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Andrea L. Turpin As I have written elsewhere on this blog , I love Mormon history. That's why I was delighted to interview Max Perry Mueller on his new book Race and the Making of the Mormon People (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). I actually happened to be teaching the Mormon unit in my American women's history course concurrently with reading this book, and it helped me answer several student questions! So without further ado, here is Mueller (lightly edited for length and clarity) on everything from the relationship between history, theology, and race to how he hopes we'll teach Mormon history differently: AT: What led you to write Race and the Making of the Mormon People ?  MPM: I’ve shared a bit of my professional and confessional history elsewhere . Let me just add that I’m an outsider—at least superficially—to experiences of Mormonism and “race.” (To be sure, to say that I haven’t experienced “race” is a sign of my privilege. As I hope my book shows, the ...

Benjamin J. Wetzel Although women's history is inseparable (or should be!) from our national narratives, the month of March serves as a time to reflect specifically on women's contributions to American history.  Even more specifically, this month provides a special occasion to reflect on the history of women religious, and to announce some current and forthcoming scholarly initiatives from the Cushwa Center in this area. 1) The center has launched the Mother Theodore Guerin Research Travel Grant Program .  This program memorializes the historic connection between Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College and the University of Notre Dame by supporting researchers whose projects seek to feature Catholic women more prominently in stories of the past.  Grants of up to $1,500 will be made to scholars seeking to visit any repository in or outside the United States, or traveling to conduct oral interviews, especially of women religious.  An inaugural round of grants will be awarded i...

Jonathan Den Hartog I've just returned from the Religion and Politics in Early America Conference in St. Louis , and I'm still processing all the great ideas that emerged. First, the important details: the Conference was convened by the Society of Early Americanists , and the conference organizer was Abram Van Engen , who did a fantastic job in organizing and executing the event. The conference was hosted by Washington University , and significant funding came from the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University and the Kinder Institute at the University of Missouri . My head-line impression was the significant interest the conference generated. There was significant buzz before the conference convened, and the expectations were well met. The conference had great attendance, with attendees ranging from graduate students to very established scholars. The sessions were full of interested audiences. The success of the conference indicated to me the c...

Our blog has recently hosted a series of reviews on Tisa Wenger's Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017). See these previous entries here. We conclude with a response from the author.  Tisa Wenger It is truly an honor to have this forum on Religion in American History, and I am fortunate to have such insightful and generous critics. I began my research for Religious Freedom with some big-picture questions that were simmering as I finished my first book, We Have a Religion . What kinds of cultural and political work has the idea of religious freedom done in US history? How did diverse groups of Americans invoke this idea, and what frameworks of ‘religion’ did it impose on them? In short I did not want to write about what religious freedom is , or how we should define it, but instead about what it does : how it has shaped communal identities in and beyond the United States and intersected with American relations of power. At first I planned to write an...

This is the final review in our round table on Tisa Wenger's  Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal  (2017). For previous entries, see reviews by Kime , Zubovich , and Su . Look for a response from the author tomorrow! Michael Graziano Tisa Wenger’s Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017) is an ambitious book. It’s asking big questions about religious freedom and looking for answers in an international context. Rather than interrogating religious freedom as something familiar--something good or bad, a myth or an impossibility--Wenger is instead interested in who talks about religious freedom, and why they do so. Ranging from the 1890s to the 1930s, Wenger examines what people had to gain (or, perhaps, what they hoped others might lose) by engaging in what she terms “religious freedom talk.” Wenger sees religious freedom as part of an Enlightenment project, an idea that challenged empire but also contributed to it, since ide...

This is the third entry in our review round table on Tisa Wenger's  Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal  (2017). For previous entries, see reviews by  Kime  and Zubovich . Anna Su Wenger’s Contested History is the first to examine holistically the history of religious freedom within the United States largely outside the confines of the history generated by the Religion Clauses of the U.S. Constitution. Among others, it serves to bridge existing scholarly conversations on the critique of secularism, religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy, and religion in U.S. history. Those familiar with the works of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan on the disciplinary inclinations of religious freedom would find much fodder in this book for support. In many ways, it lays out a rich new canvas with which to look at the questions raised in those aforementioned conversations. For instance, in what ways did religious freedom talk emanci...

Lauren Turek I recently came across this call for applications for an exciting looking summer school intended for graduate students working on Jewish history and cultural studies, broadly defined: Out of This World The Supernatural in Jewish History and Culture Advanced Summer School for Graduate Students in Jewish Studies June 24–28, 2018 in Philadelphia Presented by the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in partnership with the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem “Out of This World” is devoted to the magical, the miraculous, and the monstrous in Jewish history and culture. Its subjects include humans gifted with supernatural powers—miracle-workers, magicians, and messianic saviors—as well as superhuman beings like ghosts, golems, and God. The week will range across disciplines, including history, anthropology, literary study, and the study of religion, with the goal of modeling various ways to m...