Hinduism in America

Hindu influence in the United States likely started with trading ships that traveled between ports in India and New England in the early 19th century. Prominent transcendentalist writers and thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau...

Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu religious reformer who spoke in Chicago at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, made an impression in America as one of the first Hindus to speak for his own religious tradition before a large audience. Vivekananda traveled...

Swami Vivekananda opened the first American Vedanta Society in New York in 1894, and the second Vedanta Society in San Francisco in 1899. Vivekananda’s teachings through these societies focused on Vedanta and on yoga practice. The Vedanta society...

Paramahansa Yogananda was a Hindu teacher who came to America to attend the International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston in 1920, and stayed to found a religious movement. Yogananda promoted yoga as an intersection of science and religion that...

The 1960s and 1970s mark the popularity of the guru or swami movement in the United States. In the late 1960s and 1970s, new streams of Hindu religious life came to the United States with the arrival of new gurus or spiritual teachers. Download (PDF) In...

Increasing numbers of students and professionals immigrated from diverse regions in India during the 1960s and 70s. Once in the United States, they often formed associations based on their regional origins—associations that later became the basis for...

Hindu “temple societies” were non-profit associations dedicated to building the first generation of temples in the United States. The first Hindu temples were built in the 1970s. The organizations behind the temples blended Hindu traditions with American...

The number of Hindu temples in the United States has grown rapidly in the last decades, creating a landscape of varied expressions and structures within American Hinduism that parallels both the sites and histories of India and the value of pluralism in...