History Book Reviews Roundup

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"Views of the world: There is no such thing as an objective map," Economist, September 1, 2012

AROUND 150 AD an astronomer named Claudius Ptolemy wrote a book about how to make a proper map of the world. Penned in Greek on a papyrus scroll, the work, known as the “Geography”, is one of the most famous ancient texts on the science of mapmaking. It placed the job firmly in the domain of the geographer, who could use astronomy and mathematics to calculate from the stars what the world looked like below.>>>

Richard J. Evans, "Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power by David Priestland – review," Guardian, August 23, 2012

In this concise but extremely ambitious book, the Oxford historian David Priestland sets himself the task of taking the long view of the financial crisis that afflicts the world today. His argument is that the year 2008, when the credit crunch began, is as important as 1917, the year of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, or 1945, when the second world war came to an end. Four years on, the crisis shows no sign of coming to an end, and political systems, economies and societies seem in a state of disarray – even looming collapse.>>>

Dan Olson, "Historical accounts of U.S.-Dakota War change through years," Minnesota Public Radio, August 17, 2012
 
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Historians agree that the U. S. - Dakota War of 1862 was one of Minnesota's most momentous events.

The war's history has been documented and shared by people who have a range of perspective and accounts of it have changed over time.

Historian William Lass has reviewed 13 histories of the war, and he recommends reading, "The Dakota War of 1862," for several reasons.>>>

Pat Padua, "Book Review: Atomic Comics: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear World by Ferenc Morton Szasz," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 15, 2012

The year's biggest summer blockbuster, The Dark Night Rises, may be forever marred by a tragic footnote, but the fear that the movie itself plays on is time-honored and even old-fashioned: nuclear anxiety.

Pop culture has a long history of dealing with nuclear promise and danger, and the late historian Ferenc Morton Szasz argues in Atomic Comics: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear World that the pluses and minuses of splitting the atom were most efficiently conveyed to the general populace in comic books.>>>

Sameer Rahim, "From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra: review," Telegraph, August 6, 2012

Reviewing Niall Ferguson’s Civilisation in the London Review of Books last year, the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra was fearsomely critical of the historian’s account of the West’s rise. Ferguson had identified the six “killer apps” that enabled European domination: property rights, competition, science, medicine, consumer society and the work ethic. Emphasising these qualities, Mishra pointed out, underplayed the role of slavery, colonialism and indentured labour in the West’s triumph. Seen in this light, Ferguson’s “killer apps” looked less benign.>>>

Index for September Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

It will be a little bit before readers have the latest issue of Historically Speaking in hand, but in the meantime have a look at what will be between the covers.  The September 2012 issue will feature conversations with historians James Banner, Ilya Grinberg, George H. Nash, and Andrew Lambert.  It also includes essays on race and religion, colonial Britain, and religion and politics as well as a two forums on war.

David Lowenthal's "The Past Made Present" is the lead essay.  He explores themes laid out in the 2nd edition of his forthcoming Cambridge University Press book The Past Is a Foreign Country. Writes Lowenthal:

Branson, Mo, theme park Silver Dollar City. Photo by Stephens, August 2012.

Two opposing attitudes dominate recent discourse on the use and misuse of history. Many take refuge in the past as an antidote to present disappointments and future fears. They hark back nostalgically or formulaically to the fancied benefits, even to the fearsome burdens, of times of lost purity and simplicity, lapsed immediacy and certitude, in some Golden Age of classical serenity, Christian faith, pastoral plenitude, or childhood innocence. Sojourning in the past seems preferable to living in the present.

And given the mounting surfeit of heritage sites and structures, more and more of the past is accessible. Critics find the collective legacy crushingly voluminous, backward looking, and crippling to present enterprise. Fifty years ago architectural historian Reyner Banham condemned “the load of obsolete buildings that Europe is humping along on its shoulders [as] a bigger drag on the live culture of our continent than obsolete nationalisms or obsolete moral codes.” The load is now heavier. In much of England one feels hardly ever out of sight of a listed building, a protected archaeological site, a museum-worthy work of art. The treasured past is said to overwhelm French culture and politics. “Everything is indiscriminately conserved and archived,” notes a historian of the patrimony. “We no longer make history,” charges Jean Baudrillard. “We protect it like an endangered masterpiece.” The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas calls preservation a dangerous epidemic. Noting that UNESCO and similar bodies sequester one-sixth of the Earth’s surface, with more to come, he terms heritage a metastasizing cancer.

