This dissertation traces the roots of American Pentecostalism, with special emphasis on its role in the South, and demonstrates how crucial this movement was to American religion and culture. Pentecostalism is analyzed from its origins in the Holiness revival of the late 19th century and its culmination in the 1906 Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles. This study reveals how participants in the West coast revival transmitted the radical doctrines and practices of Pentecostalism into the South not only by recreating the revival there, but also through an extensive network of newspapers, journals, and magazines in this region. In these, converts attested to empowering experiences of speaking in tongues, feelings of spiritual fulfillment, and the sense of community the new sect provided. Forming new churches in the Jim Crow South, Pentecostals held unconventional beliefs about race and gender, setting them on an uncharted and possibly dangerous path in Christian social life. Although radical Holiness sects set in motion the doctrines and religious practices that would feed this vibrant new movement—theological perfectionism, apocalyptic eschatology, intense religious experience, interracialism, gender egalitarianism, counter-culturalism, and restorationism—this dissertation shows that it was the nascent Holiness-Pentecostal press and the extensive social networks that followed Asuza Street which served as the major forces of transmission.