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Andrea L. Turpin I hope to see many readers at the annual conference of the American Society of Church History (ASCH) next week! This year the ASCH meets concurrently with the American Historical Association (AHA) in Washington, DC from Thursday, January 4 through Sunday, January 7. (Which is, as always, the day before our classes start at Baylor...) Specifically, ASCH panels meet at the Dupont Circle Hotel. I am pleased to report that most time slots feature at least one paper on women, gender, and/or sexuality in U.S. religious history. Indeed, on Friday morning there are two entire panels on the subject that—unfortunately—conflict with each other. Nearly all the papers in this field this year focus on Protestants, but there are a large number that consider women and gender in American religion within an international context. Recurring themes include feminism and anti-feminism, the intersection of gender and race—and to a lesser extent class—women's religious thought (which make...

Lauren Turek The Journal of American Studies  recently ran a special issue entitled " Exploring the Global History of American Evangelicalism ." According to organizers Kendrick Oliver, Uta A. Balbier, Hans Krabbendam, and Axel R. Schäfer, the collected articles aim to "explore the changes over time in American evangelical conceptions of the 'global," "document the diversity of means used by American evangelicals in their efforts to make the world one in Christ," examine "the role played by the politics of affection in relations between American evangelicals and the outside world," and "identif[y] the overseas work of US evangelicals as making an integral contribution to the expansion and perpetuation of their nation’s influence as exercised across a global horizon through the long twentieth century" (1038-41). With essays by Heather Curtis, Axel R. Schäfer, Hans Krabbendam, David R. Swartz, Timothy Stoneman, Uta A. Balbier, Melani ...

Benjamin J. Wetzel As final exams wind down and the fall semester ends, the Cushwa Center would like to announce several public events it will be hosting and/or sponsoring at the University of Notre Dame during spring 2018. 1) The Seminar in American Religion | March 24 This semester the seminar will discuss Judith Weisenfeld , New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration ( New York University Press, 2017).  In addition to Professor Weisenfeld, commentators will include RiAH founder Paul Harvey (University of Colorado) and Jennifer Jones (University of Notre Dame).  Details available here .  The book seminar will be held in conjunction with... 2) "Enduring Trends and New Directions: A Conference on the History of American Christianity in Honor of Mark Noll" | March 22-23 This conference will honor the career of Mark Noll by reflecting on his work in the history American Christianity while also looking forward to new directions in the f...

What happens when you rearrange a civil rights movement class to prioritize the North? The long civil rights movement framework, which has greatly influenced my own writing, explodes the traditional southern-focused, 1954-1965, King-based narrative that has been so dominant in the general American psyche and helps students to see that race has not been just a southern problem (although there are things unique to the South), that Dr. King was not the only leader, that women’s activism and questions of gender are important, and that the movement was not just about integration.  The long movement framework, as Jacqueline Dowd Hall  conceived it in 2005, does not adequately account for religion, but there are some great books that do explore religion in the classical and long movements (I have used Charles Marsh's God's Long Summer  and Patrick Jones's The Selma of the North  in my classroom). Place matters , and I’m becoming more convinced that institutions of higher ed...

Jonathan Den Hartog Back in September , I had reported I was kicking off my "American Religious History" class this semester with some changes. Now, with the semester almost done, I figured a look back would be appropriate. Most importantly, I had promised some report on teaching Rick Kennedy's biography of Cotton Mather . I can attest that it taught well, and I thought it communicated a lot of complex ideas about 17th- and early 18th century Puritanism really gracefully. Several of the hooks in the book worked marvelously. My students were most impressed that Mather had shown up as part of the Marvel Comic Universe. They were also impressed that Mather had diagnosed the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar as a werewolf. In perhaps the best tribute, one of the students created a historical card game in which Cotton Mather featured prominently. More generally, I was struck by several other features going through the class this semester. First, the class really leant itself to ...

Andrea L. Turpin A month ago I attended two national conferences on back-to-back weekends: the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (USIH) met October 26-29 in Dallas, TX and the History of Education Society (HES) met November 2-5 in Little Rock, AR . A week and a half of intensive immersion in the current scholarship of two overlapping fields made some common themes jump out. (And also produced fascinating insights into the variable quality of Marriott hotels. But I digress.) Specifically, I was struck by historians' interest in two topics: the concept of the common good and the problem of how values are, or are not, transmitted to the next generation. I suspect these themes jumped out at me in part because they seem so salient in the current widespread breakdown of civil dialogue. Both of these lenses prove helpful for producing a clearer understanding of U.S. history, especially U.S. religious history—and for seeing how best to frame that history for our students today. The qu...