The popular alternative to wallowing in the past is to dismiss it entirely. The past has ever-diminishing salience for lives driven by today’s feverish demands and delights. The sensory-laden penchant for computer gaming, coupled with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, betoken a here-and-now environment dominated by raw sensations, in which “we live perpetually in the present.” Being up-to-date now not only matters most, it is all that matters; knowing or understanding the past is an impediment in the present rat race. . . .

Historically Speaking (September 2012):

The Past Made Present

David Lowenthal

British Perspectives on the War of 1812

The War of 1812 in the Grand Sweep of Military History

Jeremy Black

“Faithful History”: British Representations of the War of 1812

Andrew D. Lambert

The Naval War of 1812: An Interview with Andrew Lambert

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

From Light to White: The Place and Race of Jesus in Antebellum America

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey

Freedom Betrayed: An Interview with George H. Nash about Herbert Hoover’s Magnum Opus

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Along the Hindu Kush: Warren Hastings, the Raj, and the Northwest Frontier

Kenneth W. Harl

The Soviet Air Force in World War II

Out of the Blue: The Forgotten Story of the Soviet Air Force in World War II

Von Hardesty

Red Phoenix Rising: An Interview with Ilya Grinberg

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

In Search of the City on a Hill  

Richard Gamble

On Being a Historian: An Interview with James M. Banner, Jr.

Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Papist Patriots: Maura Jane Farrelly’s interview in Historically Speaking

Chris Beneke 

Among the gems in the latest issue of Historically Speaking is Randall Stephens’ interview (yes, we shamelessly shill for one another on this blog) with Brandeis University historian Maura Jane Farrelly.

Farrelly’s book Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity was published earlier this year with Oxford University Press. She focuses on colonial Maryland, which was home to British America’s largest concentration of Roman Catholics, including the influential Carroll family.

Anti-Catholicism in early Maryland was a complex phenomenon, Farrelly notes, not easily reducible to hostility toward Roman Catholics. Papist Patriots shows how a dual Roman Catholic identity -- distinguished by its compatibility with broader American understandings of religious liberty and its commitment to a hierarchal and communal church -- were reconciled in this largely Protestant country.

Excerpted below are a few tidbits from Stephens’ interview with Farrelly.

On her historical dissent from the Roman Catholic priest and theologian John Courtney Murray’s pivotal postwar argument that “there was a natural fit between Catholicism and a commitment to individual rights and religious pluralism”:

Farrelly: I agree with him that the Catholics living in the British colonies in the 1770s had embraced the American consensus, but I’m not sure their natural-law mindset was the reason why. I think it was their unique experiences as a politically -- but not economically -- oppressed minority in an English colony where Catholicism had been tolerated -- and then wasn’t that ‘prepared’ colonial Catholics to accept the ideology of the founding.

On the dual challenge faced by early Catholics:

Some Catholics rebelled more strongly against their government; others rebelled more strongly against their church. But most pushed against both with equal weight, telling their king that he could not have dominion over their religious consciences and telling their church that it could not determine their civil loyalties or behavior.

On the similarities between seventeenth-century Maryland and twenty first-century Iraq:

In 2006 nearly 235,000 people in Iraq fled their homes because of sectarian fighting. As staggering and disturbing as that statistic is, it still represents less than 1% of the entire Iraqi population. In contrast, 80% of the settlers in St. Mary’s County either fled or were killed in what is known as the ‘Ingle-Claiborne Rebellion’ of 1645-46.

On the formation of an American Catholic identity:

. . . Maryland’s Catholics understood after 1689 that English identity alone was not going to provide them with the liberty they sought. To claim the rights of Englishmen, they were going to have to assume the mantle not of English identity, but ‘Marylandian” identity, since religious toleration had been a fundamental component of Maryland’s founding. In 1776 that is precisely what they did.

Farrelly isn’t the first historian to offer an explanation of how early Roman Catholics became Americans (or more properly, first Marylanders, and then Americans), but she may have just provided us with the most persuasive one.

Historians in the News Roundup

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Melody Burri, "Historian Nancy Hewitt to present new work on Quaker Amy Post," MPNnow, August 22, 2012

Farmington, N.Y. - Nancy A. Hewitt, Professor of History and Women's Studies at Rutgers University, will give the fourth talk in the summer series for the 1816 Farmington Quaker Meetinghouse Museum.>>>

Professor Hewitt will present "Faith and Politics: The Spiritual Journeys of Amy Post."

