupations. A 17th-century Puritan would never have written a book like it.

Fundamentalism, in the narrowest meaning of the term, was a movement that began in the late 19th- and early 20th-century within American Protestant circles to defend the "fundamentals of belief" against the corrosive effects of liberalism that had grown within the ranks of Protestantism itself. Liberalism, manifested in critical approaches to the Bible that relied on purely natural assumptions, or that framed Christianity as a purely natural or human phenomenon that could be explained scientifically, presented a challenge to traditional belief.

A multi-volume group of essays edited by Reuben Torrey, and published in 1910 under the title, The Fundamentals, was financed and distributed by Presbyterian laymen Lyman and Milton Stewart and was an attempt to arrest the drift of Protestant belief. Its influence was large and was the source of the labeling of conservatives as "fundamentalists."

Useful for looking at this history of fundamentalism are George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford, 1980), Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), David Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1850 (Greenville: Unusual Publications, 1986), and Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

Lately, the meaning of the word "fundamentalism" has expanded. This has happened in the press, in academia, and in ordinary language. It appears to be expanding to include any unquestioned adherence to fundamental principles or beliefs, and is often used in a pejorative sense. Nowadays we hear about not only Protestant evangelical fundamentalists, but Catholic fundamentalists, Mormon fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists, Buddhist fundamentalists, and even atheist or secular or Darwinian fundamentalists.

Scholars of religion have perhaps indirectly contributed to this expansion of the term, as they have tried to look for similarities in ways of being religious that are common in various systems of belief. Between 1991 and 1995, religion scholars Martin Marty and Scott Appleby published a 5-volume collection of essays as part of "The Fundamentalism Project" at the University of Chicago, which is an example of this approach. Appleby is co-author of Strong Religion (2003), also from the University of Chicago Press that attempts to give a common explanatory framework for understanding anti-modern and anti-secular religious movements around the world.

Is this scene set in the Twilight Zone? According to historian Jon Butler, Huguenots died out as a distinct religious and ethnic group during the 18th century.

In the five years following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685, the Huguenot population in France declined from 1 million to less than 75,000, most of whom converted to Catholicism under duress. Huguenot emigrants traveled primarily to England, Germany, and Holland. Most of the Huguenots who arrived in British North America had emigrated first to England. Butler estimates that between 1,500 and 2,000 Huguenots came to America by 1700.

The American Huguenots, like the Huguenot emigrants to European nations, quickly assimilated into their host communities. In Massachusetts, South Carolina, and New York, the colonies to which the majority of Huguenots migrated, many attained material success and married outside of their church. Butler blames the disintegration of Huguenot communities in part to “the indelible pathology of 17th-century French Protestantism,” as Huguenot clerics “were poorly prepared to exercise the instruments of church government in exile.” The French Protestant Church in the quarter century prior to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had existed in a weakened state due to the abandonment of national synods, which had left the group without “experience in making decisions beyond the local and provincial level.” Butler also notes that group cohesion in America was especially difficult because the size of the group that migrated was very small.

Sources from the 19th century repeat a story that Huguenots from South Carolina prepared a petition for Louis XIV asking permission to settle in Louisiana when it first was colonized at the end of the 17th century. Louis’ supposed response—that he wanted Louisiana as “a dominion of true believers not a republic for heretics”—is considered by historian Bertrand Van Ruymbeke as “most likely apocryphal.” Van Ruymbeke notes that Huguenots were allowed to migrate to Louisiana, but that the very few who did settle there had to convert to Catholicism.

Following the acquisition of the territory by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase, religious restrictions for immigrants to Louisiana were removed, and the first Protestant church in New Orleans was established in 1805. If a Protestant from France had immigrated to Louisiana in 1901, he or she would have found that large communities of Protestants from areas other than France had settled in the northern portion of the state, and that most of Louisiana’s inhabitants had remained Catholic.

At least some Baptists do not consider themselves "Protestants." This is to emphasize their sense that, insofar as the Protestant Reformation was as a contest between the Roman Catholic Church and reformers who sought to protest certain features of the Catholic Church and to reestablish the Church on what they considered was a purer basis, the Baptists have not entered into that contest. They have rejected the notion of a "universal Church" altogether, admitting the authority of only local organizations, individual communities of believers, and, ultimately, each individual before God. As a result, they have found themselves at odds with the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and mainline denominational Protestantism.

The entire Reformation, however, trended in this direction—away from recognizing a central authority and toward recognizing "private judgment" as the touchstone of authority. In this light, therefore, Baptists are heirs of the Protestant Reformation, and their reluctance to group themselves with other Protestants is a radical form of the spiritual individualism that characterized the Reformation as a whole.

The Baptists, specifically, grew within and from, the Separatist movement in England during its civil war in the 16th century. The Separatists wished to separate from the established Church of England and form independent congregations. They were also called "Nonconformists" because they did not conform in doctrine or practice with the established Church. Most of them were Puritans—that is Congregationalists—and the Pilgrims brought Puritanism to America and established it in New England.

Some of the Separatists also adopted an extreme skepticism regarding civil control over religion. They formed congregations that had essentially no authority over one another in matters of doctrine or practice, and they also admitted no overarching religious authority. Some of them were influenced by the teachings of the earlier "Anabaptists" in northern Europe. Although the Anabaptists adopted Calvinist theology, they had some unique views that the early Baptists adopted.

The most characteristic of these was the conviction that Church membership was open only to believers who had consciously made a commitment of faith in Jesus Christ. This meant that children and infants, who were incapable of a mature commitment, could not be baptized. Their rejection of infant baptism became one of the most pronounced differences between them and the practices of other Christians, both Catholic and Protestant. Converts who had been baptized previously, therefore, were baptized again (ana-baptist), or, from the perspective of the (so-called) Anabaptists, were truly baptized for the first time. All these groups were convinced that this was the only form of baptism practiced by the first Christians. The Baptists adopted these views, as well as the idea that Baptism could only be accomplished by complete immersion in water, rather than by pouring water over the head.

In England, the early Baptists were persecuted. John Bunyan, the Baptist author of The Pilgrim's Progress, for example, wrote his book while imprisoned for his unauthorized preaching.

In England and then in America, Baptists were first drawn from the ranks of Congregationalists whose beliefs had modified to align with Baptist beliefs. In New England and elsewhere in America, Baptists were persecuted during the 17th century.

Roger Williams, who had been persecuted for his anti-establishment sermons in Massachusetts, exiled himself out of reach of his Puritan opponents and established the colony of Rhode Island. He helped found what was probably the first Baptist Church in America in Providence in 1638.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Baptists found the religious freedom they sought, at the beginning in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, but then elsewhere. Their ranks were enlarged by converts from Congregationalism, but also from other Nonconformist sects. In addition, they embraced the movement of religious revival during the Second Great Awakening, and found an enthusiastic mass of converts as they spread down the Appalachians into the South and West. Baptists played a crucial role in influencing the framers of the Constitution to insure freedom of religion and conscience in the new Republic, and to promote the idea of a "wall of separation" between church and state.

The highly autonomous nature of a Baptist congregation, recognizing no higher "worldly" authority over the religious beliefs and practices of its members, proved to be a good fit in many ways with the democratic, populist character of America. It also appealed to African Americans, who could found their own churches with little religious interference from others.