Race, Place, and Jesus in American History: An Interview with Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum

Conducted by Hilde Løvdal and Randall Stephens

Hilde Løvdal and Randall Stephens: Why did the two of you take on this project, which became your book, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (UNC Press, 2012)?

Paul Harvey and Ed Blum: On one level, the book began the first times we recognized that the Jesus images surrounding us in churches, Sunday schools, and on movie screens had histories. The book came from that feeling of dissonance when we saw representations of Jesus as white and knew, somehow, in our guts that it just wasn’t right.

On another level, the book emerged from years of studying independently the links between race and religion. We determined that it was time to take on the biggest symbol in the United States when it came to both: Jesus himself. We had read Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, FSG, 2003, loved it, but felt like it missed how profoundly race transformed imagery of Jesus and how much the racial images of Jesus influenced American history. When discussing our book idea with Martin Marty, he asked what it would look like to write a racially integrated story of Jesus as opposed to the ways Prothero segregated race into a few chapters. When we did that, we found profoundly complicated stories that not only featured racial conflict, but also demonstrated cross-racial exchange.

We started the book before we even met in person. Ed had reviewed Paul’s book Freedom’s Coming for H-NET and asked how the book would have looked different if it took into account art, literature, film, and material culture. At that point, we struck up an email conversation and planned an edited volume on race, religion, Jesus, and material culture. As we talked more and met every six months as part of the Young Scholars in American Religion, we decided that there was a monograph to be written. Six years later (and several very different iterations of the book thanks to amazing peer reviewers), we have the book!

Løvdal and Stephens: What is your intended audience for the book?

Harvey and Blum:

1. American historians. We both love our profession and the people in it, and this book connects to the major themes in American history that we teach from colonization and slavery to suburbia and the information age.

2. Students of American history and US religious history. We wrote the book in ways that our undergraduate students could understand, and we even created a website for the book – www.colorofchrist.com with hundreds of images, primary sources, songs, discussion questions, syllabi, and powerpoint presentations – for students and teachers to read the book, analyze it, and create their own research agendas from it.

3. Scholars of religion in the United States. Too often, religious history is written as separate from the broader trends of the overall discipline or focuses too much on ideas. We joined the many wonderful US religious historians who have been looking to connect our sub-discipline to the bigger points of the profession and to show how religion influenced all forms of society, culture, politics, and life.

4. Thoughtful religious leaders and people who want to know the stories behind the Jesus imagery they see around them and be able to make new choices about how they talk about their faith and display it.

Løvdal and Stephens: Several other prominent religious history scholars have worked on Jesus in America. You mention the influence of Prothero.  What about other scholars like Richard Wightman Fox (Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession, HarperCollins, 2004) when you wrote this book?

Harvey and Blum: Absolutely, although the book that first influenced us was Kelly Brown Douglas’s The Black Christ, which was a short, but wonderful, study of African American perspectives on Jesus from slavery through the works of black liberationist James Cone and womanist Delores Williams. These three books were always in the forefront of our thought. We have used and incorporated material from these authors, and thank them in the acknowledgements.

At the same time, we felt we had a different story to tell. On certain points, especially the impact of power and access to media resources in terms of how Jesus is represented in American history, we challenge some of the arguments that Fox and Prothero make. Both works tend to suggest that Jesus always has been made over in the image of the maker. But in The Color of Christ, we show that this is not simply the case. Jesus was made both like and unlike communities, and the “I-Thou” distinctions mattered.  Moreover, many people throughout US history have not had the representational power or means to create Jesus in their image and have transformed him in other profound ways.

We think the main difference between our book and those of Prothero and Fox is encapsulated by our different covers. While they present Jesus either as a larger-than-life air balloon or the different icons, we focus squarely on how people - everyone from teenagers in Brooklyn to presidents in the White House - have lived with the material realities of Jesus in their midst.

Løvdal and Stephens: How can a local understanding or regional understanding of Jesus say something about a national view?

Harvey and Blum: Local and regional factors are paramount to The Color of Christ. We place a lot of emphasis in the work (just to give one example to answer the question) on Jesus in the South. In many ways, the Jesus of the South – a suffering saint – became a dominant American Jesus. Ironically, that Jesus was formed first in the worldview of slaves and abolitionists. “The Christ of American civilization is the slave,” one abolitionist wrote. Many historians have suggested that the proslavery argument won the “battle for the Bible,” since slavery in general can easily be defended reading the Bible in the common-sense way that people did in the 19th century (and many do today).

But we point out that while slaveowners may have won the battle for the Bible, slaves and abolitionists won the joust for Jesus. After the war, that “southern Jesus” was reclaimed by whites; the very term for the overturning of Reconstruction, “Redemption,” suggests that white southerners saw their postwar political struggle as a kind of cleansing of a sin that had stained their region. Their triumph came to be represented symbolically in the famous closing sequence of Birth of a Nation, where the Aryan Jesus blesses the victory of the heroic Klan over the demonic forces of carpetbaggers and their black allies.

Then, later in the twentieth century, black artists (including a number of southern folk artists discussed in the book) and civil rights activists reclaimed Jesus once again, turning him once again into a figure empathetic to the black southern freedom struggle. This is best represented in Clementine Hunter’s magnificient painting “Cotton Crucifixion,” which depicts the crucified Jesus hanging over a mule-powered wagon full of cotton.

The West (or Wests) is critically important too. For Native American messianic movements, such as Wovoka’s Ghost Dance, the appeal of a neo-Christ who would bring back the Buffalo was tied to their frontier experiences. And the climate of southern California was instrumental in making Hollywood into the twentieth-century hub of Jesus media production. By having more than 300 days per year of good filming weather, southern California and Hollywood played a vital role in transforming how Jesus was presented physically and geographically.

Løvdal and Stephens: How did you want your story to unfold from one era to another or from one generation to another?

