Winner: Best New Blog!

PAUL HARVEY

Religion in American History has received the Cliopatria award for best new blog! Thanks to all who nominated us. Here's the complete list of award winners, from Cliopatria's announcement.

At the 5th Annual Banquet of the Cliopatricians at the American Historical Association convention in Washington, DC, the winners of The Cliopatria Awards for 2007 were announced. Many thanks to Jeremy Boggs of ClioWeb and George Mason University who designed the logo for The Cliopatria Awards. Thanks also to the judges who made the difficult decisions in selecting winners of the awards from among the many excellent nominations: Ancarett, Timothy Burke, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, Rebecca Goetz, Paul Harvey, Sharon Howard, Elizabeth Klaczynski, Adam Roberts, and John Carter Wood. They have done a fine job. Here, then, are the winners and brief explanations of the judge's rationale for their decisions:

The Cliopatria Awards 2007

Best New Blog: Religion in American History
Religion in American History is a well-written blog with a clear focus, a great example of how blogging can be used to present scholarship in a specialist academic field to a much wider audience and to create solid practical resources for teachers and researchers. With a varied mix of commentaries, news, useful announcements and book reviews, the writers engage with both scholarly and popular history issues and show the relevance of religion in history to religious issues today.

Best Group Blog: In the Middle
In the Middle is a medievalist blog, written by J. J. Cohen, Mary Kate Hurley, Eileen Joy, and Karl Steel. We were impressed by the blog's interdisciplinary approach, its consistently intelligent prose, its effective blend of wit and genuine scholarship, and its ability to follow the medieval wherever it might lead—from popular culture to high theory. In recent months, posts have ranged from Beowulf at the movies to the significance of animals in the middle ages. As one committee member remarked, this is, in many ways, a "model group blog."

Best Individual Blog: Civil War Memory
Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory is an impressive individual blog, with a track record of several years. It commonly offers the best of both military history blogging and history blogging about the broader political, intellectual, and social context of regional conflict. This past year, for example, Civil War Memory has devoted considerable attention to the Lost Cause myth and the quest for Black Confederates.

Best Post: Timothy Burke, "Knowledge is Inconvenient," Cliopatria, 27 September
In tackling Michael Medved's Six Inconvenient Truths about the Atlantic Slave Trade, Tim Burke performed one of the primary functions of excellent history blogging. He identified bad history and patiently explained what was so bad about it. In light of Burke's argument, Medved's caricature of current scholarship and teaching about the Atlantic slave trade was exposed as a fraud.

Best Series of Posts: Errol Morris, "Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?" Zoom, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three, 25 September, 4 October, and 23 October.
Morris became fascinated by the cannonballs pictured in Roger Fenton's Crimean war photographs, "Valley of the Shadow of Death": was the second photograph, in which cannonballs can be seen scattered on the road, "staged"? Morris' quest for the answer not only demonstrated the process of historical research in action, but also raised a number of pertinent questions about photographs as historical documents. For depth, attention to detail (including a trip to the Crimea!) and narrative flair, this series was unmatched.

Best Writer: Caleb Crain, Steamboats are Ruining Everything
The judges' aim was to reward writing that is well tailored to the history blogosphere, accessible, memorable and consistently history-oriented. Caleb Crain is always readable and thought-provoking; an engaging writer who pays attention to the constraints of the blog format but breaks them with style on occasion.

Darren's Uncoverage Course in American Religious History -- Part 1 of Many!

BY DARREN GREM

Dispatches From LeConte Hall 323

In a few minutes, I’ll go upstairs to the third floor of LeConte Hall and start another term of my HIST3150 - Religion in American History course. I’m teaching two sections of it this time around, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and, for the most part, it’s a redesigned course.

Earlier, I wrote here about my reflections on the course’s purpose and pedagogy and, with the blessings of this blog’s big kahuna, we’ve decided to invite y’all along for the ride.

So, over the next fifteen weeks, in the moments I have away from the dissertation, I’ll send in regular dispatches from LeConte Hall 323. By opening the door to my classroom, I hope to offer an inside look at how my students and I are working through my “uncoverage” survey of American religious history. Student privacy, of course, will be maintained, but I’ll try to be as honest as possible about what I see as the course’s successes and failures. I don’t intend these dispatches to be an exercise in narcissism or catharsis, but rather an informal and informative way to discuss publicly the ins-and-outs of teaching religious history in university classrooms today. As such, I welcome your thoughts and reflections on my thoughts and reflections.

