AHA/ASCH Sessions of Interest

Paul Harvey

In addition to our session "Reassessing the Significance of Religion in the Twentieth Century United States"  this Saturday afternoon at the American Historical Association, which I blogged about previously, here are a few more sessions for you to consider, ranging from a reconsideration of Harry Stout's New England Soul to papers on religious networks in the early modern Atlantic world. See some of you in Chicago! If you have a session that you particularly want to promote here, contact me and we should be able to put it up.

Also, and by the way, if you need something to do Saturday morning but you figure going to our session Saturday afternoon will suffice for your religious history needs, here's a cool session on digital history (follow the link for info), featuring some of the leading lights in presenting history in new ways, including Philip Ethington (who will be talking about geo-historical visualization), Katrina Gulliver (who will discuss her podcasts "Cities in History"), and Jennifer Serventi from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Harry Stout’s The New England Soul after 25 Years

American Society of Church History 9

Friday, January 6, 2012: 9:30 AM-11:30 AM

Promenade Ballroom A (Westin Chicago River North)

Chair:

Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame

Catherine A. Brekus, University of Chicago , James Byrd, Vanderbilt University , Thomas Kidd,Baylor University and Kenneth P. Minkema, Yale University

Comment: Harry S. Stout, Yale University
_______________________________________________

A Place for Grace: Religion and Contests of Identity in theMississippi River Valley, 1812–45

American Society ofChurch History 13

Friday, January 6,2012: 2:30 PM-4:30 PM

Jackson Park Room (Westin Chicago River North)

Chair:

Amanda Porterfield, FloridaState University

Papers:

Not Just "ALamp to Their Feet": Identity and Christian Print in the MississippiValley in the 1810s
Christine Alice Croxall, University of Delaware

"Electricityto the Churches of the East": Home Missions and the Mississippi Valley,1814–45
Brian Franklin, Texas A&M University

"Go Downinto Jordan: No, Mississippi": Mormon Nauvoo and the Rhetoric of Place
Seth Perry, University of Chicago

Comment:

Comment: Amanda Porterfield, Florida StateUniversity
___________________________________________________________

Religious Networks, Alliances, and Friendship in the EarlyModern Atlantic World
AHA Session 109
Saturday, January 7,2012: 9:00 AM-11:00 AM

Los Angeles Room (Chicago Marriott Downtown)

Chair:

Ned C. Landsman, StonyBrook University

Papers:

Catalogues ofFriends: The Meaning of Friendship for Early Modern Religious Seekers
Rosalind J. Beiler, University of Central Florida

Godparents andSocial Networks in Schenectady, New York, 1680–1800
Edward Tebbenhoff, Luther College

"A Part ofOne's Soul": Spiritual Friendship and Evangelical Networks in EarlyAmerica
Janet M. Lindman, Rowan University

Comment: John Fea, Messiah College

Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

Paul Harvey

Some of you may have seen reviewed in the New York Times Book Review today (or in the Wall Street Journal, less insightfully, yesterday) John Barry's new book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. Barry has been best known for hugely popular works of twentieth-century history, including my favorite Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. Evidently, according to the introduction to this new book, he had set out to write another work on early twentieth-century religion, but he kept pressing backwards to get to the origins of what he was studying, and he ended up at Roger Williams.

Down the road a bit Linford Fisher will be discussing this work in more detail at our blog, along with some thoughts on the founding of what is now his home state (Rhode Island). Until then, for those interested in this work, Barry has an extensive piece up at the Smithsonian magazine, which serves as something as a precis for this work. A brief excerpt:

Williams believed thatpreventing error in religion was impossible, for it required people tointerpret God’s law, and people would inevitably err. He therefore concludedthat government must remove itself from anything that touched upon humanbeings’ relationship with God. A society built on the principles Massachusettsespoused would lead at best to hypocrisy, because forced worship, he wrote,“stincks in God’s nostrils.” At worst, such a society would lead to a foulcorruption—not of the state, which was already corrupt, but of the church.

The dispute definedfor the first time two fault lines that have run through American history eversince. The first, of course, is over the proper relation between government andwhat man has made of God—the church. The second is over the relation between afree individual and government authority—the shape of liberty.

In her New York Times Book Review piece on the book, Joyce Chaplin notes the contrast between the "visions of America" of Williams in Rhode Island and Father Serra in California (and one could easily come up with numerous other examples here):

Consider the 18th-century Catholic missionary, FatherJunípero Serra. He assumed that Spaniards had the right to take up land inCalifornia and that the church had the duty to reorganize Indians intoChristian settlements, by force if necessary. Three thousand miles fromProvidence, at a rest stop on Interstate 280 in Northern California, alarger-than-life image of Serra faces the Pacific. Its back is turned againstWilliams’s far-off statue, as if also against his radical example of what NewWorld societies might represent.

The United States is part Serra,part Williams. A “hedge or wall of Separation” between church and state wasaffirmed by the Constitution; rights for Indians were not. Williams would haveconsidered it a battle half-won. He did not think an “American soul” needed tobe created — such souls already existed within Indians. By largely confiningWilliams’s story to the establishment of liberties for America’s adoptedpopulations, without equal attention to the defense of its indigenousinhabitants, Barry has perhaps underestimated his remarkable subject.

On that subject, as a side note/interview to the Smithsonian piece, Barry has some further thoughts on precisely this issue, posted in interview format.

We'll look forward to Lin's more expert thoughts on this subject and Barry's book in the near future.  

Choice Reviews Through the Storm, Through the Night

Paul Harvey Pardon the self-promotion interruption, but you're used to it. Now and then I post reviews from the helpful library periodical Choice of books of interest in our field. Today I'm going to seize the blog to post this review of my new book Through the Storm, Through the Night, especially for those of you contemplating your book choices for next semester's classes.  Harvey, Paul.  Through the storm, through the night: a history of African American Christianity.  Rowman & Littlefield, 2011.  217p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780742564732, $35.00; ISBN 9780742564756 e-book, $34.99. Reviewed in 2012jan CHOICE.

Books abound on the African American religious experience in the US, but Harvey's work is a welcome addition and succinct summary of its 400-year history. Typically in such short monographs, detail is sacrificed for brevity, but Harvey (history, Univ. of Colorado, Colorado Springs) packs great substance through insightful biographies and aptly summarized historical events. He argues against any uniform African American church or religious experience, as African Americans experienced varied contacts with Christianity and often mixed traditional African spiritualism and animistic beliefs. Unquestionably, religious beliefs infused the African American community with hope as they struggled through slavery, Jim Crow legislation, segregation, race-oriented violence, and the civil rights movement. Harvey concludes that though the church is still relevant and Christian denominations are still predominant in the African American community, 21st-century immigrants continue to challenge this narrative, as the Orisha traditions of West and Central Africans, Cuban Santería, Haitian Catholicism and Voodoo, Ethiopian Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islamic influences further heighten diversity. The author notes that clannish and local community traditions among these immigrants overshadow any presumed unity based on skin color. In summary, Harvey creates a broad panoramic of the African American religious experience and challenges future scholars to increase scholarly attention to this field. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. -- M. S. Hill, Gordon College

A Step Closer to a Mohawk Saint

Linford D. Fisher

Amidst the hustle and bustle of this holiday season—and virtually guaranteed to be overlooked following the exodus of U.S. troops from Iraq and the death of Kim Jong II—a little extra Christmas spirit just emanated from Vatican City. Today Pope Benedict XVI certified the second miracle for Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680), the “Mohawk Saint” from Kahnawake on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River near Montreal. All that remains to complete her long journey to sainthood (which began with her beatification in 1980) is an official papal bull, which is likely to come next year.

Tekakwitha’s interesting story was brought to a wider audience by Allan Greer’s Mohawk Saint (2004)—a terrific book for undergrads, by the way. Having just used this volume in a course this fall (the class included a non-Native student who swears his mother’s name is…wait for it…Kateri Tekakwitha; he said his grandmother was enamored with her life), and having spent a large amount of the class discussion on the various appropriations of her by North American Native Catholics and the ongoing attempts towards her canonization, this news feels especially timely, even if it is not entirely surprising. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to ponder how the effects of colonial-era evangelism continue to play out in the present, sometimes in surprising ways. As is often the case, the papal certifications and forthcoming bull only give “official” legitimacy to a following that is centuries old. Tekakwitha will not be the first Native from the Americas to be named a saint, but she is perhaps the most important one, at least for North American Native Catholics. As Greer and others have pointed out, Tekakwitha has long served as the unofficial patron saint for Native Catholics.

Read more here.

A Reforming People: Puritanism and Public Life in New England

Paul Harvey For you colonial America/Puritan New England/David Hall fans out there, here's a brief review, from Choice, of David Hall's newest, sure to be on oral exam reading lists soon if not already. More info is at the book's website. Hall, David D. A reforming people: Puritanism and the transformation of public life in New England. Knopf, 2011. 255p index ISBN 0-679-44117-4, $29.95; ISBN9780679441175, $29.95. Reviewed in 2011dec CHOICE.

Whenever Harvard Divinity School professor Hall, one of the premier scholars of American Puritanism, writes books and articles, those interested in early American history and culture should pay heed. This lucidly written, clearly organized work on New England "social practices and the workings of politics" from 1630 to 1650 argues convincingly that the members of New England's founding generation "brought into being churches, civil governments, and a code of laws that collectively marked them as the most advanced reformers of the Anglo-colonial world." The chief comparison is with English puritan reform efforts during the same era, concluding that the American Puritans nearly succeeded in implementing the Leveller program for transforming society and politics, hence the subtitle. The argument develops by describing the application of such concepts as participation, consent, and equity to practical questions of land distribution, legal procedures, church governance, and political action. Hall considers all New England colonies and uses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a local illustration of both successes and tensions. This nuanced analysis of the Puritan reform impulse avoids both liberal and authoritarian stereotypes of Puritanism. As expected, a fine book. Summing Up: Essential. All academic levels/libraries.

History Now Features Colonial American Religion

Paul Harvey

The below is taken from an entry on John Fea's blog, featuring a new issue of History Now that is devoted to religion in colonial America; it should be of interest to many, so I'll repost here.
____________________________________________

"History Now" Explores Religion in Colonial America

The current issue of History Now, the online journal of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, is featuring articles, lesson plans, and activities related to religion in the colonial world. The articles include:

The Puritans and Dissent: The Cases of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson by Francis J. Bremer

Early America’s Jewish Settlers by Eli Faber

The Origins and Legacy of the Pennsylvania Quakers by Barry Levy

Thomas Jefferson and Deism by Peter S. Onuf

The issue also includes a very cool interactive map tracing the concentrations of various religious groups in different parts of the British colonies.

Black Robes and Buckskin

Paul Harvey



Just a brief addendum to yesterday's posts. As long as we're talking books suited for the classroom, here's an alternative for you. For years, I have periodically used an excellent "greatest hits" anthology from The Jesuit Relations, this one being Allen Greer's edition for Bedford Books: The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America. There are many wonderful things about that volume -- the inexpensive price, the fine introduction provided by Greer, and a great selection of docs -- but just for your interest's sake, here's another possibility of a volume along the same lines, but with an updated translation provided by the editor that doesn't rely on the older, creakier one of Reuben Thwaites' original full-length edition of the volumes. So check out Black Robes and Buckskin below, reviewed for Choice; it will doubtless interest some of you. The volume includes some previously unpublished material, so I gather, as well as an important essay by the editor reprinted in the book.

Randall, Catharine. Black robes and buckskin: a selection from The Jesuit relations. Fordham University, 2011. 212p bibl afp; ISBN 9780823232628, $35.00. Reviewed in 2011sep CHOICE.

The Jesuit Relations is a unique set of documents, approximately 73 volumes, critical to understanding the history of New France. Written by Jesuit missionaries in New France between 1632 and 1673, the documents constitute a running commentary on colonial life and particularly on the culture of the Indians whom the Jesuits were trying to convert to Christianity. As important as they are to historians, it should be noted that they were also invaluable as a source for generating interest and income for New France in the mother country. Hence, the field reports of the Jesuits were edited several times before their publication. In these brief selections, Randall (French, Fordham Univ.) concentrates on what she terms "inculturation"--in essence, the Jesuits' toleration of Native culture and their attempts to understand it to further the conversion process. Her translation is more readable than Reuben Thwaites's monumental The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, first published in 1925. The present work includes 16 pages of illustrations, the author's own article, "Cathedrals of Ice: Translating the Jesuit Vocabulary of Conversion," previously published in the International Journal of Canadian Studies, 23 (2001): 17-34, and a brief bibliography. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. -- P. T. Sherrill, emeritus, University of Arkansas at Little Rock _____________________________________________ And fyi, a little more information about the book, from Fordham U. Press website. And hey, Fordham Press, after a decent interval has passed could you think about getting this in paper so we can assign it? We would appreciate that; merci. . The Jesuits approached the task of converting the native peoples, and the formidable obstacles it implied, in a flexible manner. One of their central values was “inculturation,” the idea of “coming in by their door,” to quote a favorite saying of Ignatius, via a creative process of syncretism that blended aspects of native belief with aspects of Christian faith, in order to facilitate understanding and acceptance. The Relations thus abound with examples of the Jesuits’ thoughtfully trying to make sense of native— and female—difference, rather than eliding it. The complete text of the Jesuit Relations runs to 73 volumes. Catharine Randall has made selections from the Relations, some of which have never before appeared in print in English. These selections are chosen for their informative nature and for how they illustrate central tenets of Ignatian spirituality. Rather than provide close translations from seventeenth-century French that might sound stilted to modern ears, she offers free translations that provide the substance of the Relations in an idiom immediately accessible to twenty-first-century readers of English. An extensive introduction sets out the basic history of the Jesuit missions in New France and provides insight into the Ignatian tradition and how it informs the composition of the Relations. The volume is illustrated with early woodcuts, depicting scenes from Ignatius’s life, moments in the history of the Jesuit missions, Jesuit efforts to master the native languages, and general devotional scenes.

Paperback Writers: Just Out in Paper For Your Courses (With One Glaring Exception)

Paul Harvey

Some of our favorite books of the last couple of years which we've featured here at RiAH are coming out in paper now, just in time for use in your school year courses (not yet true of my newest Through the Storm, but your students will treasure the volume so much that they won't mind buying it in hard cover).

First, and Matt Sutton has already covered this, Steven Miller's outstanding biography/analysis Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South is out in paper. Any book liked this much by both Ross Douthat and Randall Stephens is sure to have wide appeal -- that's like appealing to John McCain and Andy Warhol fans at the same time. Steven's book is perfect for modern U.S. history courses, expertly covering issues in religious, social, and political history all at once, and engaging students with a figure that they might assume they know well, but will know much better after reading the book.

Next, Kip Kosek's award-winning Acts of Conscience: Christian

Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy is just out in paper with Columbia Univ. Press. It's been a while since we've discussed the book here, so let me just call you back to my lengthy post/discussion of the book here, right when it first came out. A brief excerpt from that previous post:

The savviest of the individuals in this book understood that a principle could become a spectacle, and indeed that it must become a spectacle if it was to draw sufficient public attention to make a difference. It was all well and good to tie in nonviolence with challenges to “capitalism, imperialism, racism, and war”; it was another, and something more effective to make Christian nonviolence a complex strategy as well as a religious conviction.” (50) Long before the kinds of people covered in recent texts, the radicals in this book understood race in global rather than national terms, and understood racial violence as a sub-species of the problem of violence more generally. The racial problem was, for them, “contiguous with the problem of violence.”

Just one more to mention, and this one isn't quite "newly" in paper, but recent enough: Chris Beneke's Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism, a work that made me rethink the entire periodization and conceptualization of pluralism. In "Beyond Toleration, and Beyond Those Yellowed Classroom Notes," I reflected at length on Chris's book and its challenge to my presentation of this material in the classroom.

And finally, I want to yell a little bit at one of my normally favorite presses, Harvard University Press, which has done such a great job with Randall Stephens's The Fire Spreads and Matt Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America, both handsomely done up in paperback, very classroom-usable form. So, to Harvard Press, what is UP with no paperback classroom-usable volume of Emma Anderson's magnificently moving book The Betrayal of Faith: The Tragic Story of a Colonial Native Convert. Shortly after its publication I published an extensive interview with the author, and I expected that the book could become a classroom staple of colonial history. But as long as it's in hardcover at $51, that is not likely to happen. Please, Harvard Press, set the book free -- put it out in paper! Allez! Allez!

Through the Storm, Through the Night: Now Available!

Paul Harvey

Earlier this summer I blogged about my book Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity, which was then slated to appear later in the summer (Rowman & Littlefield publishers).

Voila, it's later in the summer, and the book is out, so for that reason, and because my vast portfolio holdings tanked today, seemed like a good day for the time-honored self-promotional post.

Below I'll just repost what I put up earlier about the book, which describes the contents in some more detail, sorry for the repeat but definitely hoping that this book will be useful for any number of classes that some of you regular blog readers teach.

So, without further adieu, a repost. If you have the chance to use it in a class over the next year, let me know how it goes. Yes, it comes in a Kindle edition as well. Paperback version should be out in a year or so I think. For classroom instructors -- the publisher Rowman & Littlefield has an "desk/exam" copy policy here.
__________________________________

Later this summer [it's now out], my new book Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity, will be out with Rowman & Littlefield. It's part of the "African American History" series put out by Rowman & Littlefield. And it's out just in time for your fall course text assignment!

I'm proud to have it standing there with very recent books by some tremendous historians in the same series, including Chris Waldrep's African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era, my old friend Burton Peretti's Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music, and Edward Countryman's forthcoming Enjoy the Same Liberty: African Americans and the Revolutionary Era.

I'm also posting this now because some of you -- and you know who you are! -- are (if you're like me) now facing up to the fact that you've put off your fall book selections (which were due a month or two ago, remember that) long enough, and it's time to pick your texts for the fall. And for a select number of you, maybe this one will be right for you.

The text is short, about 140 pp., and written with the "general reader" and undergraduate reader in mind. I start with the diversity of religious expressions in West and Central Africa in the 14th/15th century, and end with Mama Lola and Kanye West, if that is a far enough chronological reach for you. . . .

In addition, the book comes with a "documents" section, about 60 pages, ranging from Virginia laws on baptism and freedom from the 1660s, to an account of the Stono Rebellion in 1739, to Daniel Payne's famous tour attempting to stamp out "ring shouts" in the 1870s, to Mahalia Jackson's reminiscences of growing up in New Orleans, to John Lewis reflecting on the meaning of non-violence, to Vincent Harding's great essay on the white Christ and Black Power, to Kanye West's "Jesus Walks." There is also a bibliographic essay, broken up by chapter, a Glossary, a Chronology section, and a timeline and some brief footnotes (brief enough not to scare off any freshman reader).

If any of ya'll want to preview it for possible purchase or course use, I'd by happy to send pdfs of the page proofs, or a sample chapter or something if you just want to briefly survey. Just email me, and I'll be there.

Table of contents and more info. below.

_____________________________________

Book description (from book website):

Paul Harvey illustrates how black Christian traditions provided theological, institutional, and personal strategies for cultural survival during bondage and into an era of partial freedom. At the same time, he covers the ongoing tug-of-war between themes of "respectability" versus practices derived from an African heritage; the adoption of Christianity by the majority; and the critique of the adoption of the "white man's religion" from the eighteenth century to the present. The book also covers internal cultural, gendered, and class divisions in churches that attracted congregants of widely disparate educational levels, incomes, and worship styles.

Through the Storm, Through the Night provides a lively overview to the history of African American religion, beginning with the birth of African Christianity amidst the Transatlantic slave trade, and tracing the story through its growth in America. Paul Harvey successfully uses the history of African American religion to portray the complexity and humanity of the African American experience.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Themes in African American Religious History
• Middle Passage for the Gods: African and African American Religions from the Middle Passage to the Great Awakening
• The Birth of Afro-Christianity in the Slave Quarters and the Urban North, 1740-1831
• Through the Night: African Amerian Religion in the Antebellum Era
• Day of Jubilee: Black Churches from Emancipation to the Era of Jim Crow
• Jesus on the Mainline: Black Christianity from the Great Migration through World War II
• Freedom's Main Line: Black Christianity, Civil Rights, and Religious Pluralism
• Epilogue: Righteous Anger and Visionary Dreams: Contemporary Black Politics, Religion, and Culture
  
• Documents Section
• Glossary
• Bibliographic Essay

Advance reviews:

"If you teach, study, practice, or care about African American religion, then this is the book for you. Paul Harvey provides an indispensable overview of black Christianity from the age of slavery to the ascendance of Obama. With it, Harvey offers a bevy of fascinating primary documents that range from Nat Turner's righteous rage to Mahalia Jackson's soulful songs. Through the Storm, Through the Night does it all with such clarity that even the most complex concepts make sense."—Edward J. Blum, Author, W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet

"Harvey provides an elegant and engaging introduction to the history of African American Christianity that charts the diversity of experience and expression among black Christians and illuminates the complex relationship between religion and race in American life."—Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University

Faith of the Founders (My Review of John Fea in the Christian Century)

Paul Harvey

I was very happy that the Christian Century asked me to review John Fea's Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction -- and even more glad they gave me relatively ample space (over 1200 words anyway, better than the average review) to develop some thoughts on John's book. The review is here. Here is an excerpt, and then continue at the jump:

BOOKS

Faith of the founders

Jun 03, 2011 by Paul Harvey

Was America founded as a Christian nation? No, is John Fea's answer to the question posed in his title. But the answer is yes if we consider how Americans (especially from 1789 to 1865) understood themselves as a Christian nation. And then again, maybe it's just a bad question, Fea concludes, because it arises not from a rich understanding of the past but from present-day polemics. Only when we remove it from that context can we begin to make sense of it.

Continue <<<

Witchcraft in Early North America

Paul Harvey

Some of you may be looking for a good classroom resource for teaching about popular religion or witchcraft in early America. If so, this might be the book for you, so I'll reprint the Choice review below of Alison Games, Witchcraft in Early North America, put out as a pretty short classroom-usable volume by Rowman & Littlefield in their "American Controversies" series, edited by excellent historian Douglas Egerton. These volumes come with primary document selections, chronologies, and other pedagogical helps. (I have a volume coming out in late summer or so in the Rowman & Littlefield African American History series, entitled Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity -- more on that as the pub. date gets closer, but the experience of the close editing of that book, with an eye towards readability for a general non-expert audience, gives me confidence in these other volumes that R & L is putting out).

Anyway, here's more on this volume, and check the book's website here for table of contents and more info. What particularly attracts me here is the clear effort to provide a broader context for popular religious beliefs in the supernatural throughout 17th century America, and including Natives and African peoples as well as British North Americans. In other words, this isn't your father's Buick, the usual Salem-centric story of witchcraft in the colonies.
________________________________________

Games, Alison. Witchcraft in early North America. Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. 216p index afp; ISBN 9781442203570, $36.95. Reviewed in 2011jun CHOICE. Games (history, Georgetown Univ.) makes a vital contribution to the pedagogical resources on early American witchcraft. With its introductory essay and interdependent collection of primary materials, the book demonstrates how accusations of witchcraft mediated colonial encounters between mutually illegible cultures: characterized by flagrant "coercion and cruelty," such conflicts demanded justification and frequently provoked resistance, and therefore lent themselves to prevailing supernatural explanations and persecution. Games's historical introduction broadens the scope of witchcraft study beyond New England to incorporate less familiar outbreaks in New France and New Spain. The author traces as well the conflicting beliefs European, Native, and African peoples brought to these encounters. A modest selection of Salem materials are among the 29 brief primary documents, which include legal documents, reports of first encounters, and possession narratives from across the continent. Games's premise is that the historical record tells the story slant; accordingly, this volume represents a necessary and ethical, albeit brief, attempt to counter the Anglo-centrism that has characterized witchcraft historiography. The author resituates episodes of witchcraft in the context of cultural contact and conflict in which they occurred, incorporating them into larger scholarly trends in the study of early America as a space of contact zones. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. -- A. T. Hale, University of Puget Sound

After the Historical Revolutions: Or, When the Tree Falls in the Historical Paradigm Forest, Does Anyone Listen?

Paul Harvey

A review of (and an announcement of) some challenging new works in earlier American History, and the history of the American West, got me to thinking about the changing of the historical paradigm guard -- or whether those guards get changed at all by scholarly revolutions. These are questions which affect the course of American religious history, but bear with me for a short detour before discussing that further.

These thoughts first came from reading Charles Mann’s review of Daniel K. Richhter’s new book Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Past (Harvard Press) in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (yes, Virginia, I do read the Wall Street Journal! But I'm not sure if the link will let in non-subscribers; if it doesn't and you want to read, I'm happy to send it to you).

I know nothing about this book other than this review, but I am a big fan of Richter’s earlier work Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, a favorite of mine to use in class for its wonderful illustrations of how changing one’s angle of vision creates an entirely different historical sense of a period. Richter also engages in some deft analyses of early American documents of religious history from the European-Native encounter, including John Eliot’s bizarre but fascinating Indian Dialogues, of course the Jesuit Relations, Indian conversion narratives, and various ceremonial encounters at treaty negotiations.

In his review of Richter’s new book, Mann writes:

“Every few decades, historians develop a new way of looking at the past. I am not talking about ‘revisionism’ but unifying conceptual schemes, the sort of mental framework that Frderick Jackson Turner created in his argument for the importance of the frontier to our history or that Bernard Bailyn established in his studies of the American Revolution’s ideological orgins. Historians debated Turner for a long time and continue to debate Mr. Bailyn. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were arguing with Mr. Richter a decade from today.”

When I become King of the World I will permanently ban the word "revisionism" and its variant "historical revisionism" (as I have already banned the words "bias" and "politically correct" in my classrooms, since they have become barriers to thought and discussion), since they have been rendered meaningless for precisely the reason Mann explains there.

But the revolution in understanding is not just in the early America of Richter. My longtime friend Anne Hyde, Professor of History at my sister institution Colorado College, is about to publish her magnum opus for the West of the first half of the nineteenth century, Empires, Nations, Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860, part of University of Nebraska’s outstanding series History of the American West series. If this this means anything to you, as it will to some of you, the immediate predecessor to Anne’s book is Colin Calloway’s monumental work One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark.

(As a brief aside, when Anne and I were in graduate school, she always made it to the library at 8:00 a.m. sharp, while I was lucky to drag myself, half hungover and ears still ringing from some too-loud jazz concert the night before, by 10:00 or 11:00 at best, which explains a lot about the great scholarly discipline it took for Anne to finish this huge work, while I was busy watching the Mavs beat the Lakers).

Anne’s work may suggests a paradigm for understanding the history of the West in that era, in a way such as Richter and Colin Calloway have done for earlier American history. Her work also features chapters fully integrating the Mormon West into the larger picture, and too much else of interest besides to even begin to summarize here.

All of this is exciting as an historian. But all of it also makes me wonder how, whether, and when any of this affects public consciousness of earlier American history. Lately we’ve been talking about Barton et al., and of course the bookshelves at your Barnes & Noble are full of everything Founding Father related. I understand that, but considering the impact of the works above – great on historians, perhaps little on anyone else – makes me wonder about similar questions for religious history.

The older paradigm of American religious history will be familiar to many blog readers here, and most are familiar with its more recent challengers, summarized in works such as Tweed’s edited volume Retelling U.S. Religious History. I once saw Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, God rest her soul, blast away at that book at a Young Scholars in American Religion conference, with most of the authors in that book in attendance; it quickly became clear she was itching for a fight with a group that had no interest in fighting with her on the alleged evils of “postmodernist” history, since that debate was long since old and tired at that point; at the end of it, Diana Butler Bass got up and urged her to give up swinging at phantoms since none of us were in the ring with her. Sitting in the back row with Diana, I gave her a big high-five for trying to extricate us all from such an unproductive conversation.

Much of the newer paradigm seems to come from removing religious history from the specific story of the American nation-state, and using categories that engage religious experience at its own level rather than as some proxy for political parties or current day culture wars. We've blogged here extensively about some recent classics that move American religious history/studies well down this path -- by Leigh Schmidt, Robert Orsi, Kathryn Lofton, and numerous others.

Again, however, for religious history as for the studies of earlier American history mentioned above, one wonders whether and how this affects any sort of public consciousness or discussion, and whether it’s the job of religious historians to evangelize for these perspectives that challenge or disrupt how we perceive the American religious past (and present). Or maybe scholars should just do their work, let popularizers who are good at popularizing disseminate this stuff to the general public (like happens in science all the time -- neuroscientists do their thing, and then someone like Oliver Sacks explains a little bit of it to us), and trust that over a generation or two it will find its way into the more general understandings. That's a comforting and easy role to take, but it leaves not much excuse for complaining about why some pseudo-historians advise presidential candidates while the rest of us get to advise freshmen how to raise their grade from a D to a C.

As usual, I have no answers, only questions. You're welcome.

[Sutton -- sorry about your Lakers. Not].

Not into History

Randall Stephens

We've been having a lively discussion on this blog, thanks to Paul's post, and there have been other discussion raging in the blogosphere about David Barton and the uses and abuses of history. The selective use of anecdotes, prooftexts, and the decontextualized way of doing history are closely connected. And, thanks to David Barton and his recent headline grabbing, we have a case in point.

Suppose an amateur Bible scholar said "I know everything there is to know about the Old Testament books of Genesis and I and II Chronicles." Then imagine you asked him/her about what he/she knew about Bronze and Iron Age religion and society, or the development of monotheism in the ancient Near East, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the original languages, or the extensive secondary literature written by thousands upon thousands of scholars who know way more about the subject. Then suppose he/she replies "no" on every count. Now, how is it again that this person really knows something important about Genesis and I and II Chronicles? This is a Theron Ware situation if there ever was one. Ignorance of context sometimes gives people remarkable confidence!

Barton does not recognized the idea that the past is like a foreign country. Instead Barton tends to flatten out time and space and make it almost seem as if the Founders are our contemporaries, motivated by the same concerns that motivate us now. Yet people in the past--whether we're talking about leaders of Bronze Age tribes or bewigged 18th century nabobs who tinkered on their mansions, read Montaigne in their spare time, or enjoyed arm-chair speculation about nature and providence--are not the same as us. This seems like a kindergarten point, but it's apparently lost on David Barton. (See his famous and repeated misuse of the word "seminary," in which he makes no effort to explain how that word meant something markedly different in the 18th century.)

At the Way of Improvement Leads Home John Fea makes an excellent, related point about context and Barton's ignoring an avalanche of inconvenient information:

I challenge you to go to Wallbuilders website and find much of anything about the fact that the many of the most important founding fathers rejected orthodox Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and the resurrection of Jesus. Good luck finding any sustained discussion about Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's successful attempt to separate church and state in colonial Virginia or the fact that their efforts were supported by evangelical Baptists with a theology similar to Barton's. These facts of history do not help Barton promote his ideological agenda, so why bother with them?

Right on.

Nearly any trained historian worth his or her salt who takes a close look at Barton and his hyper-politicized work will see glaring gaps in what he writes and talks about. He dresses his founders in 21st-century garb. He's not interested in knowing much about the history of colonial America or the US in the early republic. Why? Because he's using history to craft a very specific, anti-statist, Christian nationalist, evangelical-victimization argument in the present. (Remember the many unconfirmed quotations Barton used in the 1990s? He did so because, first and foremost, he was trying to make a political point.)

In history circles this is what we call "bad history."

Rituals of Violence, War, and Death Among the Wendat/Huron and the Dakotas: Two New Studies

Paul Harvey

War, violence, and rituals of death have been central to American history, nowhere more so than among Native Americans. Here, just wanted to alert you to a couple of new works that advance new understandings of religious rituals surrounding war, violence, and death.

First, last week Historiann called my attention to a new book which I have yet to see but looks hugely promising, especially as a classroom-usable text. I'll quote from her here:

Erik Seeman’s The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). From the book jacket:

“Two thousand Wendat (Huron) Indians stood on the edge of an enormous burial pit… they held in their arms the bones of roughly seven hundred deceased friends and family members. The Wendats had lovingly scraped and cleaned the bones of the corpses that had decomposed on the scaffolds. They awaited only the signal from the master of the ritual to place the bones in the pit. This was the great Feast of the Dead.”

Witnesses to these Wendat burial rituals were European colonists, French Jesuit missionaries in particular. Rather than being horrified by these unfamiliar native practices, Europeans recognized the parallels between them and their own understanding of death and human remains. Both groups believed that deceased souls traveled to the afterlife; both believed that elaborate mortuary rituals ensured the safe transit of the soul to the supernatural realm; and both believed in the power of human bones.

Appreciating each other’s funerary practices allowed the Wendats and French colonists to find common ground where there seemingly would be none. Erik R. Seeman analyzes these encounters, using the Feast of the Dead as a metaphor for broader Indian-European relations in North America. His compelling narrative gives undergraduate students of early America and the Atlantic World a revealing glimpse into this fascinating — and surprising — meeting of cultures.

Anyone who has poked around at all in The Jesuit Relations will recognize descriptions of the feasts of the dead in these documents to be some of the most immediately compelling and gripping (if, as always with the Jesuits, problematic) primary sources for 17th-century Native American religious practices. Weighing in a a svelte 176 pages, this book looks like an effort to use these kinds of sources in a way that opens them up and makes discussion of cross-cultural religious encounters in early America accessible for classroom discussion.

And here's a powerful new article of interest to many of you, by our friend and colleague Jennifer Graber, whose first book The Furnace of Affliction has received attention at our blog before.

The article, based on some outstanding research in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions papers at the Minnesota Historical Society, is "Mighty Upheaval on the Minnesota Frontier: Violence, War, and Death in Dakota and Missionary Christianity," Church History 80 (March 2011): 76-108.

The piece begins by asking "If . . . war is the norm rather than the aberration in American national life, how are we to understand the transformations experienced in 1862 by missionaries and Dakotas as part of a larger American story . . . [and how do we] understand how violence worked to reshape the participants' religious lives?" Graber considers the effects both on missionaries from the ABCFM and the Dakotas of the Dakota War in Minnesota in the late summer of 1862, a horrific outbreak of violence which resulted in the deaths of several hundred settlers and later the mass public execution of over 300 Indians, particularly focused on non-Christian Indians and "medicine men" who were thought to be the ringleaders of the revolt. Graber makes effective use of concepts of Christianity and violence drawn from Emma Anderson's Betrayal of Faith, Jill Lepore's The Name of War, and Harry Stout's "Religion, War, and the Meaning of America" (from Religion and American Culture, Summer 2009, 275-89).

In one section, Graber considers the religious responses of Dakotas to this signal event in their history, including the "conversion" of many of those awaiting execution. She provides a complex portrayal difficult to summarize here but well worth the read. Alongside this, Graber considers also the effect that the trauma of war had on the missionaries, and concludes that "these men underwent their own transformation. Their encounter with violence and devastation, punishment and incarceration caused them to mitigate and complicate the revivalist Calvinism they brought to the frontier. Their vision of missions made up of churches and schools became something else altogether, one of reservations and prisons that God used to make Indian converts."

Despite its short length, this sobering piece had me reflecting in ways which inspired some previous blogging about Emma Anderson's Betrayal of Faith. Highly recommended reading, especially after our last continuous decade of religion, violence, war, and death.

A Cheerful and Comfortable Study of Colonial Material Religion

Paul Harvey

Since yesterday I mentioned Lauren Winner's essay in the Sunday Times book review, which reflected on Rob Bell and American conceptions of hell (and heaven), seems like a good time to showcase this review of her new book A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, recently published by Yale -- the review is from Choice.

Winner, Lauren F. A cheerful and comfortable faith: Anglican religious practice in the elite households of eighteenth-century Virginia. Yale, 2010. 272p bibl index afp ISBN 0-300-12469-4, $45.00; ISBN 9780300124699, $45.00. Reviewed in 2011may CHOICE.

This study by Winner (Duke Divinity School) of the domestic religious life of elite families in Colonial Virginia both builds upon and modifies earlier work, including Dell Upton's Holy Things and Profane (1986). As Upton did, Winner focuses primarily on material objects as evidence; however, she deals not with public, male-dominated church buildings but rather with articles found in and around the home: needlework, baptismal bowls, prayer books, articles related to food preparation and consumption, and garments and rings worn in times of mourning. Winner's argues that although their roles were circumscribed, Anglican women nevertheless carved out a sphere in which they subtly contested the authority over religious matters claimed by clergy and male relatives and that their religious life, though not as dramatic as that of their Puritan counterparts, was an authentic appropriation of Anglican tradition in a Colonial setting. Winner's work is thoroughly and imaginatively researched, informed but not overwhelmed by theory, adequately illustrated, and accessibly written. This book is an important contribution to Anglican, elite, Colonial, material, and gendered dimensions of American religious life. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty. -- P. W. Williams, Miami University

Whose Story is American Religious History?

By Heath Carter

I'm here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I'm attending the American Society of Church History's spring meeting, organized around the theme of "Christianity and Migrations." There are any number of interesting panels and I hope to post another update before all is said and done, but for now a brief report on Rachel Wheeler's stimulating plenary address this morning entitled, "Whose Story is American Religious History? The Parallel Lives of Daniel Boone and Joshua, the Mohican." Wheeler is an associate professor of religious studies at IUPUI whose work has come up often on this blog [those interested in reading up on her first book, To Live Upon Hope, might check out fellow blogger Lin Fisher's conversation with her back in 2009].

Her talk today engaged big questions about how we should narrate the story of European-Indian encounter in the Americas, which has ramifications of course for how we tell the story of American religious history. She argued that the life of Joshua, an Indian convert to Moravianism, highlights the difficulties with both triumphalist and revisionist accounts of conflict on the frontier. The problems with triumphalism, a view summed up in Horatio Greenough's mid-nineteenth century sculpture, The Rescue, need not be elaborated here. There is a reason why the statue, an image of which Wheeler incorporated into her talk, was removed from the steps of the U.S. capitol building in the late-1950s.
But Wheeler persuasively showed that Joshua's story also complicates the revisionist narrative, which lacks the categories to see his conversion as anything other than collusion with the oppressor; and lacks, moreover, the flexibility to allow for Moravian missionaries who - unlike some of their Protestant counterparts in the late-18th century - were not virulently anti-Indian but were in fact open to some of the ways that Indian converts made Christianity their own.

In elaborating the fascinating comparison between Boone and Joshua, Wheeler followed themes of migration, war, and conversion. All of these will be central to her next book, a biography of Joshua which will put him belatedly on more religious historians' radar (I confess that before Wheeler's talk I had not heard of him). If her second book makes the same kind of splash as her first, it may be that we'll all soon be required to take what she called the "Joshua test" - do our accounts of American religious history shed light upon the experience of this Mohican-Moravian martyr, or will we continue to relegate those like him to the margins? For the profession's sake, let's root for passing grades for all.

John Fea on the TV

Randall Stephens

RiAH friend and contributor John Fea was recently featured on C-Span's Book TV. Fea appears on a March 18 panel on The Founding Fathers and Religion. He speaks about his new book Was America Founded As a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction (Westminster John Knox, 2011). Check the video out here. (Sorry, can't embed it.) Here's the summary:

Authors talked about their books on the American Revolution and role played by religion in the founding of the United States. They also responded to questions from members of the audience. Tatiana van Riemsdijk moderated. The participating authors were: Barbara Clark Smith, author of The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America; John Fea, author of Was America Founded As a Christian Nation?; and John Ragosta, author of Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia's Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty. "Founding Fathers and Religion" was a panel at the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, Virginia, held in the City Council Chambers on Friday, March 18, 2011.

Creolization and Kreolization

Emily Clark

Academic talk of Native American-European cultural hybridity and cultural conflict immediately take my mind to the Caribbean world and major port cities like New Orleans or Santo Domingo. When authors write about “creolization,” I think of cultural intersections between French, Spanish, Native American, and African traditions in the American South. I don’t immediately think of Alaska. However, a new book I recently reviewed for Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction has widened the geographic spread I associate with creolization, or rather kreolization.

In the 1980s and 1990s, theorizing of the Atlantic World by historians such as Bernard Bailyn and later David Armitage placed the colonial Americas within a more nuanced, engaging, and dynamic framework. The Pacific World and its impact on the colonial Americas has yet to be as thoroughly explored as the Atlantic, but works such as historian Gwenn A. Miller’s Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America demonstrate the importance of expanding the view of colonial American encounters. With the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska in 1784, the Russian empire continued its eastward movement setting up its own business-oriented, colonial enterprise in the “new world.”

Together, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church and the education imparted by the fur-trading Russian-American Company offered government and trade officials a method to “civilize” the Alutiiq population and thus extend Russia’s imperial border. Miller’s micro-history of interactions between indigenous Alaskans, Russian fur traders, and missionaries on Kodiak Island elucidates how “a distinct Kreol colonial society” developed that “was neither wholly Russian nor wholly Alutiiq.” In a world of mutual dependence, intimate encounters between Russian fur traders and Alutiiq women led to a new Kreol generation of colonial subjects to be defined, controlled, and integrated into the imperial Russian enterprise. In their attempts to convert, Christianize, and “civilize” the Alutiiq people, the Russian missionaries demonstrate how interactions between Native Americans and their colonizers were fraught with complications on Alaska’s Kodiak Island. The British praying towns, the French Canadian seaways, and the American southwest were not alone. Though the situation in Alaska was less physically violent, it wasn’t necessary less culturally complex.

For a long-time, the gaze of American historians was that of the covered-wagon pioneers - westward. Miller is certainly not the first or only scholar to change the frame of reference. In her contribution to Thomas Tweed’s 1997 Retelling US Religious History, Laurie Maffly-Kipp elucidates how a narrative based in the Pacific Rim further illuminates typical historical account. Daniel Richter’s often cited Facing East From Indian Country: A Native History of Early America encourages historians to think about their narratives from the shoes – or moccasins – of “the other.” Miller’s book offers a colonial narrative far from the cities of Boston, New York, or Charleston that is both similar and different from the stereotypical westward European expansion model. For those of us interested in syncretism, cultural mixing, hybridity, colonial intersections, creolization, or whatever you want to call it, Kodiak Kreol provides another vantage point from which to theorize.