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This dissertation is an historical anthropology investigating the late 19th century liturgical landscapes of the National Camp‐Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness, an organization of Methodist clergy who sought ecclesiastical and social reform primarily through camp‐meeting revivals promoting the experience of entire sanctification. National camp meetings drew from the liturgical and architectural traditions of early 19th century frontier revivalism, yet, as this dissertation argues, these meetings were not simply an appropriation of the structure of Second Great Awakening revivals for the purpose of promoting holiness theology in decidedly more urban areas of the Northeast and Mid‐Atlantic. Rather, these meetings were a (re)imagining of the cultural practice of the camp‐meeting through a Victorian system of symbolic meanings, a middle‐class, (ex)urban geographic context, and a distinctive set of liturgical performances, social interactions, and cognitive‐environmental and architectural cues designed to elicit a changed subjectivity among attendees. Each of these transformations shaped the social space, architectural configuration, and site selection of the liturgical landscapes of the National Camp‐Meeting Association, and it is these spatial and material traces that offer a substantial body of data for the interpretation of past religious and ritual landscapes in North America. Such interpretation of revival landscapes is possible through a process of cross‐mending archival sources (diaries, autobiographies, biographies, historic correspondence, newspaper reports, sermon texts, organizational documents, maps, photographs), material culture, archaeological reports, geo‐spatial and environmental data to reconstruct and thickly interpret the ritual landscapes of three early meetings of the National Camp‐Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness – Vineland, New Jersey, Manheim, Pennsylvania, and Round Lake, New York. In its results, this dissertation argues for a significant connection between Methodism, geographic regions, and 19th century holiness practices, and an interpretation of holiness revivalism as a means of renegotiating moral orders amidst industrialization, urbanization, vacationing, and changing social fault lines in the church including race and gender.

Virginia's only montane pine barren, located in the Warm Springs Mountain Nature Preserve in the Allegheny Highlands of western Virginia is likely threatened by successional changes initiated by a history of fire suppression. Dominated by early successional fire adapted species, such as dwarfed Pinus rigida (Mill.) and Quercus ilicifolia (Wangenh.), this shrubland is home to numerous rare plants and invertebrates. We used vegetation analysis and dendrochronology to document establishment and recruitment patterns and to identify successional trends at this site. Tree establishment of the dominant tree species (P. rigida and Quercus rubra L.) peaked following the last known fire event in the early 1930s. Vegetation analysis revealed an absence of P. rigida seedling recruitment as well as a low density of fire adapted species such as Q. ilicifolia. In contrast, Q. rubra is represented in a variety of age classes and shade tolerant trees such as Acer rubrum (L.) and Pinus strobus (L.) are beginning to establish. A dense understory of ericaceous shrubs and a thick litter layer appear to inhibit recruitment of P. rigida and other early successional species pointing to the need for active management in the form of prescribed burns, which have been effective in other pine barrens.