Religion in American History: A Short Syllabus

Editor's Note:  As Jonathan and Chris have recently pointed out, July 2017 marks the beginning of Religion in American History's tenth year. Happy birthday to us! Throughout the month we'll be celebrating and reflecting upon the contributions shared and inspired through the blog...not to mention its intellectual and creative founding father, Paul Harvey. Today's post comes from another pillar of the RiAH community, Ed Blum, who--to the surprise of no one--models a longstanding RiAH value of sharing and highlighting the work of others.

Edward Blum

The blog always felt like a big classroom to me – where we could bring up books, ideas, evidence, and everything else. I routinely use posts from the blog in my class and so I thought it would be fun to put together a little list of materials for some main themes in American religious history. Please forgive my excessive focus on the twentieth-century … since students seem to like it the most that’s where I gravitate in the classroom.

Contact and Colonialism

• John L. Crow, Studying ‘the Occult’ in Colonial America
• Jeffrey Wheatley, Demonization and Racialization in British North America
• Linford Fisher, Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a Franciscan
• Curtis Freeman, A Churchless Man Seeking the Pure Fellowship: Or, will the Real Roger Williams Please Stand Up?

The American War for Independence and Early Nationhood

• Kate Carte Engel, Religion, Revolution, and Digital Humanities
• Paul Harvey, Back to the Future: Christianity and the American Founding
• Christopher Jones, Religion and Revolution
• Jonathan Den Hartog, Just War Concepts and the American Revolution

Nineteenth-Century Bonanza

• Chris Beneke, Steven K. Green on the Bible, the Nineteenth-Century Schools, and the Origins of Modern Church-State Doctrine
• Laura Leibman, Clothing and Religion
• John G. Turner, Mormon’s Apostle Paul
• Carol Faulkner, Gender and the American Religious Historian: Seneca Falls Edition
• Paul Harvey, The Visible Church

Modernism and Fundamentalism

• Trevor Burrows, Kathryn Lofton’s “The Methodology of the Modernists”
• Michael Limberg, Jerusalem YMCA
• Elesha Coffman, Conservative vs. Liberal or Evangelical vs. Churchly?

Great Depression, WWII, and Cold War

• Janine Giordano Drake, Did Premillennialism Drive Political Conservatism?
• Paul Harvey, The Gospel of the Working Class
• Adina Johnson, Religion and Rosie the Riveter
• Darren Grem, Deg’s Dispatches, Part VII

Civil Rights Movements

• Paul Harvey, From Civil Rights to Human Rights
• Matthew J. Cressler, Black Religion and Black Power
• John L. Crow, The Strange Theosophical Connection to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement
• Paul Harvey, Mississippi Praying: An Interview with Carolyn Dupont

Pluralism versus the New Right

• Steven P. Miller, God’s Own Party, cont.
• Kelly J. Baker, Saint, Profit, or Just Palin
• Chris Cantwell, The Problems and Promises of Religious Pluralism
• Samira Mehta, Nikki Haley and the Construction of South Asian Identity

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