Harvey and Blum: We structured the book by era and it is divided into three parts: “Born Across the Sea” (colonial period to the Civil War) “Crucified and Resurrected” (Civil War to World War I) and “Ascended and Still Ascending” (1920s to the present). Each part tells a different story. Most importantly, we want to show the “long duree” of images (or the lack thereof) of Jesus in American history. The dearth of imagery among Protestants in early America, for example, meant that what imagery that existed came mostly from Catholics and was, literally, “born across the sea.” Even in the “age of visions” – the First Great Awakening – Jesus often appeared as a sort of ineffable brightness, not something that could be described in physical terms. In the 19th century, the Jesus that we are all familiar with was born and disseminated through the religious voluntary agencies, and their attendant means of mass production, that came with the evangelical explosion of that era. This Jesus was crucified in the turmoil of the Civil War, but resurrected after to bless the reunion of the country (and to bless white supremacy, we argue).

The Head of Christ (1941) Warner Sallman

Then, in the final part which focuses on the last 100 years or so, we trace the “ascendancy” of omnipresent Jesus imagery, from Warner Sallman’s ubiquitous “Head of Christ” (and countless imitations and parodies of it), to Jesus in literature, film, and music, and finally to Jesus in contemporary humor (movies, “South Park,” and the like). The mass media of the twentieth century (and into the social media revolution of the 21st) have made Jesus inescapable globally, even as the meanings of his imagery have become almost impossibly tangled with the history of that imagery. The white Jesus survives through all this turmoil, but he is, we say, “white without words.” In short, the white Jesus is the “default” image, to which all others ultimately must defer, even in positions of challenge or parody.

Løvdal and Stephens: Could you say something about the malleability of the image of Jesus? How can Jesus appear so different depending on who is using his image?

Harvey and Blum: Great question, and that is really the heart of the book. We can best answer that by mentioning the three main myths our book explores about Jesus imagery and shifting appearances. First, there is a myth that humans create God or gods (especially Jesus) in their own image. This myth claims that people invariably represent Jesus to look like themselves. So whites make a white Jesus, blacks a black one, Asians an Asian one. But American history shows this is not true, and the myth hides how much racial groups have interacted and affected one another throughout U.S. history. No racial group in the United States has been separate enough to form distinct and impenetrable religious cultures. Moreover, lots of people have worshiped Christ figures that look nothing like them. For centuries, African Americans and Native Americans embraced white images of Jesus, debated them in their midst, and tried to replace them but generally did not. The myth hides the powers of money, of technological access, and of production capabilities. Slaves did not have the time or the manufacturing power to make or market pictures of Jesus as a black man, but they were inundated with images of white Christ figures. And then it gets even more complicated. When the white Jesus helped slaves run to freedom, he was defying white supremacy. So even racial images can be used to work against racism.

The second myth is that the United States has always been a "Jesus nation" or a "Christian nation." When we take seriously discussions of the race and color of Christ, we find that Jesus has been a lightning rod for struggle, conflict, and tension. For every occasion where someone makes Jesus into an icon of entrepreneurial salesmanship, as Bruce Barton did with his bestselling book of the 1920s The Man Nobody Knows, there are other Americans who have made Jesus a lynch victim (like W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes did in the 1930s), as a Native American who promised the defeat of the whites and the return of the Buffalo (as Wovoka did), or as a socialist who would get beat up by American mobs (as muckraker Upton Sinclair did). Jesus has not defined American culture; he has purely been at the center of the titanic and oftentimes bloody struggles over what the culture would be.

The third myth is that liberation theology emerged in the 1960s and was primarily a northern, black male phenomenon. This myth went into full blast during the Reverend Jeremiah Wright debacle of the 2008 presidential campaign when he could be heard on cable television and YouTube videos shouting "God damn America" and "Jesus was black." Media outlets searched for the genesis of these ideas and they turned to the 1960s. They located the work of James Cone as most influential and connected him to Wright and then Wright to Obama.

But liberation theology has a much longer history, and that history included Native Americans, women, and whites far more than the short history lets on. As early as the 1830s, some white Americans, black Americans, and Native Americans challenged expressly the whiteness of Jesus and several presented Jesus as on the side of disempowered people. In the present, there are many non-blacks who use darkened images of Jesus and some white artists even create them.

The Confucians Who Saved Middle Earth

Steven Cromack

It is particularly hard to get students interested in United States history. But this can seem almost impossible when studying ancient civilizations. How could a teacher get her students interested in Confucianism? If 19th-century U.S. history seems distant, what about the Warring States period in 481 B.C.?

One of the ways might be to take the ideas Confucius posited and find them in today’s culture. According to Confucius, an individual must be great, humble, and exhibit tremendous self-discipline. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam are Confucian heroes. A teacher can use Tolkien’s Middle Earth to examine Confucianism and the Warring States Period of China.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Middle Earth stands upon the brink of destruction. All that the dark lord Sauron needs to destroy the world is his “ring of power.” Frodo Baggins, a hobbit, possessed the one ring and brought it to the Council of Elrond. There he sat quietly as the leaders of the free races debated what to do with the ring. Eventually, the group decided that someone must cast the ring back into Mount Doom, where it was forged. No one, however, could agree on who could or should take the ring. At long last Frodo volunteered to carry the burden, bear its suffering, and resist the temptation to use its power. Tolkien writes, “At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice. ‘I will take the Ring,’ he said, ‘though I do not know the way.’”[1] In the wake of this declaration, the free peoples of Middle Earth rallied behind the hobbit, and so began the journey of the fellowship of the ring. Throughout the journey, Frodo was tempted to use the ring and to surrender to its temptation. But, he resisted, often with the help of friend Sam.

With the collapse of the Zhou Dynasty, China entered a civil war that would last for several centuries. At the center of the Warring States conflict was a debate over the role and purpose of the emperor. In his Analects, Confucius posited that the king needed to exhibit te, or the great magnetic, moral force produced by holding fast to the “way of the ancestors,” (the tao.) In order to do this, the king had to follow the li, or the traditional, ritually prescribed actions including etiquette. In The Analects, the Master [Confucius] said, “He who rules by moral force (te) is like the pole-star, which remains in its place while all the lesser stars do homage to it” (Analects, Book 2, Ch. 1). Confucius continued that the king must, “govern them by moral force (te), keep order among them by ritual (li), and they will keep their self respect and come to you by their own accord” (2.3).