Edward Helmore, "UK Harvard star Niall Ferguson accused of intellectual fraud," The Week, August 22, 2012

 THE British-born journalist and Harvard-tenured historian Niall Ferguson has landed himself in a nasty spat with some of America's most distinguished economists, among them Princeton's Nobel Prize-winner - and venerable New York Times columnist - Paul Krugman.

Ferguson is a promoter of Chancellor George Osborne's cut-to-growth economic philosophy. Krugman is a spend-to-grow man, as is President Obama.>>>

An interview with Victor Davis Hanson on his essay "There is No One California," Forum, KQED, August 20, 2012

California has become a target of mockery in the presidential campaign, with GOP challenger Mitt Romney holding the troubled state up as an example of where the country is headed under Barack Obama. Historian and conservative columnist Victor Davis Hanson also slams the state in a recent article entitled, "There is No One California." He joins us to talk about the piece, and to give us his take on the presidential campaign.>>>

Rebekah Higgitt, "(Pseudo)scientific history?" Guardian blog, August 16, 2012

There have been many writers who have claimed that history can be, or should be, scientific. Different things are meant by this, of course, and such statements are provoked by different motivations, although generally they trade on the perceived successes, rewards, professionalism and certainty of the sciences.>>>

"Historian Taylor Branch Critiques College Sports," Only a Game, WBUR (rebroadcast), August 25, 2012

The NCAA is facing growing scrutiny from college athletes, coaches and the people who follow college sports. The September 2011 issue of the Atlantic Monthly featured an article by Pulitzer-prize winning historian Taylor Branch — author of Parting the Waters, The Clinton Tapes, and others — entitled “The Shame of College Sports,” which criticizes the corruption within the NCAA.>>>

The Cold War Mentality of "A Nation at Risk"

Steven Cromack

“Our nation is at risk,” declared a 1983 report released by the National Commission on Excellence in Education.   The fallout from this simple, short report was astounding.  Its lucid words indicted the American education system and sparked national panic.  Schools across the country scrambled to assess their own standards, revised them, and implemented standardized tests.  Twenty-nine years later, as far as the state of American education is concerned, not all hope is lost.  This document was a product of Cold War mentality.  The Commission examined America’s schools under a microscope of fear. Was the United States losing the Cold War?  Only through education—advancement in math, science, and literacy—could the Land of the Free defeat the Communist threat.  “A Nation at Risk,” its language, and its implications reflect Cold War dogma—in examining this document in the era of globalization, it is evident that the Commission’s Cold War mindset failed to recognize that in the midst of the conflict, America’s schools were not failing; instead, they were shaping the future competition in which the United States finds itself in 2012.

Many Americans believed, as did the Commission, that the United States was not the great giant of innovation it once was.  The Commission asserted, “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.”  Like most Americans, the members of the Commission believed that America was falling far behind the lurking Communists.  America’s greatness, in their eyes, was drowning in its own falling standards.  The Commission echoed national fears: “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”  Furthermore, they captured the cynicism of the American public with the declaration, “What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.”  It seemed to the Commission, and many others, that America was losing the Cold War. 

The language used in the subsequent paragraphs continued to examine the American educational system through the Cold War lens.  “We have squandered the gains in achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge,” the Commission avowed, reaffirming the idea that America had fallen behind the Soviets.  The United States failed to maintain a competitive edge in science and industry.  Ultimately, the Commission argued that the underlying cause of this loss was the faltering education system.  Its members claimed, “We have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible.  We have, in effect, committed an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”  Here, the Commission dropped the phrase that no politician during President Reagan’s first term dared use: “disarmament.”  Many fretted that disarmament would lead to defeat.  Dismantling armaments meant weakening the state.  In using disarmament as a metaphor for not stimulating education, the Commission highlighted its Cold War ideology.  It was a metaphor that reflected the period.
   
