John Marks is Historian and Public History Administrator for the American Association for State and Local History. This interview is based on his new book, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas...
Latin America
Let’s Remember That Slavery in North America Pre-Dates 1619
The “20 And odd negroes” who arrived in Virginia in 1619 were the first slaves in English North America, but slavery existed in North American well before this. Here is Olivia Waxman at Time: The 400th anniversary being marked this month is really...
The Author’s Corner with David Kirkpatrick
David C. Kirkpatrick is Assistant Professor of Religion at James Madison University. This interview is based on his new book A Gospel for the Poor: Global Social Christianity and the Latin American Evangelical Left (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). JF: What...
Evangelicals and M-13 in El Salvador
It appears that evangelicalism in El Salvador is helping to solve the nation’s problem with gangs. Here is a taste of Molly O’Toole’s piece at The New Republic: According to experts, one of the gangs’ golden rules is that members can...
Does Nativism Still Exist Among U.S. Catholics?
Catholic University historian Julia G. Young believes that it does. Here is a taste of her piece “‘We Were Different‘”: A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course on migration at the Catholic University of America. During one lecture,...
Author’s Corner with Mark Goldberg
Mark Goldberg is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston. This interview is based on his new book, Conquering Sickness: Race, Health, and Colonization in the Texas Borderlands (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). JF: What led you...
Some Brazilians Love the American Confederacy
That’s right. Head over to Business Insider and check out some of the pics. Here is a taste of Melia Robinson’s piece: When the American Confederacy lost the Civil War in May 1865, 10,000 Southerners fled the US for a...
Brazil's Statue of Liberty?
This is how American religious historian Thomas Tweed describes “Christ the Redeemer,” the statue of Jesus that looks down over Rio. Tweed’s reference to the statue as Brazil’s “Statue of Liberty” is from Michelle Boorstein’s recent Washington Post piece, “The Many Meanings...
The Author's Corner With Caitlin Fitz
Caitlin Fitz is Assistant Professor, Department of History, Northwestern University. This interview is based on her new book, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (Liverlight/W.W. Norton, 2016). JF: What led you to write Our Sister Republics?...
Let’s Not Forget Pope Francis is a Latin American
Writing at The Anxious Bench blog, Gordon College history professor Agnes Howard offers a unique angle on Pope Francis’s visit to the United States. She wants us to think harder about the Pope’s identity as a Latin American, his advocacy of...
Francis, the Poor, Liberation Theology, and those “Calvinized” American Catholics
Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter has been offering some very helpful commentary in the midst of the whole papal conclave and choice of Jorge Maria Bergoglio as Pope Francis. In this piece at The New Republic he...