Confucius’s words about how the king should act were merely an idealistic vision of what a good emperor should look like. He saw the reality of the Chinese monarchy: every dynasty rose in the glory of victory and fell violently from power. For Confucius, there was no good king, no savior, no real exhibitor of te at the top. Confucius believed that no living man could separate himself from the corrupting power that comes with ruling. If the king at the top could not provide order to tame the chaos, or provide stability for the bottom, what hope was there for the world, or those living in it?

Confucius believed that humans could impose their will on the world. As there was no savior coming to rescue the world, every person must act as the good king. Each individual must be the savior of everyone else and have the wholeness of a king. Everyone must exhibit te. On the part of the person, this takes tremendous self-discipline (8.4). According to the Analects, self-discipline meant that individuals must overcome selfish desires, remove all traces of arrogance, and “be loyal and true to your every word, serious and careful in all you do.” As for the person who has “taken goodness for his load,” as Frodo did, Confucius wrote (8.3):

In fear and trembling,
With caution and care,
As though on the brink of chasm
As though treading on thin ice.

Frodo and Sam took “goodness” for their loads and acted because Middle Earth was “on the brink of chasm.” For Confucius, the tao was “the way” to take control of the chaos, to free oneself from the pain of living in the midst of civil war or strife. Every individual has the capability to do this.

In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam exhibited te (moral force). They held fast to the simple ways of their people and were not corrupted like the race of men. They were the saviors of Middle Earth, had the wholeness of kings, and exercised tremendous self-discipline to resist a multitude of temptations. In the wake of their willingness to make the impossible possible, Middle Earth fell in line behind them. Frodo and Sam stepped in and acted as great kings.

What other Confucian heroes can you think of?
_______________

[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 264.

An Interview with Historian of Religion Paul Harvey

Randall Stephens

From the new issue of Historically Speaking . . .

Paul Harvey is professor of history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Harvey is a historian of American religion and has written broadly on race, the South, and the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries. He’s the author of Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). With Edward J. Blum he has written the forthcoming Jesus in Red, White, and Black (University of North Carolina Press).

Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens recently caught up with Harvey to speak with him about the field of African-American religious history, teaching, and his new book Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).

Randall J. Stephens: Could you say something about how historians wrote about African-American Christianity fifty years ago and how they write about it now?

Paul Harvey: Historians, at least white historians, mostly didn’t write about African-American Christianity fifty years ago. Black scholars did, of course, and fifty years ago the works of sociologists like E. Franklin Frazier dominated the field. Those scholars tended to be highly critical of what they called “the black church,” a term that was invented by 20th- century sociologists. They often saw “the black church” as either hopelessly other- worldly, peddling enthusiasm and a desperate eschatology rather than substantive improvements in the lives of their congregants, or (in the case of more well-established urban churches) too concerned with protecting bourgeois comforts to address the real issues facing most African Americans. Fifty years, ago, liberation theology and “black theology” were just beginning to take root in works such as Howard Thurman’s Jesus of the Dispossessed, a classic of 20th-century American theology. And of course Martin Luther King’s writings were just starting to enter the public realm, culminating with “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in 1963. But in terms of scholarly works, the broader historical community basically knew nothing about African-American religious history.

Obviously we’ve come a long way since then; the same revolution in social history that affected all other fields of history in the 1960s and 1970s shaped the writing of African-American history as well. The 1970s were the real years of landmark achievements, especially with the publication of Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion (very well known at the time) and Mechal Sobel’s Trabelin’ On (less well known then and now, but a brilliant if sometimes rather eccentric book). Over the next decade or two, studies of religion during and after slavery poured forth, and in my own early work I tried to contribute to that by pushing forward studies of African-American religion in time, focusing on the years after the Civil War. Most recently, scholars such as Curtis Evans (The Burden of Black Religion) and Barbara Savage (Their Spirits Walk Among Us) have challenged us to question the very terms that have defined the field, including “the black church,” which are intellectual constructs of a very particular period rather than historical realities themselves. This kind of challenge really hit the public realm when Eddie Glaude published a short piece called “The Black Church is Dead” for the Huffington Post. Glaude’s piece suggested that contemporary black churches had lost their prophetic voice, and that black parishioners were gravitating toward gospel-of-prosperity preachers that celebrate American capitalism in a way that would shock a figure such as Martin Luther King. That piece generated such a controversy that it hit the New York Times. I begin my book by talking about the piece and the arguments that ensued from it.

Stephens: How do you think historians will be treating black religion fifty years from now?

Harvey: In the epilogue to my book I suggest a couple of themes that relate here: diversification and re-Africanization of African-American religion. The same trends of immigration and pluralism that have affected all of American religion apply to African-American religion as well. Churches with African immigrant congregants and pastors are becoming increasingly prominent in New York and other urban areas, and they will eventually spread to smaller cities and to the South. Many of these feature the kinds of spirit possessions, exorcisms, and supernatural theology that African- American church leaders in the 19th century tried to drive out of their church life; they saw them as too primitive. Catholicism is also an increasingly important part of black religious life, in part because of Afro-Carribean Catholic immigrants (most obviously Haitians, but black Brazilians and others as well). Then, too, Islam continues to exert a major influence, and draws a substantial number of black American converts, as well as African immigrants who come from Islamic traditions. In fifty years historians will be discussing how a once overwhelmingly Protestant group of black churchgoers became much more diverse. This is “back to the future” territory, because that is the kind of religious diversity with which Africans began their enforced sojourn in the Americas.

Stephens: Did your teaching of African-American history influence you as you wrote the book?

Harvey: My teaching always influences my books, and vice versa, so the short answer is yes. Perhaps even more so for this book, which is meant for classroom use. I had in mind while writing it, “What exactly should my students, or any students in a typical class, know about the particular subject I’m writing about here?” I tried to focus on those essentials and avoid some of the more arcane or esoteric points and debates that my other books have spent much more time on. I also tried hard to write a pretty traditional historical narrative, showing some of the basic stuff historians want to show— change over time, diversity, complexity, etc.

