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Andrea L. Turpin As you might imagine given my scholarly interests , I love to see good work come out on the history of religion in American higher education. That's why I was delighted to interview Adam Laats on his new book Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Adam is a scholar I highly admire not only for the depth of his research but also for his commitment to rigorous fairness to historical characters from across the ideological spectrum. So without further ado, here is Adam weighing in on everything from the nature of evangelicalism to why religious historians should care about the history of education to what to do about the culture wars: AT: What led you to write Fundamentalist U? AL: The most interesting questions for me are pretty basic: What are schools for? What counts as “good” when it comes to education? From that perspective, there is nothing more fascinating than the network of evangelical colle...

Benjamin J. Wetzel The following review appeared in the spring 2018 edition of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter . White, Richard. The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 . New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. "For a while," Richard White observes in a bibliographical essay at the end of The Republic for Which It Stands , "the Gilded Age became the flyover country of American history, but at other times it has loomed large" (874).  White is correct, and at this particular moment the late 19th century seems to be making a comeback.  In October 2017, Ron Chernow (whose biography of Alexander Hamilton was the inspiration for the eponymous musical) released Grant , a 1,074-page biography of the Civil War general who served as president from 1869 to 1877.  One month later, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank criticized the Republican tax plan with the headline, "Welcome to the New Gilded ...

Four of us— Erin Bartram (University of Hartford), William Black (Rice University), Michel Sun Lee (University of Texas at Austin), and Moxy Moczygemba (University of Florida)—are excited to present part two of the 2018 book preview list! This post covers releases from May through July 2018. Books are grouped by publication month. As always, feel free to leave a comment if you believe a book has been mistakenly overlooked by our editorial team. May Devery S. Anderson, ed. Salt Lake School of the Prophets, 1867–1883 (Signature Books) From the publisher: “Ministerial training was an early goal of Mormonism. The priesthood-led institution called the School of the Prophets, established in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1833, was basically a divinity school for prospective missionaries. . . . Brigham Young re-established the school in the Salt Lake Valley in 1867; his successor, John Taylor, resuscitated it for a while in 1883. Young’s emphasis was theology, first as an appendage to Deseret Uni...

2018-2019 Academic Year CALL FOR PROPOSALS Submission Deadline: June 1, 2018 The Religion and Culture in the Americas Seminar explores topics in religion and culture broadly and from interdisciplinary perspectives including social history, biography, cultural studies, visual and material culture, urban studies, and the history of ideas. We are interested in how religious belief has affected society, rather than creedal- or theological-focused studies. The Seminar provides an opportunity for scholars to share works-in-progress, and we encourage papers that use new methods, unveil archival discoveries, or need feedback in preparation for book and journal article publication. The seminar will meet on selected Fridays during the academic year, 3-5 pm, at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois. To submit a proposal, please visit our webform at https://www.newberry.org/seminar-proposal-form and upload a one-page proposal, a statement explaining the relationship of the paper to your other ...

by Adam Park Special thanks to Ryan Bean, Reference and Outreach Archivist at the University of Minnesota's Kautz Family YMCA Archives, for providing insight for this post. He can be contacted here: beanx029@umn.edu.  Though seasonally entombed by a savage Minneapolis chill, it's true, the University of Minnesota Libraries house a repository of sources with impactful significance for American religious historiography. The Kautz Family YMCA Archives are particularly promising. Well beyond issues in Christian fitness, the Y holdings (and the U of M Archives and Special Collections more broadly) are fecund with research potential. And so, along with the fried cheese curds and cold lager, here's why it might be worth your trip. In addition to the Y materials, potentially relevant contents at the U of M  Archives and Special Collections  include: the history of technology , children's literature , African American literature , immigration history , early colonial co...

 At its Jan 2018 meeting, the Executive Council of the American Catholic Historical Association, under the leadership of President Kathleen Sprows-Cummings, approved an increase in the number of Graduate Student Summer Research Grants to be awarded each summer and the Council authorized an increase in the amount of money per award. The ACHA is happy to offer 4 grants for the summer of 2018, each for a total of $2500. In taking this measure, the Executive Council wished to continue the ACHA’s long-standing commitment to graduate student research. The increased amount of support per award was also designed with the goal of funding more graduate student research in archives and libraries abroad. Dr. Carolyn Twomey conducts research with a Graduate Student Summer Research Grant from the ACHA at the Parker Library at Cambridge University, Corpus Christi College. Graduate students who have completed their coursework and are researching topics related to the history of Catholicism broadly...

Today we conclude our roundtable on  Jews on the Frontier  with a response from the author, Shari Rabin. See Parts I , II , and III here. Shari is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and the Director of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture at the College of Charleston. Shari Rabin This book was in many ways motivated by a frustration and a hope. A frustration with what I felt was a disconnect between American religious history and American Jewish history and a hope that I might be able to create conversations between those two fields. Given that origin story, I really could not be more delighted to be having this conversation, first in person in Atlanta and now on the USReligion blog. Thank you to Charlie for orchestrating the conversation and to Andy McKee, Kate Rosenblatt, and Kati Curts for their close readings of the work. I am going to start by attending to Kate and Andy’s questions about my subjects: who are they, why are so many of the men, and wha...