Adam Jortner is Goodwin-Philpott Eminent Professor of Religion in the Department of History at Auburn University. This interview is based on his new book, No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). JF:...
Eric Smith is Senior Pastor of Sharon Baptist Church and Adjunct Professor of Historical Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. This interview is based on his new book, John Leland: A Jeffersonian Baptist in Early America (Oxford University Press,...
In her new book Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History, historian Katherine Carte offers a major reassessment of the relationship between Christianity and the American Revolution. She argues that religion helped set the terms by which Anglo-Americans encountered the...
It was good to get back to conferences this weekend. I forgot how much there is to learn through attending conferences and how much face-to-face engagement is so much more effective at stimulating thinking than ZOOM events. On Thursday I...
This is a really interesting conversation between historians Francis Bremer, Jeff Cooper, Richard Boles, and Doug Winiarski. The Congregational Library and the New England Hidden History program sponsored this discussion. Watch:...
Kirsten Fischer is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. This interview is based on her new book, American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). JF:...
Here is Jeff Cooper at the blog of the American Antiquarian Society: For the past fifteen years, New England’s Hidden Histories (NEHH), a project of the Congregational Library & Archives in Boston, has sought to locate, digitize, transcribe, and publish online New...
Back in October 2014, we interviewed Salem State University historian Emerson Baker about his book The Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience. You can read that interview here. Recently, I found an interview with Baker conducted by...
Erik Seeman is Professor of History and History Department Chair at the University at Buffalo. This interview is based on his new book, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). JF: What led you to write Speaking with...
Yes, as Sam Haselby reminds us, this is true. Here is a taste of his piece at Aeon: “Muslims of Early America“: The writing of American history has also been dominated by Puritan institutions. It might no longer be quite...
Don’t be confused by the title, we are not talking about the spooky family from the 1960s. Rather, in this episode, we turn to the religious history of one of America’s founding families. By focusing on the Adams family, one...
Some of you may recall back in July 2017 when we featured University of Alabama religion professor’s Mike Altman‘s book Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu at The Author’s Corner. It is an excellent book from an excellent scholar of American religion. Today on...
(This is the third and final post in a series on the word “evangelical” in the eighteenth-century and today. Read the first post here and the second post here). So we’re agreed that the first question to every academic panel...
(This is the second post in a series on the word “evangelical” in the eighteenth-century and today). In my first post in this three-post series, I made the case that there was a religious movement in the eighteenth-century that can...
(This is the first post in a series on the word “evangelical” in the eighteenth-century and today). If the Jonathan Merritt dust-up had a positive result, it was that it got historians thinking again about the meaning of the word...
Here is the Stanford press release: Stanford will rename some campus features named for Father Junipero Serra, the 18th-century founder of the California mission system, but will retain the Serra name and the names of other Spanish missionaries and settlers...
Elisabeth Ceppi is Associate Professor of English at Portland State University. This interview is based on her new book Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England (Dartmouth University Press, 2018). JF: What led you to write Invisible...
I’ve been a haphazard tweeter but some thanks from #SEAStLouis2018! @SpencerWMcBride @BenjaminEPark continue to be the best conference friends. Great lunch organizers along with @brfranklin4. @econroykrutz let me tag along for ice cream. And I saw @JohnFea1 for one second....
In The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society I wrote about the way the ABS used water as a metaphor to describe its work during the early 19th century: The ABS owed owed much of its distribution success...
Are you looking for something to do this weekend? Why not head to Washington D.C. to see the new “Religion in Early America” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History? The exhibit, which is curated by historian Peter...
