Welcome to the BAPTIST HISTORY HOMEPAGE: A Source for Original Baptist Documents!This Website was begun in late 2002 (though some of the documents were transcribed in 1998) and the response has been pleasing with more than four million visits [2024]. When I began this project with some local Baptist Circular Letters, I did a google search and got only one response to "Baptist Circular Letters" - it was on a British site. Baptist Circular Letters have been referred to as: "a body of divinity in miniature." There are now more than 485 Circular Letters available via this site.
There is lots of Baptist history available but much of it was limited to special library collections before the Internet became so accessible. Many of these documents have had limited distribution. I have located information in various places; I have often used the Southern Baptist Seminary Library in Louisville, which has a "gold mine" of Baptist history. The archivists there are extremely helpful. I've also been to Brown University, Princeton Univesity, Regents' Park College at Oxford, England, Cardiff, Wales and several other library locations.
There are now several thousand documents on this site, also more than six hundred links to Baptist books via Google Books and others. They are an eclectic assortment; their quality is uneven - some are well-written articles while others are less so. Some are very important, some not so important. I have left the documents 'as they are' except where I use [ ] to show a change, or at the end of the article I indicate a change of the title, or that I've added a title to a document that had no title. The grammar and spelling of the original are retained. These Baptist documents are interesting to me and I hope many will be to you as well. The items posted here are "public domain" material. None of these is copyrighted, though if anyone should use material from the site somewhere else, it will be appreciated if credit to this site is given. Essays I have written are not copyrighted; the same courtesy of acknowledgement is appreciated.
I attended and worked while attending Piedmont Bible College (now Carolina University) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Lexington Baptist College (KY), the University of Kentucky, and graduated from Campbellsville (KY) College (now University) with a BA in History/English. And I received the MA in History from Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee. I pastored more than twenty-five years, have done supply-preaching, taught as an adjunct in three Bible Colleges, taught in a public university and have worked in pharmaceutical sales. I am a past-president of the Boone County Kentucky Historical Society. I have been interested in Baptist history for many years and have been collecting Baptist historical documents for some time.
My wife, Linda, and I met in high school, married a year after graduation and recently celebrated our 66th wedding anniversary with our five children, many grand-children and great-grand-children. We are faithful members of an independent Baptist church.
Thanks for visitng the site; come back often to view additional documents being posted. The most recently posted are here.
James R. (Jim) Duvall
EditorBaptist History Homepage