Stephens: What was it like to write for a more general audience? >>> Read on at Project Muse

Building Bridges from "Muscular Christianity" to "The Tebow Thing"

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Art Remillard is an assistant professor of religious studies at St. Francis University in Loretto, PA. His book, Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era will be out this December with the University of Georgia Press. His current research looks at religion and sports in the American South from the Civil War through World War II. In this his first post for the H.S. blog, Art explains how his course on religion and sports offers a "bridge" for students to better understand broader themes in American religious history and theories of religion.

Building Bridges from "Muscular Christianity" to "The Tebow Thing"
Art Remillard

Before teaching my first college course, a friend recommended that I read Marilla Svinicki and Wilbert J. McKeachie's Teaching Tips. I recall taking to heart the book's repeated emphasis on developing learning strategies, "that help students to build bridges between what they already know or have experienced and what they are trying to learn." Once I started teaching, I found sports to be an effective "bridge." Truth be told, I'm not much of a sports fan (except for college football—then I get weird). But I follow closely enough so that, for example, I can compare the Steelers and Browns rivalry to that of the Dominicans and Franciscans. Trust me, it makes sense.

In between my first teaching experience and now, I have taken a greater academic interest in sports, to the point where I have developed a course titled "Religion and Sports." Here, I use sports to investigate major trends in American religious history, while also touching on some theories of religion. I've taught it twice now, and student responses have been quite positive. Yet, many who enroll don't know what to expect. Some anticipate a course on what sportswriter Frank Deford has called "Sportianity," or when self-described Christian athletes, "endorse Jesus, much as they would a new sneaker or a graphite-shafted driver." Think: Kurt Warner. The course does mention the Sportians (via Deford's article), but I'm more interested in the creative ways that people have inscribed religious meaning on to athletic pursuits.

So on "opening day," I invite students to cross a bridge from their hometown YMCA to "muscular Christianity." I cite Luther Gulick, his efforts to institute athletics at the Y, and his lifelong quest to understand "the relation of good bodies and good morals." I then turn to his colleague, James Naismith. On January 20, 1892, the Presbyterian minister gathered eighteen young men at a YMCA gym in Springfield, Massachusetts, to play his newly invented game called "basketball." Practically, Naismith hoped that basketball would give restless young men a suitable indoor activity for the long winter months. More importantly, as theologian Michael Novak summarizes, "The idea behind the game was moral, Christian, and hygienic: active clean living through vigorous exercise." Right from the gun, then, students discover the religious roots of a familiar game. Later in the course, drawing mostly from Bill Baker's Playing With God, I locate Gulick, Naismith, and other "muscular Christians" within the social gospel tradition, and discuss how they sought to Christianize all corners of society, from the schoolhouse to the gymnasium.

Another bridge brings students to the land of religious pluralism. I reference Julie Byrne's O God of Players to show how the female Catholic cagers at Immaculata College invented religious practices to express their newfound role as athletes. Richard Ian Kimball's Sports in Zion helps me to define the contours of "muscular Mormonism." From Steven A. Riess's edited volume, Sports and the American Jew, I recall the fascinating careers of great Jewish athletes, from the championship boxer Benny Leonard, to the great slugger Hank Greenburg. To examine "seekers," I talk about Phil Jackson, whose Sacred Hoops adds to Naismith's game a spiritual soup complete with Buddhist and Native American flavors. As for American Muslims, I feature marathoner Khalid Khannouchi and his twin challenge of running 100 mile weeks while also observing the Ramadan fast.

Alongside the course's historical conversation, I build bridges to some basic theories of religion. This is actually easier than I had first anticipated. Most of my students are from western and central Pennsylvania. They have been in (or live in) houses with rooms devoted to the Steelers. They have seen (or own) trucks painted black and gold. And they have observed (or participated in) the curious tradition of wearing Steelers jerseys to church. So I try to make sense of these and other activities by using the intellectual resources developed by religious studies scholars. This semester, I might mention Tim Tebow—not as a Sportian—but rather, for his persona that one Denver Bronco recently labeled, "the Tebow thing." From what I can tell, Tebow's "thing-ness" matches with Max Weber's definition of charisma, "a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities."

The weeks always seem to pass too quickly and I never make it to every bridge that I had hoped to go over. Still, the bridges that we do cross transform students' understanding of how religion and sports fit within American history and culture. I hope that professor McKeachie would approve.

Grant to Support Research on Empirical, Conceptual, and Interpretive Work on the Interconnections between Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs

Randall Stephens

As many of the readers of this blog and Historically Speaking know, the Historical Society has launched the Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs (RIHA) Program. "It will provide up to $2 million in research support for empirical, conceptual, and interpretive work exploring interconnections between religion and innovation in history and human affairs."

Program leader Donald Yerxa says:

I have been working on the proposal for RIHA for a year. And now that it is beginning to be announced, I am gratified by the positive responses I’ve received from prominent scholars in several fields. One can get a sense of the intellectual seriousness and expansiveness of the project by looking at RIHA’s distinguished board of advisors. They include intellectual historian Wilfred McClay (UTenn-Chattanooga), historian of science William Shea (Padua), economic historian Patrick O’Brien (London School of Economics), archaeologist Ian Hodder (Stanford), geographer David Livingstone (Queen’s Belfast), and physician/medical ethicist William Hurlbut (Stanford Medical Center). RIHA is a terrific opportunity for the Historical Society. It puts the Society in the forefront of an exciting intellectual project, one that promises to shed light on how religion and innovation have interconnected.

The website, which I've been building for the last few weeks, is now nearly filled out. (We will add material on a "2013 Workshop" and "Funded Projects" later.)

Go to the site to download the Request for Proposals (deadline for pre-proposals is November 1, 2011), and view Application Information, members of the Distinguished Advisory Board, and the Program Staff and Contact Information.

