UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles
“Rivers of Living Water”: The Movements and Mobility of
Holiness-Pentecostals, 1837-1910
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements
for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History
by
Caroline Anne Bunnell Harris
2016 © Copyright by
Caroline Anne Bunnell Harris
2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
“Rivers of Living Water”: The Movements and Mobility of
Holiness-Pentecostals, 1837-1910
by
Caroline Anne Bunnell Harris
Doctor of Philosophy in History
University of California, Los Angeles, 2016
Professor Stephen A. Aron, Chair
This dissertation follows the fluid and dynamic movements of holiness and pentecostal worshipers who crossed boundaries of race, gender, language, and region at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. It demonstrates how the changeable, decentralized, and anti-institutional character of the holiness-pentecostal movement allowed for both radical social behavior and dynamic geographic mobility. The movement was in a constant state of flux as the sanctified traveled across the continent, as holiness ideas circulated amidst an explosion of print culture, and as worshipers moved in and out of socially transgressive practices.
By the early twentieth century an expansive network of holiness and pentecostal folk, tied together by railroads and holiness newspapers, sprawled across the United States. The American holiness-pentecostal movement had flowed from the homes of Northern social reformers in the