The Sacred and the Secular in Early National Virginia

June 2, 2016 By Roy Rogers in Commentary, Opinion, Recent Scholarship Tags: American Revolution, Eighteenth Century, historiography, religion, religious freedom, Thomas Jefferson, Virginia, Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom 6 Comments

Is revolutionary Virginia the birthplace of American secularism?

My attention was returned to this critical question by a recent twitter exchange between Annette Gordon-Reed and Sam Haselby (and others) along side a recent piece by Haselby in Aeon.[1] The scuffle between Gordon-Reed and Haselby focuses on the time-is-a-flat-circle question of Thomas Jefferson’s religious beliefs. Was he a secularist? Some variant of Christian? A Unitarian? An atheist? Haselby’s Aeon piece takes a different tack, arguing that the American founding represented a “rogue wave of rationality in a centuries-long sea of Protestant evangelising, sectarianism and God-talk.” Haselby marks out the Founders—particularly Jefferson and James Madison—as “visionary secularists” who created a secular republic, which was eventually co-opt by decidedly non-secular political and cultural forces. He singles out late eighteenth-century Virginia as the primary canvas upon which the great artists of American secularism worked.[2] Continue reading →

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over

April 28, 2016 By Casey Schmitt in Academia, Opinion Tags: academia, Baseball, Curriculum Vitae, CV of Failure, Shadow CV 6 Comments

Murphy Swing

The greatest baseball players fail to get on base the vast majority of their at-bats. In fact, Daniel Murphy—second baseman for the Washington Nationals—currently holds the title for the highest batting average this season at .411. To many, that batting average justifies the $37.5 million, three-year contract the Nationals just signed with Murphy. That’s $37.5 million for failing six out of ten at-bats. To be fair, when he does make contact with a pitch, he usually scores runs and contributes to the Nationals top standing in the National League East. Continue reading →

Historians and Hamilton: Founders Chic and the Cult of Personality

April 21, 2016 By Ken Owen in Commentary, Opinion, Public History Tags: Alexander Hamilton, American Revolution, Early Republic, Founders Chic, Hamilton: An American Musical 32 Comments

How does a crony capitalist son of a whore, and a militarist pumped up by delusional aspirations of honor, grow up to be feted by liberal scholars? [*]

Since the turn of the millennium, historians have lambasted the phenomenon of Founders Chic as a fundamental distortion of history. Placing the roles of specific, prominent individuals at the heart of sweeping narratives of the founding era meant that popular histories exaggerated the importance of individuals, at the expense of understanding the contribution of less-celebrated Americans or the role of broader societal and historical processes. Yet much of the reception of Hamilton, the hottest ticket on Broadway, seems to suggest that hagiography is acceptable, so long as it’s done to a catchy song-and-dance routine. It’s as if the only problem with Joseph Ellis, David McCullough and Ron Chernow is that they didn’t write to a hip-hop soundtrack. Continue reading →

The Book as a 400 Individual Medley

January 22, 2016 By Rachel Herrmann in Opinion Tags: Book, Editing, Swimming, writing 3 Comments

When I swam in college, I had a teammate named Liz, who probably swam every event in the meet lineup at least once during the three years I swam with her. This versatility is unusual in a swimmer; we tend to be specialists who have one to three events we hone over the course of four years. But Liz’s ability to take on different events, distances, and strokes made her a perfect (or unfortunate, depending on how you see it) candidate for the ironman of all swim events: the 400 yard individual medley. Shorter than the mile by far, but just as grueling because of its demand that swimmers be proficient in all four of the strokes, this race was one I never had to swim. I was a middling backstroker, and my coaches used to make me swim breaststroke when they wanted a laugh. I was a butterflyer, an occasional middle-distance freestyler, and a relay sprinter—but I knew the theory of the 400 IM. You had to pace yourself on the ‘fly, especially if you weren’t great at it, work the underwater kick off the walls on the backstroke, keep the breaststroke long and strong, and get the hell off the wall and head for home with everything you had left in your lungs for the freestyle.