Religious History and Prints/Cartoons from the Library of Congress

Randall Stephens

I regularly browse the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division for pictures to illustrate essays, forums, and interviews that appear in Historically Speaking. I also use that extensive, priceless catalog quite a bit to gather material for courses I teach. (A note to authors: the images at the LOC are almost all copyright free!) The LOC includes thousands of hi-res maps, photographs, prints, cartoons, paintings, and more, ready to download.

In the spring I'll be offering an upper level undergraduate class on Religion and American Culture. I love to teach it. No decadal history is this. It runs from the precolumbian period to the present. (Religious history is a hot topic. Not that my course's enrollment reflects that fact. The 2011 AHA has as its theme "History, Society, and the Sacred.")

Below are some amazing LOC images from the 18th and 19th centuries, well-suited for the classroom. ( I include the brief LOC description above each image.) While we go over these in class, I like to ask students general questions like: What is the cartoonist or print maker trying to convey? Who would find the image humorous or illuminating, and who would find it offensive or disturbing? Why? What can we learn about the issues of the day by analyzing the picture? In what sense does the picture reveal the contested nature of religion in public life?

"Enthusiasm display'd: or, the Moor Fields congregation," 1739. The print shows evangelical minister Geroge Whitefield preaching at Moorsfield, London. He is supported by two females, one holding a mask and labeled "Hypocrisy", the other a Janus-faced "Deceit".


"Dr. Squintum's exaltation or the reformation," 1763. Cartoon showing Rev. George Whitefield standing on a three-legged stool, and preaching in the open air; an imp pouring inspiration through a clyster-pipe into his ear; a grotesque Fame, being a female evil-spirit, listens to his discourse with an ear-trumpet, and repeats it in an ordinary trumpet; the Devil clutches gold from under his stool; etc.


"Slavery. Freedom," 1832. Two contrasted scenes divided by a huge cask in which stands, full-face, an obese and repulsive preacher with a heavy jowl, pig's eyes, and a thatch of hair over a low forehead.


Detail from a Puck magazine cartoon, "Superstition Has Always Ruled the World," April 19, 1901. Satirizes the Millerites, followers of William Miller, who predicted the return of Jesus in the 1840s.


"The salamander safe." A millerite preparing for the 23rd of April." A playful caricature of a Millerite, an adherent of the Adventist preacher William Miller who predicted that the world would end on April 23, 1844.


"Our common schools as they are and as they may be [Anti-catholic, anti-Tammany cartoon showing] (1) 'Sectarian Bitterness' of private schools; (2) 'Distribution of the Sectarian Fund' - all to Catholic and none to public schools; (3) 'Union is Strength' - children of all races and religions playing together," 1870.


"Church and state - No Union upon any terms," 1871. A Thomas Nast cartoon showing a woman symbolizing Justice(?) standing at door of building "State", as soldiers block steps to members of different religions.


"The Mormon Problem Solved," 1871. Cartoon of Brigham Young telling Pres. Grant "I must submit to your laws - but what shall I do with these" (hundreds of wives and children); Grant replies: "Do as I do - give them offices."


"Temperance, a centennial allegory." Circa. late-19th century.

Religious History at the American Academy of Religion Meeting, Atlanta, Oct 30-Nov 1, 2010

Randall Stephens

I paste below some of the history-related sessions at the 2010 AAR meeting. There are quite a few others, but this gives an idea of how history plays out at the meeting. The program is searchable here.

Saturday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Location: Marriott Marquis - L405-406
Missionary Innovation: African-American Religion and the New South

Presiding
* Josef Sorett, Columbia University

Presenters
* Lerone Martin, Emory University
Selling to the Souls of Black Folk: Atlanta, the Phonograph, and the Transformation of American Religion and Culture, 1920–1941

* Elizabeth Jemison, Harvard University
Writing and Righting Race: Women’s Interracial Cooperation in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist Episcopal Church, South

* Brandi Hughes, University of Michigan
(En)Gendering the Trans-Nation: The Missionary Sojourns of Black Womanhood from Atlanta through Monrovia

* Brandon Winstead, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
“We are Responsible to God”: Black Nazarene Women’s Theology of Evangelistic Responsibility and Its Relationship to Their Contributions to the Church of the Nazarene’s Gulf Central District, 1953–1969

Responding
* Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover E
Author Meets Critics: Thomas A. Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling (Harvard University Press, 2008)

Presiding
* Daniel Ramírez, University of Michigan

Panelists
* Richard Callahan, University of Missouri
* Marie Marquardt, Agnes Scott College
* Grant Wacker, Duke University

Responding
* Thomas A. Tweed, University of Texas

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover FG
Defining Religious Freedom: Reading Tisa Wenger’s We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

Presiding
* Ines M. Talamantez, University of California, Santa Barbara

Panelists
* Quincy Newell, University of Wyoming
* Greg Johnson, University of Colorado
* Kenneth Mello, Southwestern University

Responding
* Tisa Wenger, Yale University

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover C
The Lutheran Tradition: New Theological and Global Perspectives
Presiding
* Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg

Presenters
* Farisani Elelwani, University of South Africa
The Challenges Facing Lutherans in South Africa

* John Reynolds, Union Theological Seminary
The Heart in Sixteenth Century Physiology and the Role of Luther’s Theology in the Life of the Believer

* Hans Schwarz, University of Regensburg
Martin Luther’s Reception in Korea

* Cecilia Nahnfeldt, Karlstad University, Sweden
Lutheran Vocation and Gender Relations

Saturday 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Location: Marriott Marquis - L507
Seminar on Religion in the American West

Presiding
* Jane Naomi Iwamura, University of Southern California

Presenters
* Travis Ross, University of Nevada, Reno
Sectionalism in California’s Religious Periodicals: Place in Religious Rhetoric

* Jonathan William Olson, Florida State University
“Not Merely Asiatic but Pagan”: Religion, Chinese Exclusion, and the American West

* Barry Joyce, University of Delaware
Creating an Axis Mundi in the American Southwest: Religion, Science, and the Sacred at the Chaco Culture National Historical Park