With ending of the Cold War came a new way to view the increasingly globalizing world.  The economic boom of the 1990s, albeit an illusion of boom, led to a rise in per capita income.  How was it possible that this boom came on the heels as a “functionally illiterate” generation entered the workforce?  In his book Catching Up or Leading the Way, Yong Zhao asked the question: If America is indeed a nation at risk, and if education is always on the decline, how does the United States maintain its competitiveness?   The Global Competitive Index rates nations on the level of prosperity brought to their citizens.  In 2007, the United States ranked number one of 131 countries (41).  Furthermore, the years between 1993 and 2003 saw a 40 percent increase in college graduation.  That decade also saw a 1 percent increase in the number of graduates who hold science and engineering jobs (42).

In 2011, David von Drehle published an article in Time Magazine titled, “Don’t Bet against the United States.”  Like Zhao, Drehle examined the concept of a “Nation at Risk” in the era of globalization and saw what the Commission could not see with their Cold War mentality.  He argued that throughout the Cold War self doubt drove the United States: from Nixon declaring that America was worse off since Eisenhower left office, to the “crisis of confidence” exuded by Carter.  It was easy to blame schools.   But, Drehle asserts, “fallen trees don’t prove the forest is dying” (35).  Yes, reform is necessary, but America is not on the decline, it just needs to refocus itself in the world it has created.  Drehle concluded, “When more people in more countries are free to rise, to invent, to communicate, to dissent, it’s not the doom of U.S. leadership.  It is the triumph of the American way.”

This Cold War mindset meant that the Commission could not view America’s education and uncertainty as one of its greatest strengths.  The American education system is nowhere near perfect.  The United States must now refocus upon its education system in order to maintain a competitive edge, and drive the competition that the future holds. 

Race, Place, and Jesus in American History: An Interview with Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum

Conducted by Hilde Løvdal and Randall Stephens

Hilde Løvdal and Randall Stephens: Why did the two of you take on this project, which became your book, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (UNC Press, 2012)?

Paul Harvey and Ed Blum: On one level, the book began the first times we recognized that the Jesus images surrounding us in churches, Sunday schools, and on movie screens had histories. The book came from that feeling of dissonance when we saw representations of Jesus as white and knew, somehow, in our guts that it just wasn’t right.

On another level, the book emerged from years of studying independently the links between race and religion. We determined that it was time to take on the biggest symbol in the United States when it came to both: Jesus himself. We had read Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, FSG, 2003, loved it, but felt like it missed how profoundly race transformed imagery of Jesus and how much the racial images of Jesus influenced American history. When discussing our book idea with Martin Marty, he asked what it would look like to write a racially integrated story of Jesus as opposed to the ways Prothero segregated race into a few chapters. When we did that, we found profoundly complicated stories that not only featured racial conflict, but also demonstrated cross-racial exchange.

We started the book before we even met in person. Ed had reviewed Paul’s book Freedom’s Coming for H-NET and asked how the book would have looked different if it took into account art, literature, film, and material culture. At that point, we struck up an email conversation and planned an edited volume on race, religion, Jesus, and material culture. As we talked more and met every six months as part of the Young Scholars in American Religion, we decided that there was a monograph to be written. Six years later (and several very different iterations of the book thanks to amazing peer reviewers), we have the book!

Løvdal and Stephens: What is your intended audience for the book?

Harvey and Blum:

1. American historians. We both love our profession and the people in it, and this book connects to the major themes in American history that we teach from colonization and slavery to suburbia and the information age.

2. Students of American history and US religious history. We wrote the book in ways that our undergraduate students could understand, and we even created a website for the book – www.colorofchrist.com with hundreds of images, primary sources, songs, discussion questions, syllabi, and powerpoint presentations – for students and teachers to read the book, analyze it, and create their own research agendas from it.

3. Scholars of religion in the United States. Too often, religious history is written as separate from the broader trends of the overall discipline or focuses too much on ideas. We joined the many wonderful US religious historians who have been looking to connect our sub-discipline to the bigger points of the profession and to show how religion influenced all forms of society, culture, politics, and life.

4. Thoughtful religious leaders and people who want to know the stories behind the Jesus imagery they see around them and be able to make new choices about how they talk about their faith and display it.

Løvdal and Stephens: Several other prominent religious history scholars have worked on Jesus in America. You mention the influence of Prothero.  What about other scholars like Richard Wightman Fox (Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession, HarperCollins, 2004) when you wrote this book?

Harvey and Blum: Absolutely, although the book that first influenced us was Kelly Brown Douglas’s The Black Christ, which was a short, but wonderful, study of African American perspectives on Jesus from slavery through the works of black liberationist James Cone and womanist Delores Williams. These three books were always in the forefront of our thought. We have used and incorporated material from these authors, and thank them in the acknowledgements.

At the same time, we felt we had a different story to tell. On certain points, especially the impact of power and access to media resources in terms of how Jesus is represented in American history, we challenge some of the arguments that Fox and Prothero make. Both works tend to suggest that Jesus always has been made over in the image of the maker. But in The Color of Christ, we show that this is not simply the case. Jesus was made both like and unlike communities, and the “I-Thou” distinctions mattered.  Moreover, many people throughout US history have not had the representational power or means to create Jesus in their image and have transformed him in other profound ways.

We think the main difference between our book and those of Prothero and Fox is encapsulated by our different covers. While they present Jesus either as a larger-than-life air balloon or the different icons, we focus squarely on how people - everyone from teenagers in Brooklyn to presidents in the White House - have lived with the material realities of Jesus in their midst.

Løvdal and Stephens: How can a local understanding or regional understanding of Jesus say something about a national view?

Harvey and Blum: Local and regional factors are paramount to The Color of Christ. We place a lot of emphasis in the work (just to give one example to answer the question) on Jesus in the South. In many ways, the Jesus of the South – a suffering saint – became a dominant American Jesus. Ironically, that Jesus was formed first in the worldview of slaves and abolitionists. “The Christ of American civilization is the slave,” one abolitionist wrote. Many historians have suggested that the proslavery argument won the “battle for the Bible,” since slavery in general can easily be defended reading the Bible in the common-sense way that people did in the 19th century (and many do today).

But we point out that while slaveowners may have won the battle for the Bible, slaves and abolitionists won the joust for Jesus. After the war, that “southern Jesus” was reclaimed by whites; the very term for the overturning of Reconstruction, “Redemption,” suggests that white southerners saw their postwar political struggle as a kind of cleansing of a sin that had stained their region. Their triumph came to be represented symbolically in the famous closing sequence of Birth of a Nation, where the Aryan Jesus blesses the victory of the heroic Klan over the demonic forces of carpetbaggers and their black allies.

Then, later in the twentieth century, black artists (including a number of southern folk artists discussed in the book) and civil rights activists reclaimed Jesus once again, turning him once again into a figure empathetic to the black southern freedom struggle. This is best represented in Clementine Hunter’s magnificient painting “Cotton Crucifixion,” which depicts the crucified Jesus hanging over a mule-powered wagon full of cotton.

The West (or Wests) is critically important too. For Native American messianic movements, such as Wovoka’s Ghost Dance, the appeal of a neo-Christ who would bring back the Buffalo was tied to their frontier experiences. And the climate of southern California was instrumental in making Hollywood into the twentieth-century hub of Jesus media production. By having more than 300 days per year of good filming weather, southern California and Hollywood played a vital role in transforming how Jesus was presented physically and geographically.

Løvdal and Stephens: How did you want your story to unfold from one era to another or from one generation to another?

Harvey and Blum: We structured the book by era and it is divided into three parts: “Born Across the Sea” (colonial period to the Civil War) “Crucified and Resurrected” (Civil War to World War I) and “Ascended and Still Ascending” (1920s to the present). Each part tells a different story. Most importantly, we want to show the “long duree” of images (or the lack thereof) of Jesus in American history. The dearth of imagery among Protestants in early America, for example, meant that what imagery that existed came mostly from Catholics and was, literally, “born across the sea.” Even in the “age of visions” – the First Great Awakening – Jesus often appeared as a sort of ineffable brightness, not something that could be described in physical terms. In the 19th century, the Jesus that we are all familiar with was born and disseminated through the religious voluntary agencies, and their attendant means of mass production, that came with the evangelical explosion of that era. This Jesus was crucified in the turmoil of the Civil War, but resurrected after to bless the reunion of the country (and to bless white supremacy, we argue).

The Head of Christ (1941) Warner Sallman

Then, in the final part which focuses on the last 100 years or so, we trace the “ascendancy” of omnipresent Jesus imagery, from Warner Sallman’s ubiquitous “Head of Christ” (and countless imitations and parodies of it), to Jesus in literature, film, and music, and finally to Jesus in contemporary humor (movies, “South Park,” and the like). The mass media of the twentieth century (and into the social media revolution of the 21st) have made Jesus inescapable globally, even as the meanings of his imagery have become almost impossibly tangled with the history of that imagery. The white Jesus survives through all this turmoil, but he is, we say, “white without words.” In short, the white Jesus is the “default” image, to which all others ultimately must defer, even in positions of challenge or parody.

Løvdal and Stephens: Could you say something about the malleability of the image of Jesus? How can Jesus appear so different depending on who is using his image?

Harvey and Blum: Great question, and that is really the heart of the book. We can best answer that by mentioning the three main myths our book explores about Jesus imagery and shifting appearances. First, there is a myth that humans create God or gods (especially Jesus) in their own image. This myth claims that people invariably represent Jesus to look like themselves. So whites make a white Jesus, blacks a black one, Asians an Asian one. But American history shows this is not true, and the myth hides how much racial groups have interacted and affected one another throughout U.S. history. No racial group in the United States has been separate enough to form distinct and impenetrable religious cultures. Moreover, lots of people have worshiped Christ figures that look nothing like them. For centuries, African Americans and Native Americans embraced white images of Jesus, debated them in their midst, and tried to replace them but generally did not. The myth hides the powers of money, of technological access, and of production capabilities. Slaves did not have the time or the manufacturing power to make or market pictures of Jesus as a black man, but they were inundated with images of white Christ figures. And then it gets even more complicated. When the white Jesus helped slaves run to freedom, he was defying white supremacy. So even racial images can be used to work against racism.

The second myth is that the United States has always been a "Jesus nation" or a "Christian nation." When we take seriously discussions of the race and color of Christ, we find that Jesus has been a lightning rod for struggle, conflict, and tension. For every occasion where someone makes Jesus into an icon of entrepreneurial salesmanship, as Bruce Barton did with his bestselling book of the 1920s The Man Nobody Knows, there are other Americans who have made Jesus a lynch victim (like W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes did in the 1930s), as a Native American who promised the defeat of the whites and the return of the Buffalo (as Wovoka did), or as a socialist who would get beat up by American mobs (as muckraker Upton Sinclair did). Jesus has not defined American culture; he has purely been at the center of the titanic and oftentimes bloody struggles over what the culture would be.

The third myth is that liberation theology emerged in the 1960s and was primarily a northern, black male phenomenon. This myth went into full blast during the Reverend Jeremiah Wright debacle of the 2008 presidential campaign when he could be heard on cable television and YouTube videos shouting "God damn America" and "Jesus was black." Media outlets searched for the genesis of these ideas and they turned to the 1960s. They located the work of James Cone as most influential and connected him to Wright and then Wright to Obama.

But liberation theology has a much longer history, and that history included Native Americans, women, and whites far more than the short history lets on. As early as the 1830s, some white Americans, black Americans, and Native Americans challenged expressly the whiteness of Jesus and several presented Jesus as on the side of disempowered people. In the present, there are many non-blacks who use darkened images of Jesus and some white artists even create them.

Roundup: The Trials and Tribulations of David Barton

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Elise Hu, "Publisher Pulls Controversial Thomas Jefferson Book, Citing Loss Of Confidence," NPR, August 9, 2012

Citing a loss of confidence in the book's details, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson is ending the publication and distribution of the bestseller, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson.>>>

Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens, "Lies the Debunkers Told Me: How Bad History Books Win Us Over," Atlantic blog, July 24, 2012

Earlier this month, George Mason University's History News Network asked readers to vote for the least credible history book in print. The top pick was David Barton's right-wing reimagining of our third president, Jefferson's Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson. But just nine votes behind was the late Howard Zinn's left-wing epic, A People's History of the United States. Bad history, it turns out, transcends political divides.>>>

John Fea, "What Can We Learn From the David Barton Controversy?" Patheos, Anxious Bench, August 15, 2012

In case you have not heard, last week Thomas Nelson, a Christian publisher based in Nashville, ceased publication of David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, saying it has “lost confidence in the book’s details.”>>>

Paul Harvey, "David Barton: Falling from Grace?" Religion Dispatches, August 10, 2012

This has been the summer of discontent with David Barton. First, in a poll taken by History News Network, Barton’s newest work, The Jefferson Lies, topped the list of “least credible history works in print.” The same work met a unanimous chorus of refutations from Jefferson public humanities scholar and radio personality Clay Jenkinson, from religious historians ranging from Martin Marty to John Fea, and (in the full length work Getting Jefferson Right) from Grove City College professors Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter.>>>

Jennifer Schuessler, "Hard Truth for Author: Publisher Pulls ‘The Jefferson Lies’" NYT, August 14, 2012

Last month the History News Network voted David Barton’s book “The Jefferson Lies” the “least credible history book in print.” Now the book’s publisher, Thomas Nelson, has decided to stop publishing and distributing it.

The book, which argues that Thomas Jefferson was an enthusiastic orthodox Christian who saw no need for a wall of separation between church and state, has attracted plenty of criticism since it appeared in April, with an introduction by Glenn Beck. But the death knell came after Jay W. Richards, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author, with James Robison, of “Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family and Freedom Before It’s Too Late,” began to have doubts and started an investigation.>>>

Books & Culture Podcast on Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

Last week over at the Books & Culture site John Wilson and Stan Guthrie did a podcast on Historically Speaking.  They discuss the new issue and highlight some of the contents.  Wilson praises our forum on Brad Gregory's new book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). (Alexandra Walsham, Bruce Gordon, Carlos Eire, and Euan Cameron offered comments.) Wilson sees the book as "one of the most interesting, provocative, learned works of history that I've read in the last several years and it's good to see that Historically Speaking is devoting attention to it." 

Gregory introduces his lead piece to the forum as follows:

The Unintended Reformation is a work of historical analysis that takes the present as its point of departure. . . . While disclaiming comprehensiveness, the book aims to be as explanatorily powerful as possible while making as few theoretical and methodological assumptions as necessary. Secondarily, the book addresses some major contemporary concerns based on its historical analysis. These remarks will speak mostly to the first ambition and briefly to the second.

I endeavor in The Unintended Reformation to answer a basic but very big question: How did contemporary ideological and institutional realities in North America and Europe come to be as they are? The book intends to characterize these realities matter-of-factly. Ideologically, they include an open-ended range of secular and religious truth claims made by individuals about matters pertaining to human meaning, morality, purpose, and priorities, including some religious truth claims articulated with great intellectual sophistication by theologians and philosophers of religion. Insofar as the present is the product of the past, any adequate history must be able to account for all these claims. The modern liberal institutions variously characteristic of all contemporary Western states permit this ideological heterogeneity through the legal and political protection of individual citizens to believe and live as they please so long as they obey established laws.   

Read more of the forum and the rest of the issue at Project Muse, or subscribe to the print version today.

Kill Your Textbook

Jonathan Rees

In light of the interview I did with NPR a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d try to explain a little more here about why I stopped assigning a U.S. history survey textbook.  Since the decision to assign anything is almost always the teacher’s or the professor’s alone, this post is primarily aimed at my fellow educators.  However, as this decision has a tremendous effect on everyone else in the classroom too, I hope history students (or maybe just former history students) will chime in below with comments.

Before I made the switch to a no-textbook survey class, I was assigning a different textbook every year or two for about five or six years.  What made me unhappy with them wasn’t the quality of the scholarship.  Every one of them was solid in that department.  What made me unhappy with them was the alignment between what was in them and my lectures.  I came to believe that they were all teaching against me rather than with me.

What does that mean?  Well, like I wrote in my original post here on this subject a few months ago, anyone teaching the post-1877 US survey class has a lot of ground to cover.  With a limited amount of time and lots of history worth discussing, something is inevitably going to be left out.  Textbook writers have it a little easier.  They can include more material in print than I’ll ever get to during a 14-week course.  Yet it seemed to me that the relationship between what I was teaching and the material that appeared in whichever textbook I was using was getting further out of whack with each passing year. 

Of course, there were inevitable areas of overlap.  I teach the New Deal.  There’s a New Deal chapter in every textbook.  But I had started teaching the New Deal more as a series of themes rather than a long list of programs, which made having students read about programs that I no longer taught seem like a waste of their time.  And then there’s the material that I’ve been teaching for years that nobody seemed to cover well.  Take the 1960s, for example.  I think it’s important to teach the counterculture, but even the best survey textbooks treat Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey with kid gloves, assuming they bother to cover them at all.

Then there’s the elephant sitting in the corner of every introductory history classroom:  the fact that so many students don’t read the assigned textbook no matter what.  Sure, I always imagined that the best students could use it as a kind of encyclopedia, looking up the terms that they don’t really know, but that was a pretty expensive study aid that I was making them buy.  Ultimately, I was reading (albeit very quickly) so many textbooks in so few years that I lost interest in ever reading another one again.  Be honest with yourself now:  Do you read every new edition of your chosen history survey textbook?  Have you ever read even one edition cover-to-cover yourself?  If I wasn’t willing to read the textbook I assigned, how could I in good conscience make my students read it too?

Overcome with pedagogical despair, I wrote a post on my blog critiquing modern textbooks without having a really good solution to the problem.  That’s when a colleague of mine at our sister institution (who you may know as Historiann) left a comment suggesting that I adopt her approach and assign no survey textbook at all.  I remember exactly what first flashed through my mind as soon as I read her comment:  “You can do that?” 

Yes, you can.  As the secondary school teacher from Alaska suggested towards the end of my time on Talk of the Nation, there are plenty of principals out there who might look askance at high school teachers who tried innovating in this manner.  Perhaps there are some department chairmen out there who might frown upon contingent faculty who tried doing something that’s still rather novel.  People with tenure, however, have no good excuse.  You really can teach a rigorous American history course without a textbook, and speaking personally I’ve never been happier.

Please understand that it’s not as if I’ve chucked all assigned reading out the window.  I’ve replaced my textbook with edited primary sources.  Also, as always, I assign three other short books on a rotating basis covering subjects that I’ll explore in greater depth during class time.  I think of this arrangement as the equivalent of the Sugar Act of 1764.  Like the British Empire, I’ve lowered the reading tariff, but now it’s much more strictly enforced through things like ID quizzes and requirements for details on my essay exams.  Since the documents I select now correspond perfectly to what I cover in lecture, I’m also sending the unmistakable signal that this is the history that students have to know.

I don’t want to teach from a textbook.  I want to assign readings that reinforce the way I teach already.  Equally importantly, by killing my textbook I’ve killed the kind of coverage pressures that I discussed on NPR.  This not only gives me more time to teach the history that I want to teach, it gives me more time to teach skills like writing and reading that my students often desperately need in order to succeed throughout their college careers and beyond.

Unfortunately, the kinds of commercial demands that James Loewen famously described so memorably almost twenty years ago now still make it impossible for commercial textbooks to enable the kind of flexibility that history teachers should demand.  However, thanks to the vast array of primary sources that are now available to history teachers all over the world, it’s really easy to assemble textbook substitutes online or to use document banks assembled by publishers of all kinds.  This way, we can all teach what we want, not what they want – but only if we’re willing to break with the past and take the first step in a new pedagogical direction.

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University – Pueblo.  He blogs about education technology, labor and American history at More or Less Bunk.  He is also a course editor and consultant for Milestone Documents.  His book, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction, will be released in September by M.E. Sharpe.

Early August Break

Randall Stephens

The blog will take a break for the next week.  In the meantime, have a look at this posts on art and culture.

Heather Cox Richardson, "Women in World War II: A Photo Essay," September 19, 2011

Randall Stephens, "Acres of Glitter and Denim: David Bowie's Age of Fracture?" January 9, 2012

Heather Cox Richardson, "Lascaux, Staffordshire, and the Serendipity of History," September 12, 2011

Heather Cox Richardson, "A Day in the Life: Art and History," June 17, 2011

Randall Stephens, "Art of the Americas," November 16, 2010

THS Blog on NPR

Jonathan Rees

The other morning I was just biding my time, reading a biography of Margaret Sanger and enjoying summer vacation when I got an e-mail from an NPR producer.  They read my last post for the HS blog and wanted me to come on Talk of the Nation to discuss it.  I did.

It's the last segment of Monday's show.  The callers got me started on another hobby horse of mine: teaching without a textbook. 

Here's a little from that Talk of the Nation piece:

In college, study of American history is often broken down into two chunks. Professors pick a date to divide time in two: 1865, after the Civil War, say, or 1900, because it looks good. So for those who teach courses on the first half, their purview is fairly well defined.

But those who teach the second half, such as Jonathan Rees, face a persistent problem: The past keeps growing. Rees teaches U.S. history and, like many teachers, every few years responds to major events by adding them to his lectures. But that means other important events get left behind. He wrote about this conundrum in a piece for The Historical Society blog, "When Is It Time To Stop Teaching Something?"

Read on or listen to the rest at NPR>>>