Nearly twenty years ago, I visited a psychiatric unit near the city of Cebu in the Philippines. It consisted of two small sex-segregated wings, each holding perhaps two dozen patients. For my young adult eyes, it was a house of horrors. I had seen slums. I had seen young children scavenging at a filthy dump. I had seen an overcrowded hospital. But nothing I had seen prepared me for the vacant stares, the strange ejaculations of speech, the sense of... Read more
I bought Easter candy for my students. It was a mistake. Although the students made a valiant effort to eat as much as possible, they left a few Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs (a particular weakness of mine) in the candy basket. Needless to say, they didn’t last long. Reese’s eggs are just one of many newer adaptations of older Easter traditions. Recent twitter posts have made me realize how much confusion still persists about these traditions. My favorite was a screenshot... Read more
My new Yale University Press book American Colonial History: Clashing Cultures and Faiths is ‘in stock’ this week at Amazon, and officially releases on April 12. My aim in this book is to tell a readable story of early America, including the meetings and conflicts of Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans. It is based on extensive reading of the most-up-to-date scholarly histories in this field, but is presented in a narrative style that should appeal to general readers and students alike.... Read more
Climate change, weather, and agricultural cycles all played their part in religious history. On occasion, disasters drove paranoia and persecution – see my columns on the years around 1680. My discussion of the c.1740 era suggested how a deep crisis might create an audience open to revivalism. No less fundamentally, catastrophe could decide something as basic as the world’s religious map, of where different faiths found their main centers of strength. In my Lost History of Christianity, I wrote about... Read more
Today’s guest post is from Daniel K. Williams, associate professor of history at the University of West Georgia and the author of Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade. In the Supreme Court hearings this week on the constitutionality of a restrictive abortion law in Texas, lawyers for the pro-life side have advanced a liberal argument. Yet few liberals are taking it seriously. Pro-lifers have argued that in order for the state to protect women’s health –... Read more
In my last post, I described the extreme climatic conditions that formed the background of the Great Awakening as it developed between 1739 and 1742. To give an idea of this period as it affected one area of New England, this is an extract from a well known source, namely Joshua Coffin, A Sketch Of The History Of Newbury, Newburyport, And West Newbury, From 1635 To 1845 (1845). Witness the repeated remarks that this was the worst winter ever remembered... Read more
In February of 1864, a Confederate officer named Franklin Gaillard received word of his father’s death. Gaillard was numb to death, having fought at Gettysburg the previous July. “It was the most shocking battle I have ever witnessed,” he wrote after his side’s bloody defeat. “There were familiar forms and faces with parts of their heads shot away, legs shattered, arms torn off.” Bullets rained upon his men “thick as hailstones.” Gaillard blamed the generals, including Robert E. Lee, for... Read more
In 2004 the Kempf family farm in northeast Ohio was devastated by blight. Half of their crops, which included tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and cantaloupes, were wiped out. There was one productive area on the farm though: a new section that yielded some beautiful cantaloupes. The family’s 16-year-old son John wondered why. He hypothesized that the new section had not been subjected to years of chemical applications. This realization led John Kempf on a decade of research. With only an eighth-grade... Read more
For professors, writing letters of recommendation is a constant part of the job. Wise undergraduate and graduate students should make it as easy as possible for your professors to write them. Although few professors will write overtly negative letters, faint praise can just as easily condemn an applicant, especially when they are applying for highly competitive programs or jobs. I frequently see letters of recommendation that are vague or flat-out sloppy. Some seemed rushed or obligatory. Some fail to change... Read more
What is the “big story” that scholars should tell about the relationship of religion to the modern world? For many decades, social scientists believed that modernization led ineluctably to secularization. Modern goods such as science, democracy, technology, social mobility, and the free market meant that, sooner or later, religion was destined to swoon and irreligion would triumph. But that has changed swiftly in the last few decades. The eminent sociologist Peter Berger, a pioneering theorist of “the secularization thesis,” as... Read more
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