This dissertation seeks to enhance our understanding of the early American republic by providing a study of the home missions movement from 1787 to 1845. The home missions movement was a nationwide, multi-denominational religious movement, led by mission societies, and aimed at bringing the Protestant gospel to the various peoples of the states and territories. A history of this movement not only fills a gap in the historiography of early American religious history, but also enlightens our understanding of the broader socio-political world of the early republic. The founding years of the home missions movement, from 1787 to 1815, were led by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. Despite interdenominational competition at home and diplomatic tension with Britain, Protestants tended to cooperate both interdenominationally and transatlantically in order to achieve broader, evangelical goals in their missions. Home missions societies also shed light on a third form of cooperation: cooperation between church and state. We can better understand the relationship between church and state in the early republic by rejecting the idea that these two entities functioned separately. Instead, they functioned within a complex system of cooperation, evidenced by consistent government subsidization of and participation in missions to both white settlers and Indians, as well as by a broad culture of cooperation with Protestant projects in American society. During the early antebellum period, the home missions movement underwent a significant transformation, from functioning as a nationwide group of loosely-affiliated societies, which focused on nearby peoples, to a highly-centralized affair, dominated by a handful of national mission societies, which focused on the salvation of the entire nation. The growing importance of the population of the Mississippi Valley and the national trend toward a more centralized government and economic system played the two key roles in this transformation. This centralization - religious, economic, and political - helped give rise to the antimission movement, a nationwide Protestant protest against mission societies. This movement sheds light on the religious and ideological underpinnings of antebellum sectionalism.

As indicated by drilling and geophysical data, the Mississippi Valley Graben, the Rough Creek Graben, together with the Rome Trough of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, are fault-bounded graben structures filled with as much as 27,000 feet of Early to Middle Cambrian sediments. Detailed regional mapping of Cambrian and younger strata within and surrounding these structures indicates that they formed contemporaneously. The proximity of these structures suggests they developed within the same regional stress fields and tectonic environments. These three structures are mechanically and kinematically connected, and formed part of a single continent-scale rift system produced during the breakup of Rodinia and the separation of Laurentia from Amazonia. Data including stratigraphic tops from 1,764 wells, interpretations of 106 seismic profiles, aeromagnetic and gravity survey analysis, and mapped surface geology and structures were used within this project. Seven stratigraphic packages resolvable in both geophysical well logs and reflection seismic profiles were mapped in the subsurface across parts of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Tennessee. These stratigraphic units were then analyzed through structure maps, isopachous maps, and across 12 regional well-based cross sections. Detailed analysis of thickness patterns of seven major stratigraphic packages was used to identify the locations and timing of major fault movements within the study area. The regional patterns of fault movements through time were used to investigate how the structures evolved in response to the tectonic episodes in southeastern Laurentia during the Cambrian through Devonian Periods. Active rifting of the Precambrian crystalline bedrock began by the Early Cambrian, and resulted in a thick deposit of Reelfoot Arkose and Eau Claire Formation within the Mississippi Valley and Rough Creek Grabens, and the Rome Formation and Conasauga Group within the Rome Trough. Major tectonic extension ended by the Late Cambrian, prior to the deposition of the Knox Supergroup. Counter-clockwise rotation of the regional sigma-1 stress field between the Middle Ordovician and Early Mississippian (Taconic through Acadian Orogenies) resulted in the reactivation of varying sets of preexisting faults through time. The locations, orientations, and timing of these active faults relate to the deep architecture of the rift system.

This study focuses on the causes and consequences of depopulation in the Lower Mississippi Valley during the Protohistoric period (ca. AD 1500-1700). The Protohistoric period in the region is characterized by indirect and infrequent contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, dramatic population losses and/or regional abandonments accompanied the collapse, transformation, and coalescence of Native American societies during this period across the interior southeastern United States. The causes and timing of these phenomena, however, were often multiple and occurred in a time-transgressive manner. The goal of the research presented in this dissertation was the identification of the forces and processes of cultural and demographic change that were responsible for transformation experienced by a Late Mississippian population represented by the Tillar Complex in southeast Arkansas during the Protohistoric period. Multiple lines of evidence, including archaeological, historical and environmental data, were employed to test a multi-causal model of population decline, adaptation, and abandonment of Bayou Bartholomew by Tillar phase peoples sometime during the seventeenth century. The external forces hypothesized to have been catalysts that drove social and cultural transformations and eventual depopulation include the military expedition of Hernando De Soto, disease, and a series of prolonged droughts that impacted large areas of the Southeast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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