* Brett Hendrickson, Arizona State University
Mexican-American Religious Healing and the American Spiritual Marketplace

Responding
* Tisa Wenger, Yale University


Sunday 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover AB
Keywords in the Study of North American Religion: Anthropomorphism, Agency, and Vernacular

Presiding
* Gary M. Laderman, Emory University

Presenters
* W. Clark Gilpin, University of Chicago
Anthropomorphism: Human Connection to a Universal Society

* Elizabeth Jemison, Harvard University
Writing Agency: Reconsidering Agency in the Study of American Religion

* Rachel Lindsey, Princeton University
The Light of the World: Vernacular Photography and American Religion, 1839–1910

Monday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Location: Marriott Marquis - M101
The Future of Southern Religious History

Presiding
* Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Panelists
* Alison Greene, Yale University
* Michael Pasquier, Louisiana State University
* Randall Stephens, Eastern Nazarene College
* Curtis Evans, University of Chicago
* Ted Ownby, University of Mississippi

Responding
* Lauren Winner, Duke University

Monday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Marriott Marquis - M103-104
How Has Orsi’s Madonna of 115th Street Affected the Way We Think about Religion?

Presiding
* David Harrington Watt, Temple University

Panelists
* Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University
* Stephen J. Stein, Indiana University
* Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
* Leigh E. Schmidt, Harvard University

Responding
* Robert Orsi, Northwestern University

History Book Reviews Reviewed, July/August 2010 edition

Chris Beneke

What follows is the first installment of a semi-regular update on historical reviews in the London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and other places that we bothered to look.

Jeffrey Rosen, “Why Brandeis Matters: The Constitution and the Crash” (TNR, July 22) Review of Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (Pantheon)

Writing admiringly of both book and subject, Rosen says that Urofsky’s “definitive,” “masterful” biography of the great supreme court justice is timely given Elena Kagan’s nomination to Brandeis’s Supreme Court seat and the rediscovery by progressives of “the virtues of judicial restraint.” Rosen is confident that Brandeis “would have predicted the crash of 2008.” (The bearish justice would have no doubt still preferred bonds, as he did in the 1920s, rather than credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities.) Rosen details Brandeis’s long-standing critique of concentrated financial power (“the curse of bigness”), his commitment to judicial restraint on most matters but “judicial vigilance” on the especially urgent matter of civil liberties, and his support for Zionism as both a complement to nationalism and a source of intra-national cultural vitality. The 2008 financial crisis figures centrally in this piece and Rosen builds on a distinction of Paul Krugman’s, positing the existence of two historically-informed schools of thought on financial reform: “the Jeffersonian-Brandeisians, who want to break up the big banks and prevent them from engaging in risky behavior, and the Hamiltonian neo-New Dealers, who prefer top-down government regulation.” Rosen suggests that the Jeffersonian-Brandeisians (like Paul Volcker) have gotten it right, but the Hamiltonian-New Dealers (like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner) have gotten the votes. Urofsky’s biography is itself quite big. Given its hefty 955 page count, you might want to read Rosen’s longish review before taking the plunge. Or maybe even wait for Rosen’s own forthcoming book on Brandeis.

Anthony Grafton, “A Jewel of a Thousand Facets” (NYRB, June 24) Review of Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Belknap/Harvard); and, Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt, eds., Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion (Getty Research Institute)

The two books reviewed here might be a good complement to Stephen Prothero’s hot-selling God is Not One (not mentioned by Grafton). Prothero’s conclusion that the world’s religion’s do not much converge is today’s contrarian position. That wasn’t the case in Bernard and Picart’s time. Grafton observes that the emphasis on the similarity of the world’s faiths was a subversive stance in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Also subversive in that period: dense, weighty compilations of global knowledge like Religious Ceremonies of the World, and chatty, “ironic” footnote commentary on “orthodox inanities.” By detailing (in both print and image) the nuances of religions across the globe and by comparing the common forces underlying their different practices, Bernard and Picart injected sociological and anthropological substance into enlightened appeals for toleration. Though wondering what contemporary readers thought of Bernard and Picart’s Religious Ceremonies, Grafton is impressed by the collaborative, interdisciplinary effort that went into this two-volume project. He concludes that the authors “have done justice to a great work of eighteenth-century humanistic learning. And they have shown us some of the directions in which humanistic scholarship should move in generations to come: not only away from older narratives of intellectual change, but toward new models in which books and digital media, grand accounts and detailed inquiries shed light on one another.”

Bee Wilson, “Stuck with Your Own Face” (LRB, July 8) Review of Geoffrey Jones, Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry (Oxford)

Beauty trends may rise and fall, but the beauty industry only rises. In 1916, roughly “four fifths of Americans used neither toothpaste nor shampoo, never mind mosturiser or deodorant, lipstick or hair gel.” Today, “[c]onsumers around the world spend ‘$330 billion a year on fragrances, cosmetics and toiletries’.” Scent was the first sense to be addressed by the broadly conceived category of beauty products. Salvaging the body from early modern street odors was not an easy job. Perfume helped. By the mid-nineteenth century, this early beauty product was sold in mass, factory-produced quantities, along with “‘the first factory-made, non-toxic mascara’.” Over time, manufacturers moved away from beauty products that poisoned their users and toward products adapted to the visual revelations of electric light. They also went global with products, such as skin-lightening creams, that changed or reinforced prevailing conceptions of race and personal attractiveness. The greatest of the beauty industry’s innovations, according to Wilson, may have been lipstick. It’s legitimation “over just a few decades [in the twentieth century] must have brought about one of the biggest changes to the appearance of the Western female body in history.” Wilson is generally pleased with the data that Jones offers. She is less impressed with his grasp of the “artifice” that has gone into the sale of these high-margin products with often questionable claims to effectiveness.

Dispatches from the Historical Society, Day 2: Christian Identities in Modern Germany

Randall J. Stephens

This Friday session, which I chaired, took place after lunch, when bellies were full and eyes were heavy. Attendees trickled in until we had a good number. The presenters engaged us on historical-theological change and continuity in Modern Germany.

