Sarah Naramore is Assistant Professor of History at Northwest Missouri State University. This interview is based on her new book, Benjamin Rush, Civic Health, and Human Illness in the Early American Republic (University of Rochester Press, 2023). JF: What led...
In 1786 Benjamin Rush wrote “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic.”It is a classic example of what historians and political theorists call “civic humanism.” At one point Rush states that goal education is to “convert men...
It certainly seems that way. As Spencer McBride, the author of the newly released Pulpit & Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America, writes in a recent post at The Junto blog: Rush was a Philadelphia physician, an eager student of...
Religion News Service is running my essay on Bernie Sanders’s religion under the title “In Bernie Sanders’ deeply religious message, an echo of the Founding Fathers.” Here is a taste: (RNS) Bernie Sanders’ political revolution rolled on Tuesday night with crushing...
On last Tuesday’s Democratic town meeting in Columbia, South Carolina, CNN moderator Chris Cuomo asked Bernie Sanders to explain his religious beliefs. Here is how the Vermont Senator responded: Every great religion in the world–Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism–essentially comes down...
Christian nationalists today make historical arguments about how America used to be a Christian nation. They long to return to a golden age when Christian morality was at the heart of the republic. I wonder what folks like David Barton […]
Philadelphia’s Bishop William White In case you have not been reading The Way of Improvement Leads Home today, I did a few quick posts on the announcement of the American Bible Society move from New York City to Philadelphia. As...
Benjamin Rush was a founder of the Philadelphia Bible Society Want to get some context for this post? Click here. I am back in the home office writing this week. I got off to a slow start this morning due to...
Last night I finished Richard Alan Ryerson’s masterful The Revolution is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia. (I am glad to see that the University of Pennsylvania Press has issued a new edition of this classic). Ryerson’s book first...
My reading over the Christmas Holiday included two books on Presbyterians and the founding of the College of New Jersey. I reread the first several chapters of Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker’ Princeton, 1746-1896 (1946). This is a very useful mid-twentieth-century institutional...
“Good God! The People of Pennsylvania in seven years will be glad to petition the Crown of Britain for reconciliation in order to be delivered from the tyranny of their new Constitution.” –John Adams on the democratic, unicameral 1776 Pennsylvania...
