“In our long struggle for a more just world,” said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2004, “our memories are among our most powerful resources.” Chris pays tribute to a trailblazing jurist who drew often on her Jewish heritage and knowledge of American history. Read more
I missed the announcement of her death. We had gone out for our first movie since the pandemic began in March. I was grumpy because I had wanted to eat out too, as the local (and I have to add historic) Hippodrome Theatre in Waco features dinner. I had been outvoted. Apparently I make really good pizza from scratch. Still, it was such a relief to get out of the house and do something together as a family. I purposefully left... Read more
Alan Jacobs writes books with pretentious titles. How to Think. I didn’t know what to think about that when I first saw it. The Pleasures of Reading. It was a pleasure. Original Sin. A guilty pleasure. I’ve been hoping that Jacobs would write How to Write, which I then could apply to my own projects. Instead, Jacobs has given us Breaking Bread with the Dead. It’s tasty. “What brings tranquility?” asks Jacobs through the words of Horace translated by David Ferry.... Read more
Last time, I posted about the range of older “ghost” denominations and churches that preceded the specific church building you see before you. Think of them as the underlying substrata. If you know anything about denominations and their development, that opens the door to understanding a remarkable amount of the history of local areas, whether you are looking at issues of politics, class or, above all, ethnicity. That is true of rural areas and small towns, but also of large... Read more
Back in June, in anticipation of the book’s release, I published Jesus and John Wayne: the backstory. Now, nearly three months out from publication, I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect on the book’s initial reception—more specifically, on the surprising (to me) way white evangelicals themselves have embraced the book. Against all odds, the book found a small window into which to release in the midst of pandemic lockdowns, a summer of protest, and the general chaos that is... Read more
Is women’s history depressing? It was the third week of this semester when the question occurred to me. I was starting class for my course on American women’s history 1865 to present and reviewing what we had learned thus far. And I realized that what we had learned thus far included: that the majority of Chinese American women in the decades after the Civil War were trafficked that married women settlers in the West were often more unhappy than their... Read more
“Hard-boiled” is the last adjective anyone would use to describe me. I get uncomfortable watching movies with frequent profanities and graphic scenes of sex or violence. So I think my wife has been surprised to see that my COVID quarantine reading tastes have run to detective novels in the mode of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, if not quite James Ellroy. Now, that larger genre has obvious appeal for a historian. Scholars who patiently sift through the false trails, red... Read more
Over time, denominations and churches rise and fall, and mergers and acquisitions are a recurring theme of American religious history. We can argue at length about the social or spiritual impact of such changes, but losing those labels has a bad effect on the popular awareness of history – ethnic and political as well as religious. We lose a sense of the diversity of that religious history. I keep coming back to Martin Marty’s wise dictum that “Ethnicity is the... Read more
Through the years, I have worked a good deal on Pennsylvania history, having taught for many centuries at Penn State University. I also spent this past Summer in that state. This post is about an unexpected aspect of that history, and one with wider implications, particularly in matters of race and slavery. Briefly, even this rural northern territory had far more of a slavery history than most specialists would imagine, but that story has been all but forgotten. In that,... Read more
Peter Manseau is Curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian. His most recent book is The Jefferson Bible: A Biography, a contribution to Princeton University Press’s Lives of Great Religious Books series. Thanks, Peter, for engaging in this conversation about your book about Jefferson’s Bible project. What is the Jefferson Bible, and how did Jefferson create it? The book best known known as the Jefferson Bible is a collage of Gospel verses that Jefferson called “The Life and Morals... Read more
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