Ryan Glomsrud (Harvard University) asked: How do we summarize and describe the context of theologians and philosophers? What counts as appropriate contextualization for a theologian a cultural critic, or a moral philosopher, like Karl Barth? How do we concretize some of these ideas with social and theological context?

In Glomsrud's view, Pietism is the forgotten religious context for 19th century religion and Weimar Germany. Glomsrud challenges the abstract categories--imminent, gnostic, transcendent--used to describe theologians and public intellectuals.

Pietists organized themselves around projects--youth conferences and the like. Barth launched his career in this world. Journals attached to the Pietist 19th century movement served as the bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries. Glomsrud finds a continuity in this model from one century to the next. And he asks historians to think about how this continuity might reshape what we think of the tumultuous changes of the 20th century.

Late 19th-century ecumenism certainly drew on new sentiments in Europe. Thomas Albert Howard (Gordon College) focused on the return of religious history in the ecumenical and confessional age. His paper “Christian Unity in a Secular and Confessional Age: Ignaz von Döllinger, Vatican I, and the Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875,” answered questions about why these conferences took place, what occured at them, and what they tell us about the era. The theological consensus fell apart, commented Howard, when Catholics questioned the participation of Anglicans. The center could not hold.

So what does this tell us about the era? Howard noted the severe limits of thinking of the 19th century as a second confessional age. But also it was no secular age either. Ecumenism was limited for a variety of reasons. Still, the legacy of the Bonn conferences lived on into the 20th century.

Nicholas Brooks (University of Virginia) began with a quote, "Paul has become fashionable again." Perhaps that is in response to the postsecular age or to his reimagining/reevaluation by Gary Wills and others.

Brooks's paper “Interpreting St. Paul for the New Germany: Martin Heidegger and Karl Barth, 1920-22,” considered the views of Barth and Heidegger on Paul. Those views, said Brooks, revealed a very specific pattern in 20th century thought and marked a break with the previous century. Where Glomsrud saw continuity, Brooks saw discontinuity. In Brooks's words: "Barth's and Heidegger's readings of Paul might be situated in the history of Paul-interpretation, and how in invoking Paul's writings, Barth and Heidegger in similar ways signaled their divergence from the intellectual and cultural heritage of the nineteenth century while providing footing for the beginning of a new era in Weimar and European culture more broadly."

Heidegger viewed Paul as an existential type that took on greater relevance in the 20th century. Paul's religion was not the religion of Jesus, thought Heidegger.

The Paul the Heidegger and Barth offered was different from the liberal version, argued Brooks. Paul's religion does not look to a unified whole, Heidegger thought. Real religion presents the world in a kind of radical chaos. It is mutable. Barth and Heidegger launched very different projects using Paul. Heidegger takes a very serious vision of finitude. Barth conceives of God as wholly other and takes on a "post-metaphysical" outlook. The work of both Barth and Heidegger on Paul had special resonance for Westerners in mid-century.

Tal Howard used Freud's term "the return of the repressed" to speak about the trouble in intellectual history with regard to religion. Each of the panelists was thinking through how theologians, divines, and philosophers reenvisioned faith or belief in a supposedly increasingly secular era. Religion has returned, though, and religious studies and religious history is strong. (See the theme for the 2011 AHA!) And these papers were great examples of the strength of the field.

Posted Soon: Videos from two other sessions. The Internet connection here is as slow as Christmas.

Göbekli Tepe, the Origins of Religion, and Early Societies

Randall Stephens

An amazing archeological find is changing what we think of ancient societies and human development. Göbekli Tepe is the first human site of worship--at 11,500 years old--a startling neolithic temple. The site, not attached to a village or settlement, also challenges what archeologists and anthropologists make of the roots of religious belief. Did civilization produce religion? Did religion produce civilization?

Newsweek's Patrick Symmes reports on the find and its chief archeologist, Klaus Schmidt. (Patrick Symmes, "History in the Remaking: A Temple Complex in Turkey that Predates Even the Pyramids is Rewriting the Story of Human Evolution," Newsweek, February 19, 2010.) "The site isn't just old," writes Symmes:

it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.

See also:
Andrew Curry, "Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?" Smithsonian Magazine, November 2008.

Gobekli Tepe was first examined—and dismissed—by University of Chicago and Istanbul University anthropologists in the 1960s. As part of a sweeping survey of the region, they visited the hill, saw some broken slabs of limestone and assumed the mound was nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery.

Sandra Scham , The World's First Temple," Archeology (November/December 2008).

Before the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, archaeologists believed that societies in the early Neolithic were organized into small bands of hunter-gatherers and that the first complex religious practices were developed by groups that had already mastered agriculture.

Nicholas Birch, "7,000 Years Older than Stonehenge: The Site that Stunned Archaeologists," The Guardian, April 23, 2008.

Never mind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers.

End-of-Year History On-Line Roundup

Randall Stephens

Trapped in the Midwest because of a snowstorm, I've been catching up on some on-line reading. Choice items I've come across:

"Digitizing Monk," Here and Now, WBUR, December 24, 2009
BOSTON–Father Columba Stewart has made it his mission to digitize precious manuscripts found in some of the most threatened communities around the world, including Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel, Iraq, and Ethiopia. The project has discovered and preserved chronicles of how the early Christians living in the Middle East perceived the arrival of the Crusaders, as well as the oldest known Ethiopian-language copy of every book in the Bible. >>>

"Digital Scripture," NGM Blog, December 8, 2009
A fourth-century Bible that includes the earliest known complete copy of the New Testament now has a 21st-century address: codexsinaiticus.org. For much of its existence, the sacred text—handwritten on parchment in ancient Greek—resided at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, from which it takes its name. As with many old manuscripts, it was eventually split up, and some of it was lost. Only 823 of an estimated 1,487 pages survive. >>>

"Google & the Future of Books: An Exchange," New York Review of Books, January 14, 2010,
By Paul N. Courant, Laine Farley, Paula Kaufman, John Leslie King, Theodore Koditschek, Anthony Lewis et al.
To the Editors: In his recent article criticizing the Google settlement ["Google and the New Digital Future," NYR, December 17, 2009], Robert Darnton fails to acknowledge the significant role that libraries have had in the creation of Google Book Search as well as the concrete steps they are taking to address the sorts of concerns he raises. >>>

