It’s a weird time to be teaching Reconstruction. As I prepared the last lecture for my US Survey course, the connections between the backlash to Reconstruction and the backlash to Obama’s presidency were certainly apparent. As I wrote last week, historians will have a lot to work with in the Age of Trump. But I was especially…
Month: November 2016
Historicizing Recent Trends
Sometimes we are so inundated with information that the best work gets lost in the mix. (This is especially true now that we know many can’t tell the difference between real and fake news.) I wanted to make sure and highlight a few fantastic essays written this last week by top-notch historians that deserve more…
New Volume of Mormon Studies Review
One of my favorite activities from my last few years has been serving as an associate editor with the Mormon Studies Review. The goal of the journal is to chart the development and progress of Mormon studies scholarship; we aim to translate the significance of these works to a broader audience. We also try to integrate…
Writing History in the Age of Trump
There are a lot of new realities and circumstances that Americans will have to address over the next four years. Far from the most important, yet still something that folks will eventually have to grapple with, is how historians’ work will reflect this new environment. By this, I’m not referring to historians of contemporary America…
November 5
[Today is the anniversary of the LDS Church implementing a new policy regarding same-sex marriage. You can read about the policy here, and hear about it here and here. I hope readers will forgive me if I leave the academic tone of this blog aside for a moment and offer this personal essay.] I was…
Utah Republicans “Come Home” to Trump: Implications for the Mormon Vote
There was a brief moment when it seemed Mormon voters in Utah were leading the anti-Trump charge in today’s GOP. After the leaked video of Donald Trump bragging about groping women, a number of Utah’s leading elected officials unendorsed the GOP nominee. The LDS-owned Deseret News published an editorial asking Trump to step aside. Pundits…
The Limits of the Liberal Political Imagination
It was a sobering experience to discuss David Chappell’s phenomenal A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (UNC Press, 2004) with my graduate students the week before the election. (Well, the week before the election is sobering whatever you read.) The book is a great text to dissect in a seminar: it has…
BYU’s Maxwell Institute Celebrates 10 Years and a New Beginning
Last weekend, at a lecture delivered by David F. Holland (video should be forthcoming!), BYU celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Studies. The creation of the MI was the result of bringing together a number of activities at BYU, including the Foundation of Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, the…
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