US News and World Report Top History Programs

US News and World Report has released their 2009 list of the top history graduate departments in the country. I don't put too much stock in these lists. For example, my alma mater, SUNY-Stony Brook, is tied for #71 in the country. This means that those who attended Princeton Theological Seminary (#52) and Jewish Theological Seminary (tied for #71) received better or at least the same graduate training in HISTORY as I did. Perhaps this is true, but how could a seminary that offers Ph.Ds in historical theology or church history be ranked higher than a Research One institution with a faculty that has won four Guggenheim Fellowships.

OK--perhaps this all sour grapes on my part. I was trained well at Stony Brook and I am thus a bit defensive.

But I often tell students interested in graduate school to try to find a particular mentor to study with, no matter what the graduate program happens to "ranked" by US News. Of course the top programs have some very strong mentors and strong supporting casts, but sometimes a graduate student might be better off with a well-known or well-connected mentor at a second tier school who has similar scholarly interests and can devote more time to them. This was certainly my experience at Stony Brook.

My advice is to take these rankings with a grain of salt.

Amazing...Simply Amazing.

K.C. Johnson thinks that all members of Congress should have to pass a U.S. history exam as a requirement for office. After reading his post and watching this video I could not agree more.

11 Most Endangered Historical Places

What to do the Miami Marine Stadium (left), Ames Shovel Shops (Easton, MA), the Enola Gay's Hangar (Wendover Airfield, UT) , and the Century Plaza Hotel (Los Angeles) have in common? They are all on the National Trust for Historical Preservation's list of the most endangered historical places in America.

The site I have linked to above provides information about how you can help in the attempt to save these places.

ADDENDUM: In the comments section "BC" provides links to two bloggers who question some of the National Trust's list of endangered places. They are worth a look.

George Washington and Religion

Today was the first day of student presentations in my Religion and American Founding seminar. The panel today was entitled "Reflections on George Washington and Religion." Our presenters were Matthew Wicks and Melinda Maslin. (See Melinda's latest post on providential history). Both Matt and Melinda are working on how Washington was remembered in the 19th century as a man of Christian conviction.

Matt talked about how some of Washington's earliest biographers treated his religious faith. First, he discussed Mason Locke Weems's Life of Washington. Weems attempted to paint Washington as an evangelical who had God-like qualities. He compared, for example, Weems's description of Washington coming into Trenton before his inauguration to Jesus's triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He then moved on to Washington Irving's more humane presentation of Washington as a man of great character and concluded with David Ramsay's Washington--a man of great virtue and morality.

Melinda studied funeral sermons preached and published after Washington's death. These sermons focused predominantly on Washington as a Christian, as a believer in divine providence, as a "man of God," and as a man comparable to biblical heroes. In the end, Melinda concluded that the generation following his death clearly believed that Washington was a Christian.

We ended the class with a conversation about how to judge Washington's religion. I suggested that we judge him in the context of the 18th-century Anglican Church to which he belonged. Based on such an approach, Washington was clearly an Anglican Christian, but he probably should not be considered a particularly "good" Anglican based upon his scanty record of church attendance and his failure to partake of communion.

Rethinking the University

Mark Taylor, the chair of the Religion Department at Columbia University, has some harsh words for today's university. In his op-ed "End the University as We Know It," he writes:

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Taylor concludes that the university must change in six ways:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. He wants to design majors and programs around common problems and create interdisciplinary faculties made up of scholars working on solutions to these problems. (My concern is that such programs would mean that students do not get thorough training in a specific discipline. For example, historical thinking is vital and essential to a liberal arts education and offers a way of understanding the world that other disciplines do not offer).

2. Similarly, Taylor calls for the end of traditional departments and a restructuring of those department around common problems. He asks us, for example, to consider a Water Program. (I like this idea, but I have the same concerns as above).

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. Not every university has to be strong in every discipline or field.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. They are too arcane and no one wants to read them. When they are published as books they do not sell. (This makes sense to me--but only in certain fields. For example, in history the dissertation, though it may not be publishable, does reveal whether a graduate student is prepared to function as a member of the discipline. It shows that he or she can make an original argument based upon original research, no matter what they decide to do with their degree).

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Universities need to prepare students for careers outside the academy. (Yes!).

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Taylor favors seven year contracts. (I am with Taylor on this. Messiah College has a term-tenure policy that has been effective in weeding out some of the dead wood. Faculty are up for review every seven years. When I first came to Messiah I was skeptical about this system, but the longer I am here the more I see it as a means of preserving excellence among the faculty).

The Future of Liberalism

The New Republic web site is running a video of a colloquium on Alan Wolfe's book The Future of Liberalism. Wolfe starts out with some opening remarks, followed by reviews by E.J. Dionne and Ross Douthat. This is worth a look, especially Douthat's remarks about religion.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on-line that caught my eye this week:

Is TIAA-CREF safe?

The Jefferson papers are now on-line.

Jason Peters on nostalgia and "going home."

YouTubeEDU

Hannah Rosin reviews God is Back.

Matt Sutton hilariously concludes that God is not dead.

Historiann: Facebook Manners and You. (Hilarious!)

The Nation reviews Alan Wolfe's The Future of Liberalism.

Boston 1775: Who Coined the Phrase "No Taxation without Representation?"

Interview with Jody Bottum on the future of First Things after the death of Neuhaus.

Highbrow historical fiction.

Theodore Dreiser on individualism. (From 1932).

10 Top Obama Faith Moments.

It's That Time of Year

Spring is in the air here in south-central Pennsylvania. The weather man tells us that it may hit eighty degrees today. Later this morning I am heading off to the opening day festivities of the Mechanicsburg Girls Softball Association where my seven-year old daughter will play her first game of the season for the Fran Weimer Photography Wildcat-Superstars. Sometime after the game I need to mow my lawn for the first time this year so that it does not look like a jungle and I can get my eleven year old daughter to stop saying, "Dad, the grass is up to my ankles!" There is a pile of mulch in my driveway that needs to be spread and last night I climbed up a ladder and installed our removable screen windows. My wife has posted on the refrigerator door a list of more things for me to do . That list includes caulking the bathroom, cleaning the deck, and painting the swing-set.

Of course for those of you in the academic world, this time of year can be crazy. There are papers to grade, exams to write and grade, end of the year events to attend, and committee work which has to be completed before the end of the academic year. Now I don't like to complain, but this year it seems as if my Spring is unusually insane. Not only am I sitting on three very active committees at work, but I am swamped with outside writing projects. Between now and mid-May I need to do the following:

• Write a book review for the American Historical Review that is already late
• Write a book review for a popular religion and American history website
• Submit a few more posts in my role as guest contributor at the Front Porch Republic
• Write a short essay on the state of the field of colonial American history for the College Board
• Write three entries for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Early American Philosophy
• Review two manuscripts for academic journals
• Give public lectures at Colonial Williamsburg, the Westmoreland Historical Society (VA), Rutgers University, and the Hermitage (NJ).
• Conduct a one-day seminar on the Constitution for teachers in Brooklyn.
• Write a peer review for a colleague's tenure-file.
• Write a report for a history department where I recently served as an outside evaluator.

