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Randall Stephens I've only been in the UK once during Guy Fawkes Day, or Bonfire Night .  I saw plenty of fireworks and bonfires lighting up night skies and scratched my head in wonder about the whole thing. What an interesting, historically odd celebration. The BBC has this short summary and a video interview (see below) about the fiery fest: Guy Fawkes night is the annual commemoration of the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot - when 14 individuals planned to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. The BBC's Carol Kirkwood asked bonfire night organiser Graham Callister why we celebrate Guy Fawkes night when it was in fact a plot to maim and kill. See also this entertaining slide show at ABC News . Is the celebration in danger of being extinguished?  The worry this year is that the fest has lost its, um, spark.  Halloween may be eclipsing Guy Fawkes Day .  Some down under are saying its time to let go on an "old English gru...

Conducted by Randall Stephens W. Jason Wallace is a professor of history at Samford University . He is the author of Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (Notre Dame University Press, 2010). I recently caught up with Jason to ask him some questions about his work on Christianity in pre-Civil War America and to discuss some of the Wall Street, 1847. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. connections between religion, politics, and historical consciousness in the nineteenth century U.S. Randall Stephens: What makes the era between 1835 and 1860 such a critical period in American religious history? W. Jason Wallace: Between 1835 and 1860 most aspects of American social, political, and economic life reached something of a ferment.  Religion, and especially Christianity, underwent substantial trials as well.  Religious disestablishment was then, and still is, a young phenomenon in the scope of world history.  Unlike European churches, A...