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Lauren Turek The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion , a massive compendium of peer-reviewed essays on a range of topics in religion and religious history, is now available for subscription from Oxford. The " Religion in America " heading features essays on a range of key themes, including race, gender, class, foreign relations, politics, culture, and art. A number of RiAH bloggers contributed essays to this project, which the editors intend to serve as an ever-evolving online resource. Some of the contributions from RiAH folks that have already been published include: "Bibles and Tracts in Print Culture in America," by Lincoln Mullen "Race, Class, Religion, and American Citizenship," by Janine Giordano Drake "Gender, Marriage, and Sexual Purity in American Religious History," by Seth Dowland "Race, the Law, and Religion in America," by Michael Graziano "Civil Rights Movements and Religion in America," Paul Harvey "R...

Emily Suzanne Clark If you have not read or even just skimmed Judith Weisenfeld's recent award-winning (!) book New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity in the Great Migration , get yourself a copy. The book is fantastic, and all this week our friends over at Black Perspectives will be running a forum on the book. That forum contains abbreviated versions of longer essays that will come out next year in the Journal of Africana Religion . For more information on the f orum and its contributors, click here . This morning Rhon Manigault-Bryant's contribution was published. Her essay introduces the book and the forum with a focus on "sometime between," meaning the agency of "the people who occupy less prominent spaces." Tomorrow the forum continues with comments from Danielle Brune Sigler, Wednesday will have a reflection from yours truly, Chernoh Sesay Jr's comments will post Thursday, and Friday's post will come from Tisa Wenger. On Sat...

Andrea L. Turpin It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For job-seekers in U.S. religious history, Dickens seems to describe the history department market this year. The best of times: there is more than one tenure-track job specifically dedicated to U.S. religious history. The worst of times: no tenure-track job not specifically dedicated to this field lists it as a desired specialty. And it’s worth noting that most of the jobs in the field are at religiously affiliated institutions, albeit quite different ones. I would love to see history departments at a wide variety of institutions explicitly seeking coverage in this area. Still, I have to assume religious history remains a desirable subfield for at least some of these other jobs, considering that a mere 8 years ago the American Historical Association reported that religion was the largest subfield within the profession (with 7.7% of members listing it as one of three specialties). So without further ado, here are t...

Benjamin J. Wetzel The Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism is pleased to announce the annual deadline to apply for travel grants from the Cushwa Center.  The center offers four types of grants for projects related to the study of American and transnational Catholicism. Specifically: The Theodore M. Hesburgh Research Travel Grant (to use the Hesburgh Papers at Notre Dame) The Research Travel Grant (to use Notre Dame archival resources) The Hibernian Research Award (for projects related to Irish experiences in Ireland and the United States) The Peter R. D'Agostino Research Travel Grant (to use Roman archives for an American Catholic-focused project) The deadline for applying for each of these grants is December 31, 2017 .  More information can be found at  http://cushwa.nd.edu/grant-opportunities/ .  Please direct any questions to cushwa@nd.edu. Last year, Katherine Dugan , assistant professor of religion at Springfield College, received one of thes...

Elesha Coffman A mismatch pervades much scholarship in American religious history. Whereas most Americans experience their religious tradition primarily at the level of the individual congregation, most of us who write about religious traditions derive our evidence from other sources: books and periodicals, denominational records, histories of institutions, biographies of leaders, and so forth. The scholarly focus makes sense--microhistory is time-consuming, congregations seldom have robust archives, and the story of one congregation might have limited explanatory power at a larger scale. (There are, of course, exceptions to this observation, such as Stephen R. Warner's New Wine in Old Wineskins .) Still, ever since a fellow grad student asked me, regarding my dissertation, "But how did this play out in individual churches?" I've wondered how to connect historical arguments to that granular level of evidence and experience. Preparation for a recent lecture led me dow...

Religion in American History would like to give a hearty CONGRATULATIONS to RiAH Contributor Emily Suzanne Clark and her book A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans for receiving the Southern Historical Association's Francis B. Simkins Award for the best first book in Southern History! Emily first shared a portion of her work on Afro-Creole Spiritualism here at RiAH when she was working on her dissertation. In her March 2013 post " Bless Jesus and Lincoln ," Emily discussed an event that occurred on the same day in March 1869. Then (as well as now), it was clear that Emily was contextualizing this group and their historic moment in ways that could illuminate more for the rest of us to see. For current graduate students and recent PhDs, it might be worthwhile to note that Emily shared this portion of her work publicly as she was actively working on it. After landing her current TT position at Gonzaga University, defending her...

Michael Graziano  On the sixteenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I wanted to take a moment to learn more about how others teach 9/11. In my research, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between U.S. national security and American religion. So much of that relationship, at least in the past sixteen years, has been determined by 9/11 and its aftermath. Like many of you, I cover 9/11 in various courses: the event itself, what led to it, and what happened after it. Yet most of our current students have no memory of 9/11, and we’re entering a period where our incoming students will have been born after the attacks. This means they’ve spent their entire life in a post-9/11 world, and the things they take for granted—like the state of “forever war” brought about by 2001’s Authorization for the Use of Military Force—are the very same things we have to historicize. One way to do this is with comparisons to other American conflicts, as Paul Harvey does in his 2012...

Cara Burnidge " Indian woman and young girls in front of tents ," Dept. of Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Standing Rock Agency, September 17, 1947 [ 285835] Today, the National Archives's "Spotlight on the Records" highlighted digitized records that may be of interest to readers: Native American Reservation Photographs.  Most of the photographs are found in Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1793-1999, but other federal agencies also took part in documenting life on reservations. Daily life is often the focus of the photographs, but this can range from farming and families to sports to protests . The picture included here is one of over 5,000 digitized photographs of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota. For those interested in connecting the past to the present or including Native Americans as a part of American history well beyond the colonial era,  these photographs are an excellent resource to share with students.  In addit...

Jonathan Den Hartog With Labor Day past, the new semester has started in earnest, and I'm excited to be teaching "American Religious History" yet again With this iteration of the class, I've aimed to shake things up a bit by changing out some of the readings. One new book adoption that I'm excited to teach is Rick Kennedy 's The First American Evangelical: A Short Life of Cotton Mather . Although in graduate school I enjoyed Kenneth Silverman's Pulitzer-Prize winning  Life and Times of Cotton Mather , it's not exactly an easy read to drop on students early in the semester. By contrast, Kennedy's "short life" fits my teaching needs exactly. It reads well and presents a humane appreciation for Mather, while situating him in his religious environment. I learned a number of interesting things from the book. Perhaps most important was the fact that Cotton Mather had shown up in the Marvel Comic Universe . As the time-traveling character Witch-...