Heike Jablonski examines how discourses of martyrdom shaped 18th- and 19th-century American culture by delineating traces of John Foxe’s famous martyrology Actes and Monuments in a variety of published and unpublished material. The author investigates how a 16th-century book came to have such a lasting influence in the United States and why the martyr figure was so pervasive in American culture.