The Way of Improvement Leads Home: American History, Religion, Politics, and Academic life.

Have you ever heard someone say that they were "spiritual," but not "religious?" Our guest in this episode, Stephen Prothero, offers a "pre-history" of this idea. According to Prothero, the move from traditional/institutional/confessional "religion" to seeker "spirituality" runs through the Eugene Exman, the religion editor at Harper Brothers from 1928-1965. Throughout his long career, Exman publi...

If you want to learn more about the evangelical fascination with the rapture, Israel, the antichrist, and the prophetic books of the Bible you will enjoy this episode. Our guest is Daniel Hummel, author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation. We talk with Dan about John Nelson Darby, Plymouth Brethren, Dwight L. Moody, Dallas Theolo...

The National Basketball Association is a multi-billion-dollar industry driven by Black athletes with global influence. But as our guest Theresa Runstedtler argues, the success of today's NBA players rests on the labor activism of 1970s NBA stars who fought with owners for economic control over their labor and a Black style of hoops born in the playgrounds of urban America. Runstedtler is the autho...

In this episode we talk with historian and biographer Nancy Koester about her new book on nineteenth-century abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth. Our discussion focuses on Truth's lifelong pursuit of a just society, a deeper knowledge of God, and a sense of community for her and her family. Koester's book is titled We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth. Learn...

In this episode we explore the life, ideas, and writings of one of the 20th-century most influential American historians--C. Vann Woodward, author of The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Our guest is James Cobb, author if C. Vann Woodward: America's Historian. In our conversation we discuss Woodward's liberalism and how he balanced historical writing with social activism over a career that spanned near...

The American revolution happened in the midst of a smallpox epidemic. In one of the timeliest history books of the publishing season, historian Andrew Wehrman visits the podcast to talk about what the patriots of the American Revolution and the founding fathers thought about public health. His book Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution is a must read for anyone...

In this episode we chat with historian Jonathan Cohen about his edited collection Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen and the current state of "Springsteen Studies." Is there any connection between Cohen's current book, For a Dollar and A Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America, and his work on Springsteen? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

According to historian Kathryn Gin Lum, Americans have long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term "heathen" fell out of common use by the early 1900s, but the ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear. Americans still treat large swaths of the world as 'other' due to their assumed need for conversi...

Are you an educator? An administrator? A school board member? Does your life intersect in some way with a public school? If so, this episode is for you. We talk about the religion and transatlantic roots of American public education with historian David Komline, author of The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education. Learn more about your ad choice...

Does the American Left have religion problem? What can progressives learn from people like Dorothy Day, Ignazio Silone, Henry Wallace, Staughton Lynd, and Cornell West? Many of these thinkers and activists offered a powerful vision for a moral and just society--challenging conservatives, liberals, and Marxists to think differently about the world. In this episode we talk to Vaneesa Cook, author of...

Our guest on this episode, public historian Alena Pirok, explains how John D. Rockefeller's vision of Colonial Williamsburg eventually gave way to a vision of the site championed by an early 20th century clergyman who saw ghosts. Join us for a conversion on Pirok's new book, The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg: Ghosts and Interpreting the Recreated Past.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...

Have you visited the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.? How about the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina? In this episode, historian Devin Manzullo-Thomas, author of Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Commemoration and Religion's Presence of the Past, helps us make sense of these sites of evangelical heritage.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, our 100th, host John Fea delivers his 2022 Conference on Faith and History presidential address. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you do genealogical research? In this episode, historian Francesca Morgan talks about her new book A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History. She discusses Americans' fascination with tracking family lineage through three centuries and how the practice has intersected with race, class, religion, and commercialism.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...

What do Sammy Davis Jr., Muhammad Ali, Clare Booth Luce, Whitaker Chambers, and Charles Colson all have in common? They all had very public religious conversions. In this episode, historian Rebecca Davis joins us to talk about her new book Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed Politics.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Using America's obsession with Washington's hair as his window, historian Keith Beutler examines how "physicality," or the use of the material objects, was the most important way early Americans (1790-1840)--museum founders, African Amerians, evangelicals, and school teachers-- remembered the nation's founding. Beutler is the author of George Washington's Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the F...

In this episode we talk with historian Bruce Berglund about Vladmir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Our conversation focuses on Putin's use of history to justify the invasion, the insufficiency of the Russian military, the international ban on Russian athletics, and the role that race has played in the invasion.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

American universities entered the 1960s with the hope of bringing a high-quality system of universal higher education to all comers. But by the early 1970s hope turned to despair as universities gave way to neoliberalism, corporatism, and a powerful conservative backlash. In this episode we talk with historian Ellen Schrecker about her new book The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s....

Our guest in this episode is Gettysburg College historian Jill Ogline Titus. Her new book, Gettysburg 1963, tells the story of the centennial celebration of the Civil War in the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. Through an examination of the experiences of political leaders, civil rights activists, preservation-minded Civil War enthusiasts, and residents, Titus shows how this town continues to serv...

Less than a year after the American Revolution, a group of North Carolina farmers hatched a plot to assassinate the colony's leading patriots, including the governor. In this episode, Boston University historian Brendan McConville talks about the Gourd Patch Conspiracy. The catalysts of this movement were "The Brethren," a group of Protestants who were angry about Catholic and deists influences in...

Our guest in this episode is historian Robert Tracy McKenzie, author of We the Fallen the People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy. In the spirit of the 20th-century theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, McKenzie places the Christian doctrine of original sin at the center of early American political history. He believes that we must come to grips with the fact that America has...

Did Marcus Whitman "save" Oregon? In this episode we talk with Sarah Koenig, author ofProvidence and the Invention of American History. She tells the story of a Protestant missionary to the Pacific Northwest and how his story provides a window into debates over the meaning of the past in both the 19th-century and today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Charles Lindbergh was a celebrated aviator, the father of the baby abducted in the "crime of the century," a Nazi sympathizer, and a believer in eugenics. He also carried a small New Testament with him as he entered the South Pacific theatre of World War II and offered a spiritual critique of technological progress. Our guest in this episode is Christopher Gehrz, author of Charles Lindbergh: A Rel...

John C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. In this episode we talk with Robert Elder, author of Calhoun: American Heretic. Elder shows that Calhoun's story is crucial for understanding the political climate in which we find ourselves today. If we excise him from the mainstream of American history, he argues, we are left with a distorted underst...

In this episode we talk with Nathan McAlister, Humanities Program Manager at the Kansas State Department of Education in Topeka. When it comes to history education, Kansas is doing it the right way. Join us for a wide-ranging discussion on civics, historical thinking, social studies standards, and the controversial debates over race in the American history classroom. Learn more about your ad choic...