And when this is all done I hope to spend the summer finishing my manuscript: "Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Primer for Christians."

So, why am I sitting here blogging instead of getting this all done? Good question.

What does your spring look like? Feel free to use the comments section to whine, complain, and rant!

Abraham Lincoln and the Destruction of Place

I posted this tonight over at the Front Porch Republic.

In case you missed it, 2009 is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Earlier this week I participated in a roundtable discussion on Lincoln’s legacy sponsored by Messiah College and the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.. In the five minutes I had to speak I said a few words about Lincoln’s nationalism and the theology of his second inaugural address. But the more I think about it, the more it seems that Lincoln’s real legacy was the promotion of an American nationalism that has resulted in the slow erosion of local places and an agrarian way of life. Let me explain.

Abraham Lincoln had a clear vision for America that was embodied in the beliefs of the early nineteenth-century political party called the Whigs. Whigs advocated an economy that was national (at the expense of local economies), industrial (as opposed to a country of yeoman farmers), and sustained through the construction of turnpikes, canals, and railroads for the purposes of uniting people and providing them with opportunities to physically transcend their locales. Whigs believed that such an economy should be presided over by a strong federal government that would support industrialization (largely through tariffs to protect American industry against foreign competitors), help fund construction of the national infrastructure, and keep the sovereignty of the individual states in check. During his tenure in office, Lincoln would become a Commander in Chief, a statesman, even a public theologian, but his primary ideological commitments and sense of personal identity were tied to Whig economic and political thought.

Whigs were the party of progress. Lincoln and many of his fellow partisans understood slavery as anything that limited one’s opportunity to pursue the American dream to move forward with their lives. Liberty was closely linked to economic opportunity and improvement. The Whig party defined itself against the yeoman, decentralized, small-scale republican perspective of Thomas Jefferson (which still had much influence in the antebellum Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson) because such agrarianism kept white people imprisoned by place and black people imprisoned by chattel slavery. While most Whigs abhorred African slavery, they did so for the same reasons that they abhorred the effects of a local agrarian economy upon the ambitions and opportunities of young people.

Whigs also championed the cause of moral reform—anti-slavery advocates, temperance reformers, middle-class Victorians, and religious revivalists were all part of their ranks—in an attempt to bring a sense of Protestant civilization to America. Lincoln was skeptical about the Christian agenda of his party, but he nevertheless believed that the goal of any enlightened society was reform, progress, and the advancement of civilization. He could thus agree with the moral commitments of the party without embracing its Protestantism. If Christianity contributed to the improvement of society, then Lincoln was all for it. But he also believed that Americans, like all human beings, needed to break down the limits imposed by tradition and overcome the backwardness that prevented the pursuit of liberty and freedom. In this regard, one had to look no further than the way Lincoln attempted to transcend his humble agrarian roots in Kentucky through self-education, social mobility, and the rejection of his parent’s Calvinist faith.

Lincoln’s Whig beliefs about America informed the most important decisions and public proclamations of his presidency. His stated purpose for fighting the Civil War was to bring the rebellious states of the Confederacy back into the Union and force them to submit to the progressive direction in which the country was moving. For example, the Emancipation Proclamation, while certainly one of the most important humanitarian gestures of any American president, was primarily designed to address the political, military, and diplomatic barriers that stood in the way of the South’s defeat and the ultimate preservation of the Union. The Proclamation did not free all the slaves (slaves in those states that supported the Union were not set free) and did absolutely nothing to address the question of race once the slaves were emancipated.

Similarly, Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Address”—perhaps the greatest religious statement ever made by an American president—was also deeply rooted in Lincoln’s Whig nationalism. The war, according to Lincoln, was a divine punishment for which the entire nation, both the North and South, must suffer. In casting blame for the sin of slavery on both of the War’s participants and challenging both sides (but particularly Northern pundits) to have “malice toward none and charity towards all,” Lincoln avoided the rhetoric, popular among many of the nation’s leading theologians, that God was on the side of the victorious North. His message was seasoned with humility and avoided the temptation to exalt America as an exceptional or chosen nation. But in the process, he made it clear that the spiritual discipline of repentance would not be assigned to a specific region of the country, but rather to all of the United States.

One cannot deny that Abraham Lincoln was a great president, a prophet, if not a martyred redeemer, of American nationalism. The Northern victory was a triumph of Lincoln’s Whig vision for the country. Economically, the South would need to reject their “backward” agrarianism and rebuild their economy by mirroring Northern industrial capitalism. On the constitutional and political front, the war decided the question of states rights once and for all. Individual states had some degree of sovereignty, but they were not sovereign enough to secede from the Union. Morally, Lincoln ended slavery, allowing at least in principle, the opportunity for freemen and free-women to transcend the limits of bound labor and pursue some sense of the American Dream not previously afforded to them prior to the Thirteen Amendment. By rooting the Gettysburg Address, perhaps his most important oration, in the American founding (“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation…”), he gave his understanding of the Union historical justification. America was not only a “new nation,” but it was a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

How can any good American argue with Lincoln’s vision? His America was the America that my great-grandparents encountered as they passed through Ellis Island at the turn of the twentieth century. It was an America of social mobility and economic opportunity—the very ideals that allowed me to pursue a college education and to earn a spot in the middle-class. Lincoln’s Whig vision for America set the country on the road to becoming a world super-power and an international defender of liberal values. It could be argued that Lincoln is responsible for the coming of the “American Century,” one hundred years of American economic, military, political, and cultural power that led to victories in two World Wars, the defeat of communist tyranny, the rise of democracy around the world, the ubiquitous spread of global capitalism. Martin Luther King, in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” echoed Lincoln’s universalism in his assault on the local prejudices of the south’s segregated communities. Liberalism, in the case of American race relations, needed to trump the dark side of Jeffersonian parochialism.

But Lincoln’s understanding of the nation was also informed by the idea of a capitalist system that by the eve of the twenty-first century had grown out of control. Lincoln’s nationalism, articulated so beautifully in the “Gettysburg Address,” was rooted in the “proposition that all men are created equal,” but such a vision of liberty and equality relied upon a free market economy driven by the values of wealth, power, and self-interest. Industrial capitalism, at least the corporate post-bellum variety that would emerge with force in the generation following Lincoln’s death, not only exploited its workers and created class conflict, but also destroyed local communities and redefined the American dream in terms of consumerism and the material comforts that such consumer necessities afford.

Is it thus possible to offer a more radical critique of Lincoln, a critique that draws on ideals and values that were embedded in the American tradition, but became a minority position with the Northern victory in the Civil War and the consequential rise of modern life?

What was the cultural significance of the Northern Republican victory for the course that the United States would take in the second half of its history? Even as Lincoln called for both North and South to repent of their roles in this devastating conflict, his Whig vision had clearly won the day. Lincoln’s Enlightenment was liberal and individualistic. He believed that improvement required what historian Allen Guelzo has described as a “conquest of nature” that “alienated” people from local community, tradition, and the land, all in the name of progress. Whigs built road, bridges, canals, and railroads so that people could be mobile and free, not enslaved to particular places. The impact of this vision on the defeated South, as it began to be reconstructed in the image of the industrial North, was perhaps more devastating to their way of life than the war itself.

To Lincoln’s credit, he believed, as a good Whig, that the rampant acquisitiveness associated with Whig capitalism needed to be tempered and even controlled with an ample helping of virtue drawn from the teachings of contemporary moral philosophers. He also favored a capitalism driven by small businessmen, not international conglomerates. Never could he have imaged how his vision of a national economy driven by industry, free markets, and free labor has been corrupted by corporate capitalism. He would be shocked to find that most Americans have become deeply dependent on the corporate world to supply them with food and the stuff that is supposed to make them happy. And Lincoln, moreover, would be surprised to see how a system of superhighways, railways, and airways has made his United States the most mobile society in the world, although I am not sure he would have been disappointed by such a development.

The Northern victory, which Lincoln secured by resorting to total war against southern civilians, unleashed a devastating assault on a Jeffersonian version of agrarianism that connected happiness and human well being to real communities and real places. Liberty, as defined in terms of “improvement” and “mobility,” has resulted in a rootless cosmopolitanism that has produced millions of people who claim to “love humankind,” but who do not live in one place long enough to know, let alone “love,” their neighbor. Moreover, the national infrastructure built to connect people and unify the nation economically and culturally has come at the expense of the environment. The result of a “Whig” economy has produced an ever-expanding commercialism that tempts people with products to fulfill their every desire, all in the very American quest to “pursue happiness.” Such consumer capitalism makes it all the more difficult for Americans to practice virtues of self-restraint.

Of course, any such critique of the legacy of Lincoln’s presidency must be advanced with great care and caution. There is much of the Whig criticism of Jeffersonian traditionalism that is on the mark. Southern agrarianism and Jeffersonian localism has too often run rampant over individual rights rooted in the inherent dignity of the human beings created in the image of God. Sometimes local prejudices need to be countered with a dose of universalism. But if Lincoln is going to get the credit for the emergence of American nationalism, he must also shoulder the blame for at least some of the economic consequences that this Whiggism has had on American life. As noted Civil War historian Gabor Boritt once wrote, it is important for any student of American history to “come to terms” with Abraham Lincoln.

Melinda Maslin on Providential History

This semester I am teaching a course called "Religion and the American Founding." While the course is rooted in the discipline of history, it also includes a significant amount of theological discussion and debate. My students are history majors, but they are also Christians. In this class I have given them freedom to use their faith convictions to think about America's longstanding belief in God's providence.

Last week I asked my students if they might be willing to post some of their reflections about the seminar on this blog. The first such reflection comes from Melinda Maslin, a junior history major. Melinda reflects, using the Old Testament book of Job, on providence, Christianity, and the study of the past. I appreciate the way she, as a woman of Christian faith, displays a sense of humility about what we can really "know" about God.

Can we see God working through history to prove that America was founded as a Christian nation?

By Melinda Maslin

I am an aspiring history teacher and the question of providential history has important implications for my future studies. I have learned by looking at primary sources that it is difficult to judge things providentially. For example, during the Revolutionary War, each side believed they were in the right. Whether God providentially supported the colonies, I cannot say. The Bible says “the kings of the world belong to God” (Psalms 47:9). No kingdom will rise or fall without His knowledge. However, this does not necessarily mean God had a plan for America, though He very well might have.

Looking back through history and claiming God’s providence when we cannot know for sure what God was doing seems to be putting ourselves in the place of those who were divinely inspired to write the Scriptures. The Bible essentially tells the story of God’s providence in the world. But if there is any one thing we can take from the Bible, it is that God’s actions cannot be easily understood by human beings. I can see through people’s actions that God was active in their lives, but I do not know to what extent He planned the events in our history. It is easy to see from Biblical examples that bad things happen to good people. God allowed noble Job to lose everything, he gave the nation of Israel over to the Romans, and early Christians were killed in gladiator rings. The most extreme example was Jesus, who was crucified at the hands of his own people.

The “good” side does not always win, so to look at history and point to God as being on the winner’s side goes completely against Biblical teaching. If one looks closely at America’s history, they will see that good people, as well as corrupt people, helped to found America. God certainly does not condone the actions of slave masters, exploitive factory owners, those who used Manifest Destiny at the expense of Native Americans, and KKK members, to name a few. In the book of Job, God does not explain his actions to Job. Instead, he humbles Job by proclaiming His greatness and exclaiming the incomprehensibility of His actions for human beings. We can take a lot from this passage of Scripture. Though we are made in the image of God, we are imperfect beings with very limited knowledge. We cannot know or understand what God’s actions have been in the past, save for what we read in the Bible. Claiming to know what God is doing, or has done, seems to assume that we can easily understand God.

We can know and understand what we read in the Bible about history, but we cannot make conclusions about God’s actions in our contemporary world. The Old Testament is full of stories that show how hard God’s actions are to understand, even when explained. God is definitely a God of action and is present in history. But as finite, not all knowing human beings, we cannot claim to understand what God has been doing. One thing we can know for sure, God will have justice in the end and the Scriptures will be fulfilled. But it is dangerous to prophecy about things that may or may not be happening. In Job, God rebukes him for speaking “words without knowledge” after Job questions God’s actions. We must be careful to not do the same thing as Job and those who claimed to know why he was being punished.

Another Review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home

David Jaffee of the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture has written a generous review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home in the latest Pennsylvania Magazine of History and the Biography. I have long been a fan of Jaffee's work, especially his People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630-1860 (Cornell, 1999). Jaffee got me thinking about the social dimensions of the Enlightenment with his 1990 William and Mary Quarterly Essay: "The Village Enlightenment in New England, 1760-1820."

Jaffee writes:

John Fea has written an excellent cultural biography of Philip Vickers Fithian's relatively short but interesting life...Fea emphasizes how Fithian repeatedly balanced those centripetal forces of friends and family while attempting to achieve reason and universality. ...The Way of Improvement Leads Home successfully mixes the particular with the universal, just like the story of Philip Vickers Fithian.

2009 Pulitzer Prizes

The 2009 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced.

History: Annette Gordon-Reed, The Jefferson's of Monticello: An American Family

Biography: Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

General Non-Fiction: Douglas A. Blackman, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II

Civil War Night at Messiah College

Tonight was the annual Messiah College American Democracy Lecture. Our keynote speaker was Darrell Bigham, professor emeritus of history at Southern Indiana University in Evansville, IN and a member of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Bigham was not only here to deliver this year's lecture, but he was also awarded the Messiah College Alumnus of the Year Award. (Class of 1964). Bigham's lecture was titled "My Life with Lincoln: Memory, History, and Irony. The lecture explored his long career as a student of Abraham Lincoln and offered a Niehburian interpretation of Lincoln's life and presidency, with particular focus on the Second Inaugural.

This afternoon I served on a roundtable of Civil War historians that included Pulitzer-prize winning historian Mark Neely and Dickinson College's Civil War historian Matt Pinsker. The roundtable focused on Lincoln's legacy for American Democracy. I spoke briefly on the irony of an event like this at Messiah College. I found it ironic that Lincoln, an ardent nationalist who used "total war" to justify his quest to preserve the Union, would be featured in a lecture at a college that, because of its Anabaptist roots, does not fly a flag and embraces pacifism. I concluded with a discussion of Lincoln as an American theologian and compared his views of the war with many of the clergymen of his age. While 19th century clergymen wanted to condemn the south for slavery and relegate them to the pit of hell, Lincoln reminded us that the "Almighty has his own purposes."

Teaching the Civil War

The Washington Post is running a nice piece today on how the Civil War is being taught in the wake of Obama's election. The article includes the insights of Civil War historians Ed Ayers, James McPherson, and Randall Miller.

Here is an excerpt:

As students across the region begin springtime Civil War lessons, historians say the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president offers an unprecedented opportunity to break through stereotypes and view the era in broader ways.

"His election means we can be more honest. We can stop giving one-word answers," said Edward L. Ayers, a Civil War scholar who is president of the University of Richmond, in the city that became the capital of the Confederacy.

Obama's ascent, historians say, has opened the door to a national discussion about race. There is renewed relevance to issues surrounding the country's racial past, including the origins and aftermath of its deadliest conflict, said Randall Miller, professor of history at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on the web that caught my eye this week:

Anne Applebaum on the makeover of Monticello.

April 2009 Perspectives asks historians to reflect on the 2008 presidential election and has a series of articles on teaching the history capstone course.

Faculty cuts at Covenant College.

I am not a Yankees fan, but I do like Yogi Berra.

Interactive feature on anonymous sketches of New York City after Lincoln's assassination.

Washington Post coverage on Meacham's "Christian America" article: here and here and here.

Ross Douthat reviews Stephen Miller's Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South.

Historiann on Ed Linenthal and the Journal of American History.

Delwin Brown on the history of the religious left in America.

Thomas Frank on populism and tea parties.

Ben Carp's wrap up on last week's tea parties.

Sam Wineburg critiques the Teaching American History grant program.

The Way of Improvement Leads Home at Jesus Creed

Over at Jesus Creed, Scot McKnight has a nice review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home. He writes:

To prepare for his ordination examination, Philip Fithian (1746-1776) was asked to prepare a sermon on the "Nature of Regeneration" and an exegetical study "that shall prove by plain & full Arguments that the Torments of the Damned will be Eternal." Fithian, well-known to American historians but completely unknown to me until I read John Fea's meticuloiusly-researched and very readable new book (The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (Early American Studies) ), is a fascinating person.

Fea's biography opens up a world of reality about 18th Century Presbyterians -- their social classes, their social ambitions, their love lives and Fithian's was one of note, their reading habits, their theological world, and how they worked that faith out in the context of the American Revolution.Fea's theological perception impressed me in his penetrating summary of Fithian's conversion experience and Fithian's experience is prototypical for what is often called "God's caress," the Puritan religious experience. Fundamentally, conversion is coming to terms with a massive contrast: the utter holiness of God (and wrath) and one's personal depravity overcome graciously through the atoning death of Christ.

For those of us who like American history and, in particular, like to read about the theological or religious dimension of that history, Fea's virtual biography of the theological and intellectual development of Fithian is a powerful way to enter into that history. As a tutor to Robert Carter, in Virginia, Fithian both experienced and criticized the practice of slavery and came to terms with the Anglican faith.

Another major issue: Fea's contribution to Fithian studies to see him as part of the "rural enlightenment." This part of his book, showing as it does that Fithian brought into this thinking the Enlightenment hope for self-improvement through the formation of intellectual societies and into a cultured sensibility, reminded me of some great Romans who were intellectuals and farmers (Cicero). At the heart of Philip Fithian's struggle in life was coming to terms with his rural, Presbyterian roots and his Princeton, educated social and intellectual elite dreams.

And all of this in the spirit of revolution (against England)! Fea demonstrates the Fithian pulled together the New Moral philosophy, Presbyterian ethics, and (classical, humanistic) republican political thought. In short, he was all for freedom and he became a chaplain. His commitment to the American Revolution also ended his life. He died of dyssentery during the Battle of New York.

Liberty University

Yesterday I took a ride down Route 81 to central Virginia where I spoke at a conference on Christianity and American History at Liberty University. It was a beautiful weekend in the Virginia hills. I must admit that I was a bit sentimental as I passed through many of the towns in the Shenandoah Valley that Philip Vickers Fithian had visited in 1775 and 1776.

I realized that I was entering "ground zero" of the Christian Right as I drove down "Jerry Falwell Parkway," entered the Liberty campus, and passed the "LaHaye Ice Rink" (named after the co-author of the "Left Behind" novels, Tim LaHaye). And then, to top it all off, I left the hotel today with some fellow scholars and saw LaHaye and his wife Beverly.

This morning I gave a keynote/plenary address that linked some of the ideas I wrote about in The Way of Improvement Leads Home with my ongoing project on Presbyterians and the American Revolution. The title of my talk was "Towards a Social History of Evangelicals and the Enlightenment." I discussed the way that Presbyterians embraced the Enlightenment in years between 1740 and 1765, offered a narrative of post-Great Awakening Presbyterian history in the middle colonies, and concluded by returning to Fithian and the "rural Enlightenment."

This afternoon I participated in a plenary roundtable devoted to Thomas Kidd's The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. I was joined on this panel by Kidd and Tim Hall, the author of Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping of the Colonial American Religious World.

Both my plenary talk and the roundtable were held in the Liberty School of Law's new "Supreme Court" room. (Pictured above).

For all of the heat that Liberty and its founder Jerry Falwell have taken in the mainstream press, I was actually quite impressed with both the campus, the students I encountered, and the members of the history department. Thanks to Sam Smith and Doug Mann for inviting me to spend a few days on "Liberty Mountain."

The Brick Academy

I did a book talk and signing tonight at the Historical Society of the Somerset Hills in Basking Ridge, NJ. The event took place at the "Brick Academy," an early nineteenth-century (1809) building constructed to house a Presbyterian classical academy that served as a preparatory school for Princeton. The academy was affiliated with the historic Basking Ridge Presbyterian Church, a congregation which dates back to the early 18th century.

Philip Vickers Fithian, of course, attended a similar Presbyterian academy in the southern New Jersey town of Deerfield, so there were many connections between the local history of the Cohansey River region and that of Basking Ridge.

Thanks to Sonia and Marcella for hosting me this evening. It was a very enthusiastic crowd!

More on Tea Parties

Today was the big day. Hundreds of conservatives throughout the country participated in local tea parties to protest Barack Obama's economic policy. Over 2000 participated here in Harrisburg. I think some Messiah College students attended.

A few days ago I called your attention to Ben Carp's helpful post comparing these tea parties to the original tea party of December 15, 1773. Now, my friend and fellow historian Andrew Shankman has offered an alternative historical view. Shankman writes:

Tomorrow in what appears to be a scripted farce, some number of Americans will wave tea bags to denounce what they view as the outrageous, un-American taxes of the Obama Administration. The teabags are meant to invoke the Boston Tea Party of December 15, 1773, when, in current U.S. dollars, the Boston Sons of Liberty dumped between $1.5 and $2 million worth of tea into Boston Harbor.

Many of my fellow Obama supporters have denied that these modern tea-partiers can claim a proud American heritage since President Obama has lowered the taxes of the vast majority of U.S. citizens. This modern nonsense, they insist, can, therefore have nothing to do with that brave act of resistance, which provoked the Coercive Acts that led to the First Continental Congress and two years later to the Declaration of Independence.

Yet how wrong my fellow liberals are. In denouncing President Obama’s smug, elitist insistence that taxes be lowered, the modern tea-baggers follow precisely the example of the Boston Sons of Liberty. The Tea Act of 1773, conceived by the ministry of Frederick Lord North, gave the East India Tea Company monopoly privilege to sell tea to the American colonists. This privilege was intended to bail out the floundering company. In exchange for it, the company paid a light tax and also agreed to sell the tea to the colonists at prices lower than they had been before Parliament passed the Tea Act. The Tea Party occurred because the Massachusetts colonial governor, Thomas Hutchinson, refused to let company ships laden with tea that had arrived in the harbor leave without unloading. The tea sat for several days and the time when it would have to be unloaded or seized and sold at public auction neared. Leaders of the Boston Sons understood that if the historically cheap tea made it on shore, whether unloaded by the company or as a result of public seizure, the good citizens of Boston would happily purchase it. So into the harbor it had to go before a principled stand against no taxation without representation ended with Bostonians drinking very cheap (but taxed) tea.

So wave your teabags by all means. Denouncing taxes that have actually been lowered and resisting shrewd, well-designed policies is so American that it predates the United States of America.

Good job, Andy.

Inspiration

Trust me--you will want to see this.

Gettysburg

I took my Civil War class to Gettysburg today. It was cold and it was raining but we braved the elements like a Civil War soldier. Since many of my students had not been to the battlefield since elementary school, we decided to concentrate on an overview of the battle through the park Auto Tour (with a few detours here and there).

It was my first visit to the new Visitor's Center, which was quite impressive. (The old Visitor's Center has been demolished). The park service has moved the famed Cyclorama to the new Center and it now offers an introductory movie that places slavery at the center of Gettysburg's story. (I am guessing that this emphasis was in response to critics who complained that the park did not emphasize slavery enough in their interpretations of the battle). The movie was well done and I enjoyed the narration of Morgan Freeman and Sam Waterston's interpretation of the Gettysburg Address. I also need to go back soon to see the Gilder-Lehrman Civil War gallery. The bookstore is now much larger and my students managed to locate all of their textbooks on the shelves. One of my students invested in an original newspaper from the era and another one bought a biography of the controversial Dan Sickles.

We ate lunch, as we always do when I take students to Gettysburg, at the famous (or infamous) "General Pickett's Buffet." The chicken and macaroni and cheese was quite good this time, but I got way too filled up with pitchers of Coke and Mountain Dew! Our visit to the buffet always allows me to say a few words--usually in the parking lot-- about the relationship between capitalism and historic commemoration.

Thanks to my drivers--Dave, Dillon, and Andrew.

After spending a day like this on the field, returning to the sterile environment of the classroom is always a little depressing. Yet, we must press on. Our discussion of Reconstruction begins tomorrow..

A Sad Day For Baseball

Yesterday was a sad day for all baseball fans. Philadelphia is mourning the death of Hall of Fame broadcaster Harry Kalas. If you have never had the privilege of hearing Kalas call a Phillies game, you may have heard him as the voice of NFL Films. ESPN has a moving tribute. I was never a big fan of Kalas, largely because I am a Mets fan and Kalas was a Phillies homer. But I sure did respect him.

Mark "The Bird" Fidyrich also passed away yesterday. He really only had one great year--1976. I was just a kid at the time, but I will never forget watching him pitch on Monday night baseball. (This New York Times obituary reminds me that it was June 28th). I quickly became a part of his cult following and I still own his Topps rookie card. I used to love how he jumped over the foul lines on his post-inning run to the dugout.

RIP Harry and "The Bird." We will miss you.

Linker on Religion and Politics

The obituaries for the Christian Right continue to roll off the presses. This past weekend I devoted a post to Jon Meacham's "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." Today, I want to call your attention to Damon Linker's New Republic post, "All Good Things." I think he may be on the mark here.

Linker writes:

The ordinary resources of empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge give us no warrant for supposing that all good things are reconcilable with each other.--Isaiah Berlin

This quote -- a long-time favorite of mine -- came to mind when I heard that James Dobson had conceded the religious right's defeat in the culture war. Let's assume for a moment that the right has indeed been routed (which I doubt). Dobson and his admirers and allies no doubt view the event as a terrible thing -- as definitive proof that the United States is in irreversible moral and cultural decline. Yet there are powerful reasons why all American citizens, religious and secular, left and right, should greet it with cheer.

Berlin tells us why, by way of an assertion: Because good things -- and I'm taking it for granted that politics and religion are genuine human goods -- don't fit together. The world doesn't add up. Its parts clash. What is good for one sphere of life is not necessarily good for another. Goods can rarely be synthesized without losing something of value in each. Thinking and acting responsibly thus involves making trade-offs and choices among irreconcilable goods while giving up the hope of combining them in some unified, holistic vision that will inevitably do damage to its constituent parts. This was Berlin's profoundly anti-utopian, deeply pluralistic vision of human life.

We Shall Remain

Tonight PBS begins running "We Shall Remain," a five part series that tells the story of American history from the perspective of Native Americans. Here is a snippet of a review (preview?) by Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post.

"We Shall Remain" is unapologetically committed to the now suspect idea of Great Man history, the chronicle of charismatic leaders, epic battles and dramatic, decisive events indelibly marked on the calendar and mythologized for centuries after.

It may be old-fashioned, but it radically shifts the sense of agency and psychological complexity from familiar American icons to Native Americans who once played only supporting roles. The effect is rather like the psychological shock one gets when the map of the world is turned upside down. It's still a map and still reliable in every way. It's just disorienting.

I do not know which scholars will serve as the so-called "talking heads" for this documentary, but I would be surprised if Dan Richter is not one of them. In fact, the entire project sounds a lot like his book, Facing East From Indian Country.

Defending Meacham

History News Network is running a piece entitled "Predicting the End of Faith in America." The article is written by Charles Mathewes (BTW--I love his monograph, A Theology of Public Life) and Christopher McKnight Nichols. They are editors of a great new book: Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America’s Imminent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day (Oxford University Press). Here is the Oxford's description:

Prophesies of Godlessness explores the expectation of moral and religious change that has been voiced in America from the time of the Puritans to today. Predictions of "godlessness" in society -- sometimes by those favoring the foreseen future, sometimes by those fearing it -- have a history as old as America. There have been and continue to be patterns -- what we call "scripts" -- to these prophesies.These scripts have taken a sinuous and at times subterranean route, but they consistently inform the way we think about our future. This book excavates the history of these prophesies, attending in each chapter to a particular era, focal individual, community of thought, and conception of secularization. From the role of prophesies in Thomas Jefferson's thought, to the Civil War, progressivism, the Scopes Trial, the Cold War and beyond, Prophesies of Godlessness argues that expectations about America's future character and piety are not an accidental feature of American thought, but have been, and continue to be, essential to the meaning of the nation itself.

McKnight and Mathewes's HNN piece place Jon Meacham's Newsweek article, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America" (see my remarks on it here) in the larger context of the subject of their book. They write:

In his theatricalized hand-wringing about the future of Christianity (always a topic that sells magazines, particularly important in this down market), Meacham passes over the plentiful evidence of the persistent vitality of American religiosity, and ignores the way that not just Christianity but Protestantism shapes every American religion--so that, for example, Muslim and Buddhist religious organizations in America must still conform, even legally, to the institutional structures of those most Protestant of social realities, the local "church" and the national "denomination."

Their statements about Meacham's motives for writing the essay border on uncharitableness (I imagine that they too wrote their essay to sell more books "in this down market"--we are all, in some ways, guilty of this) and I do think they are probably right about the "Protestant social realities" to which non-Christians must conform.

But more importantly, I do not think Mathewes and McKnight do justice to Meacham's argument. Granted, Meacham may be predicting "godlessness" in America, but he is responding to legitimate statistics on Christianity's decline. This makes him quite different from the historic cases Mathewes and McKnight include in their book. Moreover, Meacham connects the decline of Christianity in America to the fall of the Christian Right, one particular form of Christianity. As Meacham wrote in a recent follow up piece:

Some have read the piece (or, I suspect, the cover line) as an attack on Christianity, which it is not and which would, in any case, be an act of self-loathing, since I am a Christian, albeit a poor one. Note that we did not say we were discussing the decline and fall of Christianity, or even the decline and fall of Christianity in America. But "Christian America" is something else again. It is the vision of a nation whose public life is governed by explicitly articulated and adopted Christian principles in the hope, I think, that God will bless and protect the country and its people in the spirit of II Chron. 7:14. To see how well that is going from the perspective of the religious right, take a look at the news from Iowa and Vermont. I do not think, as some evangelicals do, that we are entering a "post-Christian" phase, but I do believe we are growing rather more secular than I would have anticipated even five years ago. The cumulative effect of a somewhat declining Christian population and a weakening Christian force in partisan politics is likely, I think, to lead to a more secular politics. Not wholly secular, to be sure, but more secular than we have been accustomed to in our Jesus-Winthrop-Reagan "city on a hill."

It seems a bit of a stretch to connect Meacham's Newsweek essay with the apocalyptic and prophetic movements--the "prophecies of Godliness"--that have occurred throughout the course of American history.

In other words, Meacham's article is not a jeremiad. And he is no prophet.

Easter Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on the web that caught my eye this week:

The Library of Congress has a YouTube channel.

Kevin Mattson on Jimmy Carter's "Malaise Speech."

Ross Douthat on Easter and Good Friday.

African Pentecostal missionaries in America.

New York Times review of John Richard Neuhaus's American Babylon.

Elements of Style is 50 years old.

Do you review academic monographs? If so, you should read this.

Walter Isaacson reviews Richard Beeman's Plain, Honest, Men.

The other preacher in Lynchburg.

The New Republic on baseball.

Polite interest does not always translate into a book contract. Rachel Toor explains.

Controversy at Vanderbilt over Doris Kearns Goodwin as a commencement speaker. (HT).

Jared Farmer wins Parkman Prize for On Zion's Mount. (Also, three cheers for my alma mater: the History Department at SUNY-Stony Brook).

The End of Christian America?

The web is abuzz with discussion about Jon Meacham's recent Newsweek cover story, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." First, Meacham affirms, based upon recent surveys, that the number of self-professed Christians in America is declining. Second, he argues that the Christian Right in America has failed.

I agree with Meacham. Neither of these developments should cause Christians to be alarmed.
In a follow-up piece, Meacham distinguishes between "Christianity" and "Christian America":

Note that we did not say we were discussing the decline and fall of Christianity, or even the decline and fall of Christianity in America. But "Christian America" is something else again. It is the vision of a nation whose public life is governed by explicitly articulated and adopted Christian principles in the hope, I think, that God will bless and protect the country and its people in the spirit of II Chron. 7:14. To see how well that is going from the perspective of the religious right, take a look at the news from Iowa and Vermont. I do not think, as some evangelicals do, that we are entering a "post-Christian" phase, but I do believe we are growing rather more secular than I would have anticipated even five years ago. The cumulative effect of a somewhat declining Christian population and a weakening Christian force in partisan politics is likely, I think, to lead to a more secular politics. Not wholly secular, to be sure, but more secular than we have been accustomed to in our Jesus-Winthrop-Reagan "city on a hill."

Meacham's article celebrates the separation of church and state as an alternative to this kind of "Christian America" thinking. As a Christian himself, he is concerned about what happens to his faith when it is wed too strongly to the political sphere. The separation of church and state, of course, is a longstanding tradition in American life, dating back to Roger Williams and the Baptists and James Madison and the United States Constitution. It is the theme of two good recent books on religion and the founding era: Meacham's American Gospel and Steve Waldman's Founding Faith.

Meacham is right to assert that Christianity thrives under a polity defined by religious liberty. It is strongest, and has always been strongest, when it functions outside the corridors of political power. In other words, the "Decline and Fall of Christian America" may not be a bad thing for the Church.

The responses to Meacham have been pouring in:

Albert Mohler, a conservative evangelical who is featured in the article, seems to generally agree that the era of the Christian Right is over. What concerns him is how the decline of America's so-called Christian culture will impact evangelism:

...my greater concern is not with political influence and what secularization means for the political sphere, but with what secularization means for the souls of men and women who are now considerably more distant from Christianity -- and perhaps even with any contact with Christianity -- than ever before. My main concern is evangelism, not cultural influence.

I appreciate Mohler's concern here. Evangelism is one of the defining characteristics of the evangelical movement. But does the Gospel spread more effectively in a Christian culture? There are all kinds of examples in human history when Christianity has thrived in a secular or non-Christian culture--a culture in which people were "distant from Christianity." Think about the success of Christianity as it spread throughout Rome--a society that one would be hard pressed to call "Christian" (at least prior to the fourth century).

If American culture is indeed becoming "post-Christian," or even "secular," then the Christian message will become countercultural. Isn't this what Christians should want? The City of God functions in the world, but it is not "of" the world. The Church might be smaller under such a scenario, but it would certainly be stronger--made up of true believers willing to follow what Jesus called the "narrow" road. Megachurches may not be quite as filled with people on Sunday mornings when the demands of being Christian in the world become increasingly harder and more costly.

As E.J. Dionne put it in his column in today's Washington Post: "...something is changing, and that change will strengthen rather than weaken the Christian church over the long run."

Despite these developments, America will remain a culturally "Christian" nation for some time. Pentecostalism and Catholicism, for example, are on the rise even as the political power of the Christian Right declines. And if we are indeed a post-Christian nation, believers should celebrate the fact that they will continue to have religious freedom under the First Amendment.

I am also not entirely convinced that we have seen the end of the Christian Right. As long as there is abortion, gay-marriage, and embryonic stem-cell research the Christian Right will continue to exist. But there is a difference between a Christian politician who promotes good laws rooted in Christian justice and a Christian politician who is out to build a country that is uniquely "Christian" based upon some sketchy or nostalgic vision of American history.

On one level, Christians should be concerned about the "Decline and Fall of Christian America." Christians always want people to embrace the Gospel and should lament the fact that fewer people identify themselves with Christian faith. Perhaps this "decline and fall" might prompt Christians to put more effort into doing the work of the Church--fulfilling the Great Commission and loving God and neighbor. On the other hand, Christians should not be scared by these demographic developments. In fact, they just might do the Church some good.

Paving Over History at the Brooklyn Bridge

The noted historian David McCullough has a video op-ed at the New York Times defending the Brooklyn Bridge against the commercial interests trying to construct an eighteen-story building right next to the bridge. McCullough asks: How did such a building project get this far?

This is also the site where George Washington made his famous retreat in the fog during the Battle of Brooklyn in August 1776. Philip Vickers Fithian was part of that retreat. As he tells the story in his diary, he and his friend Andrew Hunter Jr. were sleeping in a boarding house nearby when the landlady announced that she was taking their beds because she was joining the retreat. Philip thought the lady was crazy--it was inconceivable that the great Washington would retreat. He gave her the bed and went back to sleep on the floor. When he woke up early the next morning the successful retreat was nearly finished. Fithian jumped on one of the last boats and made it safely across the East River. In other words, Fithian slept through the entire retreat and almost did not make it out alive. (Read about it all in The Way of Improvement Leads Home).

Here is a news story on McCullough's fight to stop this new building project. David, what can we do to help?

NCAA Tournament Moves to 4096 Teams

Did you hear about this? (HT: Scot McKnight)

Tea Parties

In case you have not been following the news, conservatives in several cities and communities are hosting "Tea Parties" to protest Obama's budget and stimulus package. On April 15, a group called "Tax Day Tea Party" is calling for all angry Americans to take to the streets in a national "Tea Party."

The organizers of these "Tea Parties" are, of course, making appeals to the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773. But are they using this historic event correctly? The best thing I have read on this issue so far is Benjamin Carp's post over at Public Occurrences 2.0. Carp argues that there are few similarities between the Boston Tea Party and these modern day "Tea Parties."

The Annual Neighborhood Easter Egg Hunt

Here is a question I received from Empedocles, one of the readers over at The Front Porch Republic.

When people in our mobile, placeless society, more to a new location, they generally look for a place to live that is safe, has good schools, has conveniences of various services, and is aesthetically

pleasing. I was wondering what you think “home” possesses in addition to these features?

I am not much of expert on this, but here was my attempt at an answer:

Empodocles: You ask about what might be the characteristics that people look for when they search for a new home. Great question. It seems to me that most of us look for the very things you mention when we think of “home”–good schools, close to shopping, a nice neighborhood, and safeness. These are all reasonable things to want in a home. But I wonder, when does the place where one lives truly become “home?” Is “home” really possible in such a geographically mobile society, or are we all destined for some degree of homelessness? It seems to me that finding a “home” requires an investment in the people of a particular community. It requires showing love to neighbors, civic engagement, even loyalty. It requires not only showing up at the high school girls basketball games, school plays, PTA gatherings, community picnics and zoning board meetings, but really wanting to be there. In other words, having a home takes time…and work. It is something that might even take generations to cultivate. I have lived in the same place for seven years and I am not there yet, but I like to think I am getting close.

Today I think my family took a step closer to finding a home. This morning we had our annual back yard Easter egg hunt. Every year my wife invites our neighbors and their children over to our house to hunt for plastic eggs filled with Easter candy. Even older neighbors whose children who have grown and moved away arrive early and help me hide the eggs. It is not much, and only lasts for about forty-five minutes, but I have to believe it is a means of building social capital and working toward some sense of "home."

Speaking Publicly: Read or Talk?

Mark Bauerlein has a great post at Brainstorm on conference presentations. He writes:

...But it is baffling to see experienced professors on conference panels running several minutes over. Why don’t they just identify a point or issue or distinction and sit down? They have 15 minutes at most, and 12 works better. That pretty much allows each panelist only enough room to pose a question or take a position on something. Not much nuance, not much subtlety, only one or two finer assertions.

And why fill that brief opening by actually reading words off a page? How refreshing it is to hear an academic speak in the conversational mode, not the lectern mode. This should be an occasion for exchange, debate, give-and-take, not one person’s display. A conference presentation with eyes downward, moving at the pace of the printed word, loses auditors.

One might draw a lesson in forensics: if you can’t expound your point by word of mouth, if you have to read it in paragraph form, then you have overwrought it. Bring it down. Don’t try to articulate all you know. Give the audience one thing to digest. Simplify, simplify.

Bauerlein raises the great debate over whether or not to read a paper or speak in "conversational mode." Frankly, I feel more comfortable reading a paper. It is less work. All you need to do is write the paper (I try to write the paper in a more conversational style) and read it aloud a few times in preparation for the formal presentation at the conference. I think this approach is fine at an academic conference where it is important to offer a nuanced argument, as long as you stay within time parameters.

But while reading a paper may be easier and more comfortable, it is not the most effective way of speaking in real life--outside the academic conference. I have found that the only people who tolerate the reading of a paper are fellow academics. My students, for example, cannot understand why a visiting scholar who comes to campus for an address reads from a text. A few years ago one student remarked about a visiting lecturer: "He seemed so smart and knowledgeable during the Q&A when he was talking off the top of his head, I wish he would have done the same thing in actual presentation."

This, of course, reminds me of my good friend Philip Vickers Fithian. While traveling through the Shendandoah Valley in 1775 he learned quickly that the Scots-Irish Presbyterians of the region did not like sermons to be read. In response to this revelation, Philip described the way his hearers normally responded to this type of formal presentation:

...Backs will be up at once; their attention all gone; their Noses will grow Red as their Wigs (sic)--And let me whisper this, you may bet your dinner where you breakfasted.

Places

Readers: Don't forget to send in your pictures for our new feature, "places." Read about it here.

Scot McKnight at Messiah College

As some of you know, I teach in Messiah College's first-year "CORE" class, "Created and Called for Community." It is an interdisciplinary course that introduces our students to the mission of the college. We read the Bible, Alice Walker, Tolkien, Wang Anyi, Martin Luther King, Robert Putnam, Jerry Sittser, Henry Nouwen, John Paul II, Ernest Boyer, Albert Schweitzer, Gregory Wolfe, and Desmond Tutu, to name a few of the texts. (We need more classic history texts in this course!). The class is broken up into three units: Creation, Community, and Vocation.

At today's CORE convocation our speaker was Scot McKnight, the Karl A. Olsson Professor of Religious Studies at North Park University in Chicago. McKnight is a well-known New Testament scholar who also writes popular books about Christian spirituality. But he is perhaps best known for his award-winning blog, "Jesus Creed." Scot challenged our students to live lives that "love God" and "love others" and had some hilarious and moving stories from his travels and experiences as a teacher. He also had lunch with CORE faculty. We had a great discussion about various trends in Christian theology.

It was great to have Scot--a former teacher of mine--with us today.

Front Porch Republic

The powers-that-be over at the Front Porch Republic have invited me to join them for a month as a guest blogger. They are apparently interested in some of my musings here about place and community, particularly as they relate to The Way of Improvement Leads Home. I have accepted their invitation and sent off my first post earlier this evening. (It is not posted yet at FPR, so stay tuned).

Here is the post I sent them. It should be familiar to those of you have been regular readers of this blog or who have read my book.

First, let me extend my greetings to the readers of the Front Porch Republic. I have been following conversations here at FPR since it launched earlier this year and find myself resonating with its mission. So needless to say I was quite flattered when Jeremy Beer asked me to take a turn as a guest blogger.

I am guessing that part of the reason I was asked to join this impressive group of writers was because my book, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), touches on themes near and dear to the heart of this on-line community. On one level, The Way of Improvement Leads Home is a traditional academic monograph. It is being reviewed in all of the important scholarly journals and, as a contribution to eighteenth-century historiography, it offers a new way of thinking about the Enlightenment in America and its relationship to Christianity, the Revolution, and everyday life. I argue against the predominant notion in my field that “rural Enlightenment” is an oxymoron. By examining the life of an ordinary eighteenth-century farmer—the prolific New Jersey diarist Philip Vickers Fithian—I show how ideas permeated the hinterlands and influenced grain-growers in remote locales.

On another level, I have been pleasantly surprised that The Way of Improvement Leads Home is finding a readership among those interested in questions related to place and community. This book tells the story of a young man of great ambition who embraced the new opportunities that Enlightenment progress and self-improvement had to offer. Fithian drank deeply from the well of modernity, but his “way of improvement” was by no means a smooth one. Modern opportunity often conflicted with his strong and abiding passion for “home,” a term I use broadly in the title to describe his longings for his family farm on the banks of New Jersey’s Cohansey River, his desire for friendship with his future wife, his love with those he called “friends and relations,” and his deep sense of evangelical Calvinist piety.

In the messiness of everyday life the Enlightenment ideal was often impractical. It demanded a style of living that only a handful of elite intellectuals could attain. Max Hilbert Boehm, writing in 1932, reminded us that cosmopolitanism has always existed in “compromise with nationalism, race consciousness, professional interests, caste feeling, family pride, and even egotism. However, it is precisely these tensions that make Philip’s story so interesting. His attempt at easing them is the focus of my book, the very essence of what I have described as Fithian’s “rural Enlightenment.”

My study of this ordinary farmer argues that a modern life could be lived locally—even in rural and remote places where the dominant social institutions were churches, where modern and naturalistic explanations of the world often merged with theological convictions held by people of faith, where the lines between ambitious self-improvement and Christian vocation might sometimes be blurred, and where circles of friends improved themselves through conversation amid the regular demands of the agricultural calendar.

I thus hope that the moral argument of this book might shine through some of my more academic historiographical musings. Philip Vickers Fithian reminds us that cosmopolitanism, that “great” product of modernity, has always existed in compromise with local attachments. Fithian was a member of the republic of letters and a citizen of a particular place. If true republicans were also true world citizens, then Fithian’s cosmopolitan spirit was nurtured within the context of his Cohansey River home, complete with the social networks of friends, relatives, and loves that came with it.

I hope this was an appropriate way to begin my one-month stint at the Front Porch Republic. In a world of cosmopolitan ambitions that lead to social mobility, geographical mobility, and a general sense of placelessness, my hope and prayer is that sometimes the “way of improvement” might lead us “home.”

More on the Greenwich Tea Burning

The April 2009 edition of the Readex Report is running a short piece I wrote on my use of Readex's "America' Historical Newspapers" in research on the Greenwich Tea Burning. We at Messiah College are privileged to have several Readex databases, including Early American Imprints Series 1 & 2 (Shaw-Shoemaker) and Early American Newspapers. (Thanks Beth Mark!). I recently visited a major northeastern research university and learned that they subscribed to none of these databases!

I first wrote about the tea burning in The Way of Improvement Leads Home, but have since explored the way the event was memorialized in the southern New Jersey town in which it occurred. This piece offers some of my initial thoughts on the subject.

I should add that the "About the Author" section mentions I am completing a book entitled "The Greenwich Tea Burning: History and Memory in a New Jersey Town." This is technically correct. I have seven of nine chapters of this book written, but have put it on hold temporarily while I finish a book manuscript, due at Westminster/John Knox Press in January, on the idea of "Christian America." (I should also add that I am still looking for a publisher for the Greenwich Tea Burning book. Any takers out there?).

Society of the Cincinnati

I spent the evening doing a book talk and signing at the national headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati in Washington D.C. The Society is housed in the Anderson House, a stately Gilded Age mansion on Massachusetts Avenue. (I think I spoke in the room pictured on the left--it looks different in the daylight). Founded in 1783, the Society is the oldest patriotic society in the United States. It also has a small research library that offers short term fellowships to researchers.

During my visit I was excited to learn that the library holds the Revolutionary-War diary of Ebenezer Elmer, a friend of Philip Vickers Fithian and one of the famed "Greenwich Tea Burners." Elmer was apparently one of the early members of the Society of Cincinnati.

Thanks to Ellen Clark, the Society librarian, for her gracious hospitality during my brief visit. I have made some friends here and I hope to return soon.

Early American Notes

• The April 2009 edition of Common-Place is here. It is a special issue entitled "Who Reads an Early American Book?" Authors include Joanna Brooks, Michael Winship, and Bryan Waterman.

• The program for the 15th Annual Omohundro Institute Conference can be found here. The location is Salt Lake City.
  

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on-line that caught my eye this week:

Eduardo Porter wonders about progress.

Whose father was he? Part one. Part Two. Part Three.

Sports and spirituality at Neumann College.

Audio Lecture: Charles Mathewes, "American Faith: Going Strong, Going Down, or Going to the Mall?"

Diogenes on our current crisis.

HNN Open Forum on John Hope Franklin.

Videos of OAH sessions.

Historiann on a new history of college fraternity life.

American History is alive and well.

Nicholas Kristof on experts.

Conservatives are embracing Carter's malaise speech.

The vanishing shopping mall.

Peter Lawler: Nations, Liberalism, and Science.

Jason Zengerle on the decline of high school hoops in New York City.

National History Day

I spent the day volunteering at the South Central Pennsylvania regional competition of the National History Day. Messiah College has been hosting this event for the last several years.

I was a judge for the "Middle School Papers" section, which means I had to read 11 papers related to the theme of "The Individual in History" and choose two winners who will advance to the PA state finals next month. The winners were a paper on Rosa Parks and a paper on Rachel Carson.

After judging I helped to hold down the fort in the judges room--collecting scores from judges and helping to prepare for the awards ceremony. Several of my students participated in the awards ceremony by announcing the winners. Thanks to Jason Stussy, Courtney Weller, and Marty Zimmerman for doing this. Special thanks to Jen Cline, our student volunteer in the judges headquarters. We couldn't have done it without her servant's heart and good cheer.

The most credit belongs to Jim LaGrand, my colleague in the history department, and Gina Hale, the department's administrative assistant. They did all the preliminary work necessary to make this day happen.