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Randall Stephens The latest issue of HS is now up on the Project Muse site .  It is a longer issue than normal, featuring two forums, five essays, and four interviews.  Readers might be especially interested in our forum on Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013), one of the most important history books of the last year.  As Don Yerxa puts it in the intro to the forum : "It has been widely heralded as an extraordinary scholarly achievement. Parker makes the case for a link between climate change and the worldwide catastrophe that occurred 350 years ago. We asked Parker to begin our forum with an account on the book’s long gestation. Then three prominent scholars, Kenneth Pomeranz, J.R. McNeill, and Jack Goldstone, comment on Global Crisis, followed by Parker’s rejoinder." This issue, as many of our readers know, also marks an important transition for HS.  We are suspending publicat...

Randall Stephens In 2013 the University of North Carolina Press published David T. Gleeson's The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America .  It is  a sprawling study that is already receiving high praise from historians and journalists.  In the Boston Globe Michael Kenney writes "As his analysis unfolds, there is much that will surprise, perhaps even unsettle, Boston readers familiar with the abolitionists, the Massachusetts 54th, and the summertime encampments of reenactors. Gleeson looks at the role of Irish-Americans in the Southern debate over slavery, in the Confederate Army, on the homefront, and in the aftermath of the defeat." Over at the Irish Times Myles Dungan seems to agree. "Gleeson goes well beyond the merely anecdotal," says Dungan.   Gleeson conveys "a sense of what it was to be an Irish immigrant in the southern states that formed the Confederacy between 1861 and 1865." David Gleeson is no stranger to the sub...

Randall Stephens [Cross-posted from Religion in American History ] Life magazine, June 30, 1972 Larry Eskridge is Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals and editor of the Evangelical Studies Bulletin at Wheaton College.  With Mark Noll, he was co-editor of More Money, More Ministry: Evangelicals and Money in Recent North American History (Eerdmans, 2000).  Eskridge has also written the definitive account of one of the most significant mass religious movements of the last century.  His God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (Oxford University Press, 2013) examines the fusion of the hippie counterculture and evangelical Christianity that burst onto the scene in the late 1960s. I recently caught up with Larry to ask him about the project, his research, and more. Randall Stephens: What first got you interested in the topic of the Jesus People? Larry Eskridge: I found the Jesus People an interesting topic at several le...

Randall Stephens In not too long Project Muse will post the June issue of Historically Speaking .  In the meantime, copies are being shipped across the country and overseas to subscribers.  The latest issue contains a lively range of essays.  This month we have the last of Joe Amato's three essays on revitalizing local history. Here he sketches a sensory history of 20th-century rural America. He then explores some causes and effects of the countryside’s marginalization in modern American society. On a related note, Don Yerxa interviews Canadian cultural historian Constance Classen about sense history.  Classen has written extensively on the senses, exploring the lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity and helping us appreciate the tactile foundations of Western culture.   Also in this issue are pieces on history and political thought, Mormon historical studies, Stalin and Nazi Germany, Civil War naval history, Britain and the Treat...

Randall Stephens I've just heard the sad news that Will D. Campbell--activist, minister, and author--has passed away.  Many who teach southern history or American religious history will be familiar with Campbell's humorous, insightful, page-turners like Brother to a Dragonfly (1977) and Forty Acres and a Goat (1986).  I've used the latter when I've taught the modern South . Today, the New York Times eulogizes him: The Rev. Will D. Campbell, a renegade preacher and author who joined the civil rights struggle in the 1950s, quit organized religion and fought injustice with nonviolent protests and a storyteller’s arsenal of autobiographical tales and fictional histories, died on Monday night in Nashville. He was 88. . . . Followers and friends called Mr. Campbell hilarious, profound, inspiring and apocalyptic, a bourbon-drinking, guitar-picking, down-home country boy who made moonshine and stomped around his Tennessee cabin in cowboy boots and denim uttering streams of s...

Randall Stephens In the coming week the April 2013 issue of Historically Speaking will be posted to the Project Muse site.  Subscribers can expect it soon in mailboxes.  The issue includes essays on environmental history, ancient religion, teaching, and Harry Truman. It also features interviews with Matthew Bowman on Mormonism in American history, John R. Gillis on seacoasts in history, and turning points of World War I with Ian F.W. Beckett.  In addition the April issue includes a lively forum on "Scientific Culture in the Modern Era" with intellectual historian Stephen Gaukroger (University of Sydney).  "One of the most distinctive features of Western culture since the 17th century is the gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones," writes Gaukroger in his lead essay. "A particular image of the role and aims of scientific understanding is tied up in a very fundamental way with the self-image of Western modernity. One striking illu...

Randall Stephens On a recent browse through the loud, garish halls of YouTube I found several interesting history clips.  Without diminishing the importance of LOL catz videos and the endless Fail compilations, I'd like to praise/point to some of the history gems on YouTube .  In the last 5 years YouTube has served as a go-to source for me.  Interviews , documentary films , and materials on teaching draw me in.  It's been a boon to my teaching and research. For example . . . Hear the late esteemed historian and former master of Balliol College, Oxford, Christopher Hill speak about his work on 17th-century England.  He also reminisces on why he became a historian, the nature of revolutions, and more. ("Conversations With Historians: Christopher Hill," BBC Radio 4, October 14, 1991) In this much more recent video (April 11) see historian Taylor Branch discuss the critical year of 1963 and the context of the black freedom struggle.  Branch pieces together ...

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...

Philip White . Philip White signing copies of his book, Our Supreme Task , at Well Read, March 2012 The commonly accepted narrative about bookstores is that they’re doomed. People simply won’t go to bricks-and-mortar spaces to buy hardbacks and softcovers when they can pull up a web browser, click or tap a couple of times, and boom! Either an e-book is on their screen or that supposedly archaic bundle of paper is on its way. But while certain undeniable facts—the closing of Borders and the rise of Amazon as the alpha dog in the bookselling industry among them—prove this impression to be true-ish, there are other signs that cast doubt on it. Some of these are factual and some anecdotal. In the case of the latter, Half Price Books is always jam packed when I go into one of the four Kansas City locations to buy more books I probably don’t need. Also, I recently read The Atlantic ’s feature on Ann Patchett , who is not only bankrolling a bookstore in Nashville but also got a spot on the Co...

Randall Stephens Since 2007 the US Intellectual History (S-USIH) blog has nurtured a lively community of historians. Since then that virtual group has morphed into a series of annual conferences and the Society for US Intellectual History. The revamped S-USIH site is a real model for digital humanities and shows how best to foster conversations within a field. The blog features book reviews, op-eds, think pieces, and essays that frequently spark heated debates in the comments section. (Like many U.S. historians I’ve watched all this with real interest—reading, lurking, and occasionally commenting on posts.) To find out a little bit more about how the website has led to a vibrant Society and what the group does, I recently caught up with key members and founders: Andrew Hartman (Illinois State University), Tim Lacy (Loyola University), Benjamin Alpers (University of Oklahoma), and Ray Haberski (Marian University). Randall Stephens: The US Intellectual History blog started in 2007. Wh...