Remember, way back when, when I said I’d check in to talk about the book-writing process? Those of our readers who’ve written a book or two probably thought that promise was hilariously ambitious, and I’m inclined to agree. Continue reading →

The Question of Narrative

September 22, 2015 By Tom Cutterham in Historiography, Methodology, Narrative History, Opinion, Roundtables, Special Features Tags: Alan Taylor, historiography, Kurt Newman, Narrative History, Roundtable 15 Comments

Should historians embrace the art of narrative, or treat it with more suspicion? In his review of Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton back in July, USIH’s Kurt Newman argued that “the book-length narrative” is not “the proper form for the presentation of a historical argument.” Narrative, he wrote, involves too much selection, too many authorial choices hidden from the reader. “Most importantly,” Newman suggested, “constructing a narrative is almost always tied up with some telos or end,” a teleology that serves as expression or conduit of ideology, pulling us towards the outcome we imagine fits. Narrative, in other words, is something more than reasoned argument. It enlists desire to shape the way we think. Continue reading →

Historians Attend Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical

August 7, 2015 By Christopher F. Minty in Commentary, Opinion, Public History Tags: Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, Angelica Schuyler, Anthony Ramos, Bill of Rights, Christopher Jackson, Daveed Diggs, Eliza Hamilton, Eliza Schuyler, Founding Fathers, George Washington, Great White Way, Groffsauce, Hamilton: An American Musical, Hercules Mulligan, History, How do you get tickets for Hamilton?, How to get tickets for Hamilton, James Madison, Jasmine Cephas Jones, John Laurens, Jonathan Groff, King George III, Leslie Odom Jr., Lin-Manuel Miranda, Maria Reynolds, Marquis de Lafayette, Musicals, New York Times, Okieriete Onaodowan, Peggy Schuyler, Philip Hamilton, Phillipa Soo, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Richard Rodgers Theater, Showbiz, The Public Theater, Thomas Jefferson 13 Comments

This post was written by Christopher Minty and Nora Slonimsky, who, many moons ago, woke up early on a Sunday morning to purchase tickets to the opening-night preview performance of Hamilton: An American Musical, which took place on July 13, 2015, at the Richard Rodgers Theater in New York City. This post was originally posted on July 19, 2015. It was removed as a courtesy to the show’s creative and promotional teams. It has been reposted with significant alterations and additions.

hamilton_FB Hip-hop is on Broadway, not just in a popular YouTube video. On Monday, July 13, 2015, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit off-Broadway musical, HAMILTON, made its debut on the big stage. On August 6, 2015, rebranded as Hamilton: An American Musical, a much-applauded, diverse cast returned to perform in the official opening of a much larger, hopefully long-running production at the Richard Rodgers Theater.

Continue reading →

Seriously, though, was the American Revolution a Civil War?

June 29, 2015 By Christopher F. Minty in Academia, Commentary, Opinion Tags: Alan Taylor, Allegiance, American Revolution, British Empire, Citizenship, Civil War, Coercion, colonial history, Constitutional history, David Armitage, King George III, Loyalty, microhistories, New York, Politics, Rebecca Brannon, South Carolina, sovereignty 38 Comments

On February 18, 2014, Tom Cutterham asked, “Was the American Revolution a Civil War?” According to Cutterham, understanding the Revolution that way might be useful. If we did, he suggested, “we’d better understand the way the modern world—the nexus of state, citizen, and property—was born in and determined by violence.”[1] Continue reading →

The Charleston Shooting and the Potent Symbol of the Black Church in America

June 18, 2015 By Benjamin Park in Commentary, News, Opinion, Public History Tags: African-American history, black church, denmark vesey, race, religious history 143 Comments

Last night, Dylann Storm Roof entered the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, sat through an hour-long meeting, and then opened fire on those in attendance. Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a state senator, was among nine individuals who were killed. Many are shocked at not only the grisly nature of the shooting, but also its location. “There is no greater coward,” Cornell William Brooks, president of the N.A.A.C.P, declared in a statement, “than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people engaged in the study of scripture.” Yet this experience is unfortunately, and infuriatingly, far from new: while black churches have long been seen as a powerful symbol of African American community, they have also served as a flashpoint for hatred from those who fear black solidarity, and as a result these edifices have been the location for many of our nation’s most egregious racial terrorist acts. Continue reading →

Single-Perspective Narratives and the Politics of Marriage History

March 24, 2015 By Jonathan Wilson in Commentary, News, Opinion Leave a comment

scotus-obergefell-aha Earlier this month, the American Historical Association announced that it had signed a Supreme Court amicus curiae brief in support of legal same-sex marriage.[1] This well-written, scholarship-rich brief was apparently drafted by Nancy Cott, and it was signed by many other distinguished historians of marriage.

In discussions that followed on Twitter, some professional historians who were happy with this brief (as I imagine most were) told me they supported it on the basis of historians’ collective interest in historical accuracy. History has been distorted, they argued, by conservative arguments—specifically, by conservatives’ appeals to what marriage has supposedly always been like. They agreed with the AHA that conservatives have advanced not only an unconvincing interpretation but also a set of demonstrably false claims.[2] Specifically, it seems, they think it’s false to say that marriage historically “serv[ed] any single, overriding purpose.”[3]

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Serial, