Yes, Researchers Do Know Something About Teaching

Art Remillard

On the final day of FSU’s Graduate Symposium, I had the pleasure of joining Kelly Baker, Betsy Barre, Howell Williams, and Joseph Williams to talk about, "Life after Graduate School." A recurring theme was the difference between teaching and research schools. We outlined strategies for interviewing at such schools, and gave insights on what daily life is like as a teacher or researcher. We also emphasized that, despite outward appearances, folks at teaching schools take research seriously, and folks at research schools take teaching seriously. This point--that researchers strive to excel in the classroom--could use some publicity. Many of the best professors I've known are also productive scholars. They have an infectious enthusiasm about their subject, and give as much thought to their course designs as they do to any article or book. They are also creative, always looking for something new to enliven the classroom. Take our own Paul Harvey, for example. UCCS's Teaching and Learning Center featured Paul and his use of blogs in undergraduate courses. He also elaborated on his jazz-inspired teaching philosophy. No "teacher-centered" or "student-centered" approach for the good Professor Harvey.

I focus on a theme-and-improvisation model, that allows for the discipline and intellectual rigor of a theme while also encouraging soloing and improvisation. I find this model best fits the notion of learning as an active and dynamic process, that occurs for different students on varying levels. I have also found it works to make students feel they have a voice and that their participation is valued and drawn upon in course preparation, even while assuring them that discipline and intellectual rigor have not been sacrificed.

Blogging, jazz, intellectual rigor--very nice. How about some one-upmanship from Mike Pasquier, who has been collaborating with LSU’s Coastal Sustainability Studio to have his students conduct oral histories in Bayou Lafourche. Take a minute and listen to this podcast where Mike and his students discuss the project. The description:

Today’s show is an interview with one of the Center’s partners, Dr. Mike Pasquier, a professor here at LSU in the Religious Studies Department. Dr. Pasquier is working with the Center to establish the Bayou Lafourche Oral History Project. He and his students collected oral histories to gain a better understanding of the role of religion in everyday life among Bayou Lafourche residents. He’s also partnering with the Coastal Sustainability Studio here at LSU, and is using this material to garner a better understanding of how south Louisiana culture is being affected by wetland loss. He teaches courses in U.S. religious history, Christianity, and world religions and his research focuses on the history of Roman Catholicism in the American South, Catholic devotional culture, and religion in colonial Louisiana.

In this episode, the director will speak with him about his ongoing project in Bayou Lafourche, how he uses oral history in the college classroom, and how this research will be useful to a larger, interdisciplinary study assessing the impact of land loss on residents of the area. We’ll get to hear some clips from interviews recorded by some of his students with Bayou Lafourche residents. So join us today as we hear about men murmuring the rosary during Hurricane Betsy, about school children being punished for speaking French on state property, and about how the land and waters where people fish, work, and live is disappearing before our eyes.

What Does This Map Tell Us?

Randall Stephens

The other day in my Religion and American Culture class we were covering mid-19th century America. I've found that asking questions about maps and looking at the demographics of the religious landscape can be a helpful in-class exercise. This map of Major Communal Experiments before 1860 comes from the old Mapcentral site, Bedford/St. Martin's. (Click to enlarge.)


(Students should not get the idea that every American sold his/her possessions, took up with the Shakers, and renounced sex. But still there certainly was quite a bit of communal/utopian action.) After we look at the above in class we ask: What accounts for the heavy presence in the North and the absence in the South? Why did utopian experiments thrive in this age? How did these influence society?

Some selected quotes might provide interesting context to the map and give the students something to ponder. (The two I cite here are not exactly representative, but could get the conversation rolling.) See, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who famously rhapsodized to his friend Thomas Carlyle in 1840:

We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.1 One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the State; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope.

From the southern end, have a look at James Henley Thornwell, or George Fitzhugh, who wrote this in Cannibals All! or Slaves without Masters (1857):

Mormonism had its birth in Western New York, that land fertile of isms--where also arose Spiritual Rappings and Oneida Perfectionism--where Shakers, and Millenarians, and Millerites abound, and all heresies do most flourish . . . . Abolition swallows up little isms, and Socialism swallows up Abolition.

Bedford/St. Martin's Make History site provides some of the best map and visual resources for free.

Guest Post: Social Media in the American Religious History Classroom

Today's guest post comes from John L. Crow, a graduate student at my alma mater, Florida State University, in American Religious History. John's interests lie in theosophical movements, but this post engages the question of how to use social media effectively in our classrooms.--Kelly

Social Media Tools for the Classroom

John L. Crow

We have all read the news about the ever expanding presence of Facebook and other social networking sites. Terms such as “Classroom 2.0” and “Social Learning Network” have been batted around within the larger discussion of how these tools can assist in the classroom. Yet, for religious historians, many of these tools are less than helpful. However, one relatively unknown tool actually could be of use to classrooms and add an interactive way to look at historical periods. Dipity.com is a social networking and group collaboration website that allows users to interactively create timelines. These timelines can be consist of any event at any time period. Each timeline entry contains a title, description, plus a place for an image and a URL. Signing up for the website is free and the timelines can be created and collaborated by any number of people. As an example of what can be shown, I have taken the static table from Appendix I of Mary Beth Norton’s In The Devil’s Snare, the cases heard by the court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692, and rendered it as an interactive timeline here.

One can zoom in and out of the timeline and begin to see the gaps in activity, the clustering in trials, accusations and executions. The timeline makes the intermittent nature of the trials more apparent than a table.

The interactive and open nature of the platform allows anyone to transport time based data to a dynamic, interactive chronology. Classes could share in the creating of timelines, cooperating in populating continuities that collectively illustrate time periods under study. The particulars of events or the overlapping and interrelated aspects of history become visually and animatedly apparent. The best part is that an instructor can create a blank timelines, have students sign up for free accounts and then they can create the timeline entries as parts of assignments and as study aids.

Social networking is a presence in classrooms, regardless if we like it or not. The persistence of laptops and smart phones allows instant access to Facebook and other sites. Dipity.com, though, allows for a more constructive use of social networking, one that engages the students and enhances the possibilities of their comprehension of the complex and dynamic nature of American religious history.

Questions for Research Projects

Randall Stephens

As the snow fell outside our classroom window today, the students in my Religion and American Culture class and I talked about research papers. A good paper can always use a good question. But what makes for a good question? Should the question be broad enough to lend itself to a sweeping assessment of a period? Or, should it be more narrow? What are the marks of a good question?

Hear are some of the questions we came up with as we brainstormed. (We're up to the early 19th century, which is reflected here):

What are the connections between religious belief and war in American history?

Why did utopian communities flourish as they did in the first half of the 19th century?

How did abolitionists and proslavery advocates use the Bible in the years leading up to the Civil War?

Was the women's rights movement a religious movement?

What were the political and social ramifications of the Second Great Awakening?

How has millennialism influenced American religious groups?

How have religion and politics been intertwined in American history? And how does the American context differ from the European context?

Are Americans more or less religious in 2011 as they were in 1961?

In the Beginning...What?

by Heath Carter

For the second spring in a row, I am teaching "History of Religion in the United States" at Loyola University Chicago. The class meets once a week on Thursdays from 4:15-6:45pm, meaning that I am working against not only short attention spans but also serious hunger pains and wish-it-was-Friday already syndrome.

Nevertheless, things got off to a promising start yesterday. I gave a lecture that focused on life in Pueblo New Mexico on the eve of Spanish arrival, the experience of conquest, the establishment of Franciscan doctrinas, the possibilities of resistance, etc (based mostly off of Ramon Gutierrez's When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away (1991)). We followed that up with a discussion of Lauren Maffly-Kipp's essay, "Eastward, Ho! American Religion from the Perspective of the Pacific Rim," which can be found in Retelling U.S. Religious History (1997), edited by Thomas Tweed (I imagine most readers know of this book already, but for those who don't, it's full of provocative essays, perfect for stirring up conversation in class). You could see the wheels turning as students struggled to re-imagine American religious history outside the trope of westward expansion, which is so pervasive in high school history classrooms.

And I will admit, often in mine. While I am committed to starting somewhere other than aboard the Arbella (we get there toward the end of week 2) and was generally very pleased with the conversation yesterday, I haven't yet figured out how to weave this initial class meeting seamlessly into the rest of the course. This is mainly because I go on to foreground the nation. By dealing extensively with themes of race, class, and gender I try to move beyond the confines of older grand narratives, with their "confessional pitfalls," to borrow Maffly-Kipp's phrase. But in exploring questions about the way religion has historically shaped - and been shaped by - national political and economic currents, I do end up spending a lot of time on Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant). In this way my approach is certainly more traditional.

All this brings me to a question: where do others begin when teaching the American religious history survey? Many of the contributors to this site have participated at one time or another in IUPUI's seminar for young scholars in American religion, which you can learn more about here. Over the past twenty years this program has produced a treasure trove of syllabi for courses in American religious history, which are invaluably cataloged on the same site. For those of you who have posted syllabi there in years past, do you still begin your courses the same way? Or have you changed things up as you've gone along?

Gender and Religion in American Culture

Kelly Baker

For the spring semester, I am enjoying a rare privilege for lecturers, teaching a senior seminar. I am teaching Gender and Religion in American culture. This is basically a crash course for our majors and non-majors in the intersections between gender and religion, gender as analysis, and the complicated relationships between religion and sexuality in the U.S.. The course is reading heavy and requires a fairly substantial research project. Yet, it is only a sixteen week course, so I couldn't possibly cover all I might want to.

Here's a glimpse of the syllabus:

Description: This course covers the role of religion in lives of American women and men, gender as a category of analysis for the study of religion, the often-conflicted relationship between religion and sexuality, and perhaps most importantly, how religion and the religious construct, reconstruct and deconstruct gender norms. Religion informs gender, but gender also informs religious discourse. American men and women practice and live religion, and thus, religion cannot be separated from the sexed bodies we inhabit. Gender matters.

We will examine the pivotal role of religion in defining and constructing gender from Puritans to Salem Witch Trials to Spiritualism to muscular Christianity (including modern constructions of religion and sport) to contemporary debates over sexuality and abstinence to home birth to LGBTQ concerns to gender performativity. We will use historical and modern case studies to explore both the nature of femininity and masculinity in the religious lives of Americans.

Assignments: Research Project and Presentation, Gender as Analysis Paper (autobiographical paper on how gender impacts you), and a Field Visit.

Select Readings: Joan Scott, “Gender as a Useful Category of Analysis,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5 (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053-1075.

Ann Braude, “Women’s History is American Religious History” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas Tweed, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

Pamela Klassen, “Sacred Maternities and Postbiomedical Bodies: Religion and Nature in Contemporary Home Birth,” Signs, 26:3, (Spring 2001), pp. 775-809.

Marilyn J. Westerkamp, “Puritan Patriarchy and the Problem of Revelation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23:3, (Winter 1993), pp. 571-595.

Robert Orsi, “ ‘He Keeps Me Going’: Women’s Devotion to Saint Jude Thaddeus…” in Religion in American History: A Reader, eds. Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, (Oxford: 1998).

Bret Carroll, “The Religious Construction of Masculinity in Victorian America: The Male Mediumship of John Shoebridge Williams,”Religion and American Culture, 7:1, (Winter 1997), 27-60.

Krista McQueeny,"We Are God's Children, Y'All:" Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Lesbian- and Gay-Affirming Congregations, Social Problems, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Feb., 2009), pp. 151-173.

The full syllabus is available here.

For this course, I am relying upon experiential and autobiographical assignments, so I'll post later about what happens. This is a new practice for me, and I think perhaps a concept like gender might make more sense if students have to apply it analytically to themselves. I've already done this. Selfishly, I want to think more about the role of autobiography in scholarship, so I am testing this out on my students as well as myself.

For readers of the blog, what might you assign for a gender in American religions course? What am I missing? What might be added?

Just a quick note to say, I did rely upon articles rather than books to expose students to many styles of gender scholarship in differing subfields (history as well as sociology, etc.) and topics rather than taking a solely historical approach.

God in America and Voices in the Classroom

Emily Clark

Like most in our discipline, I watched the God in America series on PBS. There are many elements of the series that have been discussed here and on other blogs, such as events, figures, or themes left out of the series, overly represented in the series, or given an unexpected portrayal. While listening to the commentators and following the story they mapped, I thought about American religious history narratives and how particular events can make all the difference to the story.

As a Ph.D. student at Florida State University, I get the opportunity to teach a section of the Religion in US History survey course. Each time I have taught it or assisted a professor, the narrative is different. Given our varied research interests, what we know best and what we most enjoy exploring seeps into our courses. I most enjoy teaching when pushing my students to think about the role race has played in our nation’s history and how its influence in American religion has never been neutral. And I know this leaves less time for other topics, but like all teachers, I try to negotiate it best I can. For a survey course, I find the most frustrating planning part to be: what to cut and who to leave out. Course organization varies as we decide whether to cover the history chronologically or thematically. For example, God in America chose chronologically and devoted one-third of the airtime for the latter half of the twentieth century to the present. Over six hours or fifteen short weeks, preparation decisions whittle down the story to fit the time allotted, and all the deities in the world know I wish for more time.

At the 2008 National American Academy of Religion meeting in Chicago, the Q&A during a panel on violence in American religious history brought survey course organization into the discussion. Not entirely surprising, it was a graduate student working on teaching her own undergraduate course who raised it. One of the audience members who offered guidance was Thomas Tweed, whose 1997 edited volume Retelling U.S. Religious History called the academy’s attention to the way we narrate our field. Recognizing our own voices in our work and their impact on our (hi)stories force a scholastic self-reflexivity that is also applicable to our teaching style and our relationship as a field with the public. God in America told a particular story that encourages me to reflect upon what I impart onto the undergraduates I teach.

CFP: Undergrad Conference on Race in America

Friday and Saturday, March 25-26, 2011
Saint Francis University
Loretto, Pennsylvania 15940

CALL FOR PAPERS

We cordially invite undergraduates to submit proposals for the fifth annual North American Undergraduate Conference in Religion and Philosophy. Submissions are encouraged from students majoring in all academic fields.

Although any paper related to religion and philosophy will be considered, priority will be given to those addressing this year’s theme, “Race in America.” As philosopher Cornel West asserted, “A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.” Accordingly, this year’s conference will forthrightly address philosophical and religious questions of race and how these questions relate to politics, culture, society, and history. To begin our conversation, this year’s keynote speaker will be George Yancy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and author of Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race.

Paper proposals (roughly 250 words) should give a concise description of the presentation. The deadline for proposals is February 18, 2011. Please include your full name, paper title, institution, e-mail, phone number, and the name and contact information of your major professor. Presenters must submit their full paper by March 11, 2011 to be considered for conference prizes. Proposals and final papers should be sent via e-mail attachment to Dr. Arthur Remillard.

The keynote address will be given on Friday evening, with a student-led discussion to follow. All student presentations will be given on Saturday from approximately 9:00am-5:00pm. This conference is open to the public and free for presenters and non-presenters alike. For more information, directions, contacts, scheduling, etc., please visit our website and join our Facebook group.

This conference is organized by Saint Francis University and Westminster College, with support from SFU’s School of Arts and Letters, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and the Institute for Ethics.

Gender Me, Gender Religion

Kelly J. Baker

It's summer, which means fiction and sunshine, but I am teaching summer session. This means less fiction and sunshine, and more of a focus on my own teaching style and what I cover. These days I find myself more and more concerned with how to teach gender in American religious history. Every semester, I teach gender as a crucial point of analysis for religious studies, American studies and American history. This should not be surprising and/or novel. As my current students note, most of their humanities classes at least have a section or sub-section on gender (which is a post for another day altogether). When I first started several years ago as a graduate student, I didn’t feel like I was a revolutionary, rather, I feared that my students were “so” over emphases of gender and race. We debated what gender is/was, its construction and its deployment in larger culture. Moreover, I pointed out how religion constructs and reconstructs gender and places important emphasis on men’s and women’s bodies. Religion also defined our gendered ways in private and public—who could preach or could not? Who could lead? Who was more spiritually pure? Who has divine support and who asks for divine support? Who we can marry or cannot?

Religion defines men and women in intimate and powerful ways. But, class debates and my lectures on gender theories don’t always make these topics approachable for students. Gender emerges as something academic and distant rather than something personal and tangible. Ann Braude noted the still potent and important fact “women’s history is American religious history.” But, how can you convince students that gender matters historically and today in interpretations of religion and American culture? I assign excerpts from Robert Orsi’s Thank You, St. Jude and Marie Griffith’s God’s Daughters, which showcase the power of gender relations and the complicated place of the divine. Yet again, I wonder how “real” this seems to students. My teaching approach to gender and religion has become much more personal and face-to-face. No, I don’t recite my own spiritual autobiography, which is terribly dull, nor do we sit together and talk about our experiences with gender. Instead, I make myself into a guinea pig.

My approach to gender is an adoption of Amy Koehlinger’s approach to gender in her undergraduate classes. It is deceptively simple: she allows students to “gender” her. She bravely stands in front of the room while students sometimes politely, and occasionally not, point out how well she performed gender. Perhaps because I am a masochist or perhaps because I thought I could handle this, I became a guinea pig for my classes. Amy warned me that this exercise was not for the faint of heart, but my confidence outweighed my common sense. With some poking and prodding and a tiny bit of introduction, I let my students “gender” me. That first class in which I allowed critiques of my gender “performance” is unforgettable. (Please note how much I rely on Judith Butler here, but I also employ Erving Goffman, too.)

Students shouted comments ranging from flattery to obscenity at me, and frankly, I am amazed that I continued to do this teaching practice. It truly is not for the faint of heart. Most people don’t have their gender performances scrutinized by 50+ students, at least not in such an open and obvious way. And I still have to gird my confidence before I present myself to my classes. (I also make it easier for them through costume and makeup—a pencil skirt rather than pants, high heels as opposed to my favorite sandals, a bold floral print top, jewelry and accessories and more make-up than I tend to wear. One student from this semester stated very nicely that I didn’t quite look like myself.)

Comments range from my masculine glasses to my (then) long hair to my obviously un-feminine outspoken and sarcastic nature. A student, several semesters later, would claim that I couldn’t be feminine because I didn’t show “enough” skin. What I didn’t realize was how much I would learn about gender from my students. Gender, it seems, was also fairly abstract to me until confronted by their analysis of my way of being in the world. Gendering me allows my students (hopefully) to “see” the place of gender in the religious movements and people we study. It also makes clear that cultural assumptions that run rampant about what it means to be feminine and/or female in America. My students usually pin me as “girlie,” which has some truth, and “outspoken,” which tends to be synonymous with more masculine. Often, the commentary runs along the line of “you look feminine but act masculine.” Though with more frequency than I am comfortable with, students seem to place me firmly in the feminine range.

While it usually takes a couple of days for my ego to recover, the “gender me” approach seems to make gender as a category of being and as a category of analysis more apparent to my students. Some might just find this to be a fun way to get out of lecture. I remain hopeful that they agree with the significance of gender in our day-to-day lives, but more importantly, that there is something at stake in how a person is gendered by society and religion. Our contact with the divine, or lack thereof, also reflects the intimate ways we adopt gender but also how we are gendered my larger forces. If critiquing my gender performance gives students more tools to interpret Orsi and Griffith, then my ego can take it. But my ego can also take it, if they have a bit of pause about what they wear, why they wear it or what it communicates about them. Gender impacts religious history. The sacred is not gender neutral, so knowing how religion defines the world between women and men and other categories of gender is important. Again, I am not a revolutionary just a guinea pig with a penchant for American religious history, Judith Butler, good shoes and pixie cuts.

Know Your [Digital] Archives

Michael J. Altman

I wrote a blog post for the Hacking the Academy project last week where I argued that digital collections could change the way we think about graduate seminars because they allow for easier original research without having to leave campus. A while back Michael Pasquier wrote a great post on digital humanities and religious history.  Building on his list of sources I wanted to point out two more great online archives I've used in the past year to write seminar papers that will eventually make their way (in some form) into my dissertation.

First, there is the pair of Making of America collections--one at Cornell and one at the University of Michigan.  As the websites describe them, they are:

Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history primarily from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.

 The Cornell collection contains 267monographs and over 100,000 journal articles while the Michigan collection contains about 10,000 books.

The second collection is, I believe, a little less well known.  The University of Pittsburgh has a digital collection of 19th Century Schoolbooks that is fascinating to browse through.  It is a smaller collection, only 140 volumes, but there is some great stuff in there for folks interested in American civil religion throughout the century.

Both of these collections have titles and journals that deal with missions, religious education and other things of obvious interest to historians of religion.  However, the full-text searchability of these collections makes them even more useful.  In my own research I've turned up really interesting references to South Asian religions in places I would have never found in a traditional brick and mortar archive.  I also think these sorts of collections have a lot of potential in the classroom--both for teaching and as resources for original student research.  It's one thing to lecture on the tensions between North and South in the 1850s, but reading a southern schoolbook versus a northern schoolbook offers a very different feel for those tensions.

If anyone knows of other good digital collections for religious history let us know.

Newsweek's Lisa Miller on "Harvard's Crisis of Faith"

Randall Stephens

Just got the latest issue of Newsweek in the mail today. And, behold, there's this very interesting article on Harvard University's trouble with religion in the curriculum. (Lisa Miller, "Harvard’s Crisis of Faith," Newsweek, February 11, 2010.) So while the Texas board of education is intent on getting the word out to students that the founders were born-again believers, many of Harvard's cultured-despiser profs would rather their students spend more time learning about anything but religion. (I exaggerate.)

Miller discusses a 2006 proposal floated by Louis Menand "that undergraduate students should be required to take at least one course in a category called Reason and Faith." Harvard's evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, and a host of others, said no thanks.

Miller observes that for Pinker:

human progress is an evolution away from superstition, witchcraft, and idol worship—that is, religion—and toward something like a Scandinavian austerity and secularism. (Pinker is one of those intellectuals who speak frequently about how sensible things are in Europe; one suppresses the urge to remind him of the Muslim riots in the Paris and London suburbs.) A university education is our greatest weapon in the battle against our natural stupidity, he said in a recent speech. "We don't kill virgins on an altar, because we know that it would not, in fact, propitiate an angry god and alleviate misfortune on earth."

In Miller's opinion such views haven't served the students all that well. "To decline to grapple head-on with the role of religion in a liberal-arts education," she argues, "even as debates over faith and reason rage on blogs, and as publishers churn out books defending and attacking religious belief, is at best timid and at worst self-defeating. . . . it's fair to say that the study of religion at Harvard is uniquely dysfunctional."

Miller speaks to faculty at Harvard--Peter Gomes and Diana Eck among them--and interviews Robert Orsi, Jeanne Kilde, a collection of others.

"Just because the study of religion does not fit into the narrow categories the university has created for itself," contends Miller, "does not mean that students should not equip themselves—in a rational, secular context—with a vocabulary for thinking about it."

A very intriguing piece, made all the more relevant by the recent buzz about the increasing number of historians who are working on religion.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

by John G. Turner

The world notices the passing of very few historians, but Howard Zinn's death yesterday made the headlines for obvious reasons. It's hard for me to think of an historian of Zinn's generation who exerted more influence on the way that Americans view their past.

For several years, I've been using a "dueling banjos" approach in my survey class (explicitly borrowed from Lendor Calder). I assign Zinn's People's History and a diametrically opposed text. Students identify and has out the differences. [I've tried Paul Johnson's History of the American People and Schweikart and Allen's Patriot's History. If anyone has a suggestion of something else to pair with Zinn, I'm all eyes].

The shortcomings of Zinn's book are obvious to me and to many students. For starters, there is hardly any sense of change over time, no recognition of the tremendous material gains for all classes of Americans over the past hundred years. If one cares about American religious history, it's a bit painful to give students a text that only touches on religion in a sympathetic manner by way of the Berrigan brothers. At the same time, I've never assigned a "textbook" that students so readily engage, whether they like Zinn's arguments or not. I am grateful to Howard Zinn for getting so many of my students to take an interest in U.S. History.

The Associated Press had this to say about Zinn on a more personal level:

Professor Zinn himself was an impressive-looking man, tall and rugged with wavy hair. An experienced public speaker, he was modest and engaging in person, more interested in persuasion than in confrontation.

I can attest to the latter. Several years ago, one of my classes noticed a rather obvious factual error in People's History. Zinn was trying too hard to make the case that many Americans opposed the Second World War.

Thus, we fired off an email to Zinn:

My undergraduate survey classes have been profitably reading your People's History this semester. We're learning to read all sources critically and have a question about a detail in your book. Can you help us resolve the following?

On p. 418 (2003 edition) you write, "Our of 10 million drafted for the armed forces during World War II, only 43,000 refused to fight. But this was three times the proportion of C.O.'s in World War I."

On p. 371 (WWI): "About 65,000 men declared themselves conscientious objectors and asked for noncombatant service."

How could 43,000 in WWII be a larger proportion than 65,000 in WWI? Our understanding is that more individuals were drafted during the Second World War. Can you help?

The then 84-year-old Zinn promptly wrote back:

Thank you for calling that to my attention. A gross error! I think my absolute figures are right, but what I say about "proportion" is wrong. I don't remember where I got that information but I'll look into it. You can use this as a lesson for your students on how historians can get things wrong!

Best wishes,
Howard Zinn

For a man who received sacks of both positive and negative mail about his work, I found the response extraordinarily gracious and a testimony to a kind and gentle spirit. May we respond similarly to our critics!

A Trip to NYC and an Interview with Randall Balmer on Teaching American Religious History

Randall Stephens

So, I took the train down to NYC last week. Not to see Abraham Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party (which looks hilarious), but rather to present my work to the Columbia University Seminar on Religion in America. (I love trains and seminars. Better than plains, rowboats, and/or webinars any day.) The seminar, founded over ten years ago, “explores the role of religion in American society from cross-disciplinary perspectives, including history, anthropology, literature, sociology, theology, and material culture.” In a posh faculty house that looked like a country club, minus the golfers, I talked about my paper, “‘A great many theologians’: Premillennial Authorities and Modern American Evangelicalism.” I benefited tremendously from some wonderful critique and q and a. The questions that historians and religious studies scholars ask can be quite different. So, it’s always a plus to take in the advice of those in other, related fields. Some wanted to know how representative are the evangelicals my co-author and I focus on. Others wondered about what makes a given leader an “expert” or an “authority.” Was all very good food for thought. Dinner afterward—food for stomach—offered a nice chance to get to know those in attendance. (One of them, Daniel Vaca, a PhD student at Columbia, was a fantastic host.)

While in NYC, I also had some time to catch up with a close friend who works at Cooper Union and pop into McSorleys. In addition I had the pleasure of attending Randall Balmer’s survey course on American religious history at Barnard College. If you teach American religious history, you probably don’t have too many opportunities to bounce ideas off others who teach the same, or get new light on old topics from colleagues in the field. (Though, this is one of the most amazing benefits of the Young Scholars in American Religion program.) I

enjoyed hearing and seeing how Balmer conducts his class. It was filled with about 100 students from Barnard and Columbia. He covered the rise of utopian communities in the 19th century, bringing in the Shakers and the Oneida Perfectionists (the Shakers’ polar opposite? I wonder if any Shakers ever went over to John Humphrey Noyes’s unbuttoned camp). Then he concluded by showing part of Ken Burns's elegiac classic, The Shakers.

After the class, I sat down with Balmer in his office to ask him some questions about teaching the American religious history survey and to pick his brain about other courses he's offers. The interview here is divided into two parts (part 2 is here). Balmer speaks about drawing students into the story. He also describes some new courses he’s taught in recent years and focuses in on what he’s learned from a new course on Mormonism. His comments got me thinking a little bit about how teaching new courses can lead to surprising, new research interests. My course on America in the 1960s has certainly led me in some surprising directions. (I still have not perfected my plans to teach that class on Rosicrucian Trapeze Artists in Late-19th-Century Pennsylvania. There's always next year!)

Writing American History Textbooks and Teaching Religion: An Interview with Paul S. Boyer

[Crossposted from the Historical Society blog]

Randall Stephens

What to cover? What not to cover? What makes an event, individual, or movement worthy of our attention?

History professors and high school history teachers spend quite a bit of time thinking about those questions. If you have to get through the sweep of American history (pre-Columbian to 1865) in just one semester, then you're going to need to make some cuts. Goodbye obscure Puritan theologian. Hello slave insurrectionist. Hardly enough time in class to talk about how each colony took shape. King Philip's War is interesting, but how much time on center stage does it deserve? For those who teach Western Civilization or the West in the World, good luck figuring out content and coverage. The same questions about scope and range occupy the time of history textbook writers.

Last weekend I caught up with the historian and general bonhomie Paul S. Boyer at a conference on Adventism in Portland, Maine. Boyer, Merle Curti Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of a number of American history books, like Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968); Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), co-author with Stephen Nissenbau; Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); By

the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (NY: Pantheon, 1985); When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America's Half-Century Encounter With Nuclear Weapons (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998). He's also written articles for the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, American Literary History, The History Teacher, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the William & Mary Quarterly. But he may be best known as the author of a couple of very successful textbooks: The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (6th edition, 2007); and The American Nation (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 4th edn., 2002).

In the 2-part Youtube video embedded here, I ask Boyer about the writing of history textbooks and how he thinks about the role of religion in history. He comments at length on how religion has shaped American history and considers some of the major questions textbook writers ask as they go about their task.

My Embarrassment with the Book of Mormon

by John G. Turner

The Book of Mormon embarrasses me. Not because of its content, but because I haven't read it . I cringe when Mormon History friends ask me if I've read the most famous of American scriptures, as it seems irresponsible to undertake a project of any significance on Mormon history and avoid the "Gold Bible."

So this summer, without great enthusiasm I borrowed the BOM on CD for a car ride from Provo to Logan. Actually, there were so many CDs at the BYU library that I only took the first few. As I was trying to get to Utah State before the archives opened, it was quite early, and I didn't make it through very many chapters of 1 Nephi before fatigue forced me to another form of entertainment. Mark Twain's famous (infamous to some, I imagine) of the BOM as "chloroform in print" seemed persuasive. I put the project aside and endured the indignity of continuing to tell friends I hadn't read it. Depressing setback.

I'm teaching a graduate course on Religion in 19th-Century America this semester. I'm privileging my students with a disproportionate amount of things Latter-day Saint (including an assessment of Will Bagley and Ronald Walker, et al. on the Mountain Meadows Massacre). As part of our introduction to Mormonism, I assigned selections from the BOM that further my own reading (1 Nephi, chpts. 1, 18; 2 Nephi, chpts. 29; 3 Nephi, chpts. 1, 11-15; 4 Nephi, chpts. 1; Moroni, chps. 9-10). I also gave my students Laurie Maffly-Kipp's excellent short introduction to the Book of Mormon. [She also suggested the selections].

These short chunks suited me more than my prior attempt -- I found some portions quite eloquent (esp. the closing chapters of Moroni). My students' reactions varied sharply. Several, though, found the book evocative and biblical.

I don't have any scholarly or even well-informed opinions about the book. After all, I've got a long way to go. From the little I've read about the book's production, however, I find entirely unpersuasive the theories that anyone either than Joseph Smith translated the text (however one wishes to define "translate"). I read the BOM as a product of its time, but that does not prevent me from being drawn into the narrative at points or contemplating its function as scripture. Thus, even though I do not accept Smith as a divine prophet, I do think outsiders underestimate him despite Harold Bloom's designation of him as a "religious genius."

Coincidentally, Royal Skousen's The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (Yale, 2009) arrived in my mailbox the day of the above-mentioned class. Skousen has been working on a Critical Text Project of the BOM for two decades, examining discrepancies among the earliest BOM sources. Now, Skousen presents a corrected text that aims to approach as nearly as possible that dictated by Joseph Smith to Oliver Cowdery and others in the late 1820s.

Somehow, Yale sells this attractive cloth-bound, 800-page tomb for only $35. They must be expecting robust sales. I have only read Grant Hardy's introduction (a concise source on the production of the BOM), read Skousen's own preface, and poked around the text. I like the way Skousen has presented the text in "sense-lines," breaking up the text in phrases and clauses. [Thus, he has not tried to reproduce the original manuscript's lack of punctuation or sentence breaks]. The method increases the text's readability somewhat. I do wish the most important discrepancies were footnoted in the body of the text itself (as in, say, the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament) rather than in an appendix.

Yale's publication of Skousen's crowning achievement itself signifies the maturation and partial mainstreaming of Mormon Studies. It's not as if the leading university presses have ignored Mormonism; indeed, they have long published books on various Mormon history topics. However, Skousen's work is of another genre, an effort of textual criticism focused on an American scripture, edited by a professor at BYU who has done at least some of his work through FARMS. I reckon that until recently Skousen's work would not have found such a warm reception at places like Yale. I'm glad times have changed.

Alas, whether via Skousen or the 1981 BOM left in my departmental mailbox by a Mormon elder who missed me, I have hundreds of chapters to go. I need a Mormon version of the "Read-the-Bible-in-a-Year" promoted by so many evangelical churches. Even better yet, a Walk Thru the Book of Mormon in a weekend program. Actually, what I'd really like is something akin to my NRSV Study Bible, an annotated BOM with a discussion of how these text have functioned among the Saints. Any suggestions?

UPDATE: The folks at Juvenile Instructor have a review and discussion of Terryl Given's Very Short Introduction to the BOM, which should help those of us trying to teach even portions of the book. [Givens, whose productivity and intellectual breadth is establishing him as the LDS equivalent of Mark Noll, also has a history of "Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought" forthcoming next month].

A Novel Approach to Teaching American Religious History

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

For my American Religious History class this fall, I'm considering revamping the course by assigning 3 or 4 novels (and perhaps a memoir). As I've done in the past, Religion in American Life will serve as the main anchor text for the course, and I'll have a host of other primary and secondary readings for students to examine.

I once assigned a memoir, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963), and asked students to consider Baldwin's ideas about the relationship between race, religion and democratic society. Students enjoyed the book--partly because of its relative brevity--but mostly due to its deep and hefty subject matter and Baldwin's engaging and accessible writing. I will probably assign it again at some point.


Some have suggested using Black Robe (1985), and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952). Malcolm X's Autobiography seems to be a mainstay. For me, the fact that each of these books have been made into a movie makes them compelling assignments--rich ground to discuss interpretive vantage points via text and film--but certainly there are many other worthy choices. I'd like to assign novels (or memoirs) that cover multiple time periods and address a variety of themes.

So, what are your experiences using novels (or memoirs) to teach American religious history? What novels (or memoirs) have worked best for specific periods? What novels (or memoirs) work best to address topics such as gender, immigration, race, ethnicity, class, unbelief, or sexuality? What novels (or memoirs) explore lived religion or popular religion, or even religious pluralism? What are the possibilities, promises, and peril of the novel (or memoir) approach?

Public History and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680

Religious Intolerance and Public History
Kelly Baker

On this blog recently, we have posted quite about religious intolerance. This does my heart good because not only is this one of central areas of interest but also because I am teaching a course in religious intolerance this semester. One of my main claims is that Americans have a hard time recognizing intolerance, or even hatred, in public culture, so some prefer histories of collegiality to histories of conflict and colonization. However, I am teaching this course in New Mexico, which has a long history of colonization and my students seem more keen to histories of conflict and repression. Moreover, the topics I lectured on for my second class actually occurred in New Mexico, which means that I have the benefit of pointing out local sites that our central to these case studies.

Last weekend (I teach on Saturdays), I presented the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in which Pueblo peoples successfully revolted, and thus, were free from Spanish rule, military and spiritual, for twelve years. My students were pretty familiar with the story, except I provided more detail to what happened to Franciscans who decided to stay at their missions. Suffice to say, their fates tended to be fairly gruesome. The revolt is a brilliant case study of both Catholic and Pueblo intolerance. Franciscan friars attempted conversion by removing indigenous religious praxis, and the Pueblo, involved in the revolt, inverted Catholic ritual and tortured Franciscans who stayed behind. The history of this religious encounter is bloody and tragic. What makes this case study unique is that I can point to the places of this encounter, and these places are more tangible because they are so nearby.

Moreover, many of my students have visited the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe and the Acoma Pueblo at Sky City. These sites present a narration of this dramatic event and the larger history of colonization in what is now New Mexico. Tourists visit these sites each year and imbibe in the visions of Catholic-Pueblo encounter. They consume cultural artifacts as well as stories. I have also been a tourist at these cultural sites, and what becomes clear is that the Catholic vision and the Acoma Pueblo vision of the revolt and Spanish missions are starkly different. The Catholic vision focuses upon the benefit of the missions and glosses over the revolt (the twelve years of Pueblo autonomy is missing). In addition, the cathedral sponsors an event every year that retraces the flight of the Franciscans from Santa Fe. At Sky City, an Acoma tour guide leads hapless tourists through the village of the mesa and tells tales of encounter that vary depending on the audience. Our tour guide told me at the end of the tour that she has to decide how pro-Pueblo her tour can be based on her audience. Thus, I get to hear the story of "flying lessons" for priests privately. Most tourists, generally middle to upper class white men and women, seem to prefer their tour free of conflict and colonization. Intolerance still makes us uncomfortable, it seems.

This week, Historiann posted "Never mind the slavery, have you dipped a candle yet?" and pointed out the desire for conflict-free tourism at historical sites, particularly in regard to slavery. She writes:
Now, it would be easy for all of you groovy, liberal, non-Southerners to roll your eyes and chuckle and slap your foreheads in mock disbelief at the racist fools who run North Carolina house museums. But I think that the problem diagnosed so accurately by Professor Alderman is a problem in many house museums and historic sites all over the country. This story raises the important question of what historic sites and house museums are for: are they opportunities to dip candles, admire high-style material culture, and imagine our (white) selves playing dress-up? Or are they opportunities to learn more broadly about the lives of all people in a given period of history and how they related to one another?

As a professional historian, I’d say that the latter is a worthier goal than the former. But let’s be clear: it’s not just southern public history sites that “whitewash” history. Something I’ve observed in my travels across the country, stemming from my interest in borderlands warfare in the colonial Americas, is that some of the most wretched and/or totally hapless European or Euro-American forts or missions–the fort at Pemaquid, Maine, for example, or Fort No. 4 in New Hampshire, or Jemez Mission in New Mexico–have been excavated and/or lovingly (and sometimes imaginatively) re-created in the twentieth century, whereas the Indian villages or forts that laid them to waste and and long outlasted them have not been. (Jemez Mission includes some reconstructions of the foundations of Indian dwellings outside the mission, however.) Jemez Mission was reconstructed by the Works Progress Administration, and reflects in many ways the prejudices of history as it was practiced in the 1930s. It seems like it’s time to revisit the assumptions that undergirded these public history projects from thirty, fifty, and eighty years ago.

I agree with Historiann that we need public history to be revisited at these sites, so we can reflect on the unpleasant and the intolerant in our histories. Moreover, how different would tourists find the history of the Pueblo Revolt if the Catholic and Pueblo narratives rested side-by-side rather than separately presented? Would tourists appreciate the unflinching presentation of colonization and the violence of the revolt? Or would we rather "dip candles" and consume Pueblo artifacts than encounter the unseamy side of American history?

Undergraduate Conference Reminder

Art Remillard

A quick reminder that the submission deadline for the 3rd annual North American Undergraduate Conference in Religion and Philosophy is February 13, 2009. I put up the CFP in a previous post. You can also visit the conference website for details, or just contact me directly. If you are reasonably close to western/central PA and have an undergrad or two who would like to present, this is a terrific opportunity. If not, then enjoy some Old Crow Medicine Show...