FYI, the course’s website is here.

A Dispatch from the AHA Book Exhibit

BY JOHN FEA

Well, this is not really a "dispatch" since I am now home from the AHA. The only session I attended was a Saturday morning panel sponsored by the Conference on Faith and History on John Somerville's book The Decline of the Secular University. The rest of the time was spent catching up with friends, attending receptions, and participating in meetings.

I did, however, get to spend a few hours in the book exhibit. Here, in no particular order, are a few new or forthcoming titles (most of them from 2007 or early 2008) on religion in America that caught me eye. Some of them have been discussed in previous blog posts.

First, I got to take a look at Paul Harvey's Freedom's Coming (North Carolina) in paperback and Randall Stephens' new book, The Fire Spreads: Holiness & Pentecostalism in the American South (Harvard). I also looked for John Turner's Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America at the North Carolina. According to Amazon it is due out on March 6, 2008. And in the blatant self-promotion category, I was thrilled to see that the galleys of my own book, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightnment were on display at the Penn table. It is due out at the end of February.


Drew Gilpin Faust, The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf)

George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (Yale)

Edward Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America (Yale)

Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (Yale)

Jewel L. Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Monopoly, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century (Virginia)

Martha Tomhave Blauvelt, The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780-1830 (Virginia)

Aaron Fogleman, Jesus is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America (Penn)

Liam Riordan, The Revolution and its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic (Penn)

Edward L. Blum, W.E.B. DuBois, American Prophet (Penn)

David K. Yoo and Ruth H. Chung, ed., Religion and Spirituality in Korean America (Illinois)

Nick Salvatore, ed., Faith and the Historian: Catholic Perspectives (Illinois)

Nancy Marie Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-46 (Illinois)

James H. Huston, Church and State in Early America (Cambridge)

Michael P. Carroll, American Catholics in the Protestant Imagination (Johns Hopkins)

James O. Lehman and Steven M. Nolt, Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War (Johns Hopkins)

Wallace D. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (Princeton)

Kristin Schwain, Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age (Cornell)

Emily Clark, ed., Voices from an Early American Convent:Marie Madeleine Hachard and the New Orleans Ursulines, 1727-1760 (LSU)

James Hudnut-Beumler, In Pursuit of the Almighty's Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism (North Carolina)

Michael Lienesch, In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement (North Carolina)

J.D. Bowers, Joseph Priestly and English Unitarianism in America (Penn State)

Richard Pointer, Encounters of the Spirit: Native Americans and European Colonial Religion (Indiana)

Ryan P. Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820-1865 (Indiana)

Thekla Ellen Joiner, Sin in the City: Chicago and Revivalism, 1880-1920 (Missouri)

Matthew T. Corrigan, Race, Religion, and Economic Change in the Republican South: A Study of a Southern City (Florida)

Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard)

CFP: Religious Hatred in the US

BY KELLY BAKER

Greetings, faithful blog readers,

I am organizing a panel on Religious Hatred in the U.S. for the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, October 16-19, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This panel seeks to engage historical incidents, contemporary case studies, rhetorical analyses as well as theoretical examinations of religious hatred in the United States. The panel should engage with the scholarly presentation of religious hatred: How is this term applied or avoided? Does it help or hinder scholarly endeavor to use the terminology of hatred? Is there hesitance in employing this term?

For instance, my proposal will focus on a 1920s Klan essay contest in which they write about tolerance/intolerance, which really looks like an exposition of religious hatred. This panel seeks to document, but also subtly, call into question how we approach the study of religious hatred in American culture.

Please send an abstract (no more than 500 words), title (no more than fifteen words), and an abbreviated CV to kellyjbaker (at) gmail (dot) com by Jan. 16. Please contact me via email, not on the blog.


All proposals should follow the ASA's submission guidelines for session descriptions, paper abstracts, and CVs, which are described on the ASA website.
(http://www.theasa.net/annual_meeting/page/submitting_a_proposal/)

For those of us who didn't get a completed dissertation in our stockings...

