A few things online that caught my attention this week:
David Swartz reviews Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.
Jan Gardner reviews Michael Greenburg, The Court Martial of Paul Revere: A Son of Liberty and America’s Forgotten Military Disaster.
George Whitefield and slavery
David Levering Lewis reviews Jason Sokol, All Eyes Are Upon US: Race and Politics From Boston to Brooklyn. Kate Tuttle reviews it here. Eric Arnesen reviews it here.
Larry Cebula on Tom Hanks’s forthcoming Lewis and Clark miniseries
Paul Harvey reviews Ed Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Religious history at the American Historical Association
Sean Wilentz weighs-in on The New Republic
Culture in a digital age
Daniel Walker Howe reviews Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History
Louis Menand on the purpose of college
Is Ellis Island to blame for your family’s name change?
The black minister who took Jefferson Davis’s Senate seat.
Mark Noll reviews Matthew Kadane, The Watchful Clothier: The Life of an Eighteenth-Century Protestant Capitalist.
Allen Guelzo reviews David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
From the Louis Menand column on college: “Independence of mind is tolerated in college, and even honored,”
On what planet does this guy live?
If there's one thing I read about large numbers of colleges/universities these days, independence of mind is anything but tolerated. After all, these are the folks who create “speech codes” and “free speech zones” to protect the delicate egos and sensibilities of poor little college students. After all, we can't have them exposed to ideas that might “offend” them, can we?
Then we have universities like Vanderbilt here in Tennessee who have decided, in all their glorious Ivory-towered idiocy, that it is intolerable “discrimination” to require that the leaders of religious student organizations require their leaders to affirm the statements of faith of those organizations.
I'd like to believe college is such a noble endeavor….debating ideas, tolerating ones with which one disagrees. Sounds good in theory, but I doubt it plays out so regularly in the real world.