A fascinating history of dispensationalism and its influence on popular culture, politics, and religion. This book illuminates how dispensationalism, despite often being dismissed as a fringe apocalyptic movement, shaped Anglo-American evangelicalism and the larger American cultural imagination. It locates dispensationalism's origin in the writings of the nineteenth-century Protestant John Nelson Darby, who established many of the hallmarks of the theology, such as premillennialism and belief in the rapture. Though it consistently faced criticism, dispensationalism held populist, and briefly scholarly, appeal-visible in everything from turn-of-the-century revivalism to apocalyptic bestsellers of the 1970s to current internet conspiracy theories. Measured and irenic, the author objectively evaluates evangelicalism's most resilient (and contentious) popular theology. As the first comprehensive intellectual-cultural history of its kind, this work is a must-read for students and scholars of American religion.