"800 years on the Cam: Low living and high thinking at Cambridge University, from Henry III to Peter Mandelson," by Peter Linehan, Times Literary Supplement, December 16, 2009
This year the University of Cambridge celebrated its 800th birthday, an anniversary no less secure than any other of thirteenth-century origin, with an “anniversary portrait”, a handsome volume illustrated with the reminiscences of recent and not so recent alumni. >>>

"'War Is Over! If You Want It': John and Yoko, 40 Years Later," The Nation Blog, Jon Wiener, December 27, 2009
"War Is Over! If you want it" – a full page ad in the Sunday New York Times Dec. 27 must have puzzled many readers. The ad marked an anniversary: it was 40 years ago today that John Lennon and Yoko Ono launched their "War Is Over!" campaign, with billboards in New York, London, Hollywood, Toronto, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Athens and Tokyo proclaiming the message in giant black letters on a white field – and in much smaller type at the bottom, "Happy Christmas, John and Yoko." The message was repeated on posters, leaflets, and newspaper ads. >>>

Historical Society's 2010 Conference & Religious History

Randall Stephens

[Crossposted at Religion in American History]

The Historical Society's 2010 conference will deal with the future of the field of history. Titled "Historical Inquiry in the New Century" (June 3-5, 2010, hosted by Eric Arnesen at George Washington University, Washington, DC) the meeting hopes to attract scholars interested in the shape of the historical enterprise.

Animating questions include:

• What are the current historiographical debates?
• Where do particular fields currently stand?
• What's changed for the good—or the worse—in specific areas?
• What have been the clearest criticisms of the profession?
• What are the truly "big questions" historians face, and are we adequately grappling with them?
• What, in fact, are our aims/goals for the history that we write? What are the audiences for the history we write? Who's reading us?
• What impact, if any, do we have on larger, non-scholarly debates and understandings?
• How important is good writing to the field of history?
  

I hope that we can have several panels on religious history in general and American religious history in particular. Questions similar to those above might be worth considering. In addition, though, participants might look at how the field of religious history has broadened out over the decades from institutional and denominational history to something much larger. In recent years the number of historians who study religion has grown rapidly. Will that help reshape the field of history? Are the arguments about the neglect of religious history—made by George Marsden, John McGreevy, and Jon Butler—still applicable? Other questions to consider: What topics are younger historians studying, and why? What role does theory play in the writing of religious history? Has the job market or the publishing industry begun to reflect the growth in religious history?

A couple of years back James O’Toole wrote an essay in Historically Speaking on “Religious History in the Post-Ahlstrom Era.” His closing paragraph deserves further reflection:

The post-Ahlstrom era is now thirty years old, and no one can predict how long it might last. Historians will have to take account of new forms of religious diversity, particularly outside the West, both on their own terms and for the impact they have on more established groups. Levels of religious practice remain very high in America in comparison to other parts of the West, and history can help us understand this phenomenon. The future of the discipline is unknown, but it is clear that there is much work to do.

Please contact me, or the Historical Society, if you are interested in giving a paper, attending, offering insights, or putting together a session. Proposals (abstract and CV) should be sent to jslucas [at] bu.edu by January 31, 2010. Panel proposals are encouraged.

Which History?

Randall J. Stephens

Patricia Cohen reports on the steady drop in college courses offered on diplomatic, economic, and intellectual history in "Great Caesar’s Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?" NYT, June 10, 2009. "To the pessimists evidence that the field of diplomatic history is on the decline is everywhere," writes Cohen. "Job openings on the nation’s college campuses are scarce, while bread-and-butter courses like the Origins of War and American Foreign Policy are dropping from history department postings."

Cohen's comments are sparked by a roundtable on the topic at the upcoming meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, June 25th - June 27th at the Fairview Park Marriott in Falls Church, Virginia. That session is titled "What’s in a Name?: Diplomatic History and the Future of the Field" and includes the following participants: Thomas Zeiler, University of Colorado at Boulder; Matthew Connelly, Columbia University; Christopher Endy, California State University, Los Angeles; Barbara Keys, University of Melbourne; Robert J. McMahon, Ohio State University; Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, University of Kentucky; Emily Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine.

According to Cohen the percentage of history departments with faculty who specialize in intellectual, diplomatic, or economic history has declined sharply since the 1970s. By contrast greater numbers of faculty work in gender, women's, or cultural history. There's also been a slight increase in the number of faculty specializing in military history, oddly enough. (The latter bit contradicts what John Miller wrote in his 2006 National Review essay, "Sounding Taps: Why Military History is Being Retied.")

There are many reasons why some areas of history lose lines and why others gain them. Cohen cites David Kaiser, history professor at the Naval War College: “The boomer generation made a decision in the 1960s that history was starting over. It was an overreaction to a terrible mistake that was the Vietnam War.” To what extent has post-1960s identity politics shaped the profession?

As I read on I wondered what other fields could be added to those that Cohen mentions. I'm no longer certain that religious history would qualify as "neglected" or "underrepresented.” There is much interest in religious history. (See this interesting thread at Religion in American History on a recent conference on religious history/American religion.) Though it’s debatable whether or not that interest has bubbled up into curriculum and/or publications. I conducted a little informal, crude, utterly unscientific study of my own a couple years back. I went through journals like American Quarterly and the Journal of American History for the years 1997-2007. These rarely include religious history topics. (The American Historical Review was a little better.) Only 5% of the articles in the American Quarterly, the premier publication for American studies, covered religion. Only 4.3% of the essays in the Journal of American History dealt with religion over the same period. Thumb through most professional history conference programs and find much the same. (See John Butler's now-classic 2004 essay in the JAH: "Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History.")

What else? Would political history count as underrepresented? What about the history of science? This could probably be extended to include periods that receive less attention, too. I’m looking at you, Early Bronze Age.