BY KELLY BAKER

The AHA's December edition of Perspectives provides a manageable and fairly painless advice on completion of the dreaded dissertation. Much of the advice is geared toward those entering into the ABD stage, and Andrew McIlwaine Bell points out that time is not on our proverbial side. Bell's advice is mostly helpful and seeks assuage the anxiety that can overcome anyone faced with completing a dissertation. However, I would point out that Bell's suggestion of being unemployed while writing is unattainable for many (including myself). Though, I heartily agree with his suggestion that one should write everyday. He relays this anecdote:

At the 2004 AHA annual meeting in Washington, Robert Remini told his audience that he used to reward himself with a martini on the days he wrote six or more pages. Martinis may not be your cup of…er…gin, but you should be able to find something pleasurable to indulge in at the end of a productive workday.

As someone in the midst of her dissertation, I discovered that I was much more productive if I set a word limit for every day. After I meet the limit, I can do whatever I want for the rest of the day including writing more, staring dumbly at my monitor, or playing with a mean cat. And Starbucks proves to be an adequate reward for me. So for those writing or those advising we who are writing, the article is worth a read, especially since Santa brought me knee-high boots instead of a finished dissertation.

Native Voices from the Revolutionary Era: New Primary Source Texts

PAUL HARVEY

I'm out for the next several days, but wanted to leave you with a couple of recommendations for the New Year, for some primary texts that might otherwise escape your attention.

Here's the first: The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America.

Some years ago, a scholar collected and published the indispensable writings of William Apess: On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, featuring his famous autobiography A Son of the Forest and his blistering appreciation of King Philip. The new collected writings of Occom provide an excellent resource as well. Here's the description from the book jacket:

This volume brings together for the first time the known writings of the pioneering Native American religious and political leader, intellectual, and author, Samson Occom (Mohegan; 1723-1792). The largest surviving archive of American Indian writing before Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux; 1858-1939), Occom's writings offer unparalleled views into a Native American intellectual and cultural universe in the era of colonialization and the early United States. His letters, sermons, journals, prose, petitions, and hymns--many of them never before published--document the emergence of pantribal political consciousness among the Native peoples of New England as well as Native efforts to adapt Christianity as a tool of decolonialization. Presenting previously unpublished and newly recovered writings, this collection more than doubles available Native American writing from before 1800.

Occom's writings have been discussed in a number of places previously, most crucially in Joanna Brooks's American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures. But this compilation allows for ready access to the complete body of works.

A related title from a few years back, of a figure less important then Occom but certainly worth study: To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson 1751-1776 . From the Library Journal:

These transcriptions of diaries, letters, and sermons of Johnson, a Mohegan (Mohican) teacher and visionary leader, break stereotypes. With prominent ancestors and literate parents, Johnson lived in a community that valued both Mohegan and European cultures. His writing style, learned under the tutelage of Eleazer Wheelock, founder of Dartmouth College, is indistinguishable from that of other writers (Indian or white) trained in prerevolutionary missionary schools, but attention to editor/author Murray's interpretation reveals issues and facts about Mohegan life, including plans for "Brotherton," a Christian Indian town, realized only after the Revolution and Johnson's death. Murray (English, Queen's Univ., Kingston, Ontario) emphasizes the individual writer, following such examples as James Axtell's The Invasion Within (1985). Johnson's humility is striking, as is his commitment to his people. This book makes another Indian "voice" more accessible and gives helpful instruction in the genres and forms of early American writing. Recommended for all Native American collections and for academic libraries.

Finally, a related but lesser-known secondary text: Bernd Peyer, The Tutor'd Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America.

I find historians often not aware of the ready availability of texts such as these, which are full of rich material for American religious history scholars. Brooks's work noted above is, for my money, the best introduction and analysis of the subject.

American Religion in Fiction

American Religion in Fiction
John Turner

A few months ago, we discussed our favorite American religious history authors.

Once in a while, I find myself learning vivid new facts and ideas about the American past through great works of "historical fiction." I think these fall into several subcategories. Some are fictional recreations of the past that involve considerable research and painstakingly try to dramatically recreate the past. Kenneth Roberts's Arundel, about Benedict Arnold and the march to Quebec, is a classic in that genre. Others recreate a historical setting for a more fully fictional tale, such as Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (one of my favorite books -- so much better than the movie, which wasn't a bad adaptation). To help students comprehend the subculture of American evangelicalism, many teachers of American religious history have used Shirley Nelson's The Last Year of the War, which I would put in the latter category.

My favorite novel that pertains to American religious history is Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter, a vivid account of John Brown's abolitionist odyssey. Banks's narrative is gripping, and his portrayal of Brown's Calvinist fury has stuck with me, reminding me not to overlook John Brown as a key figure in the history of American religion.

What are other great novels that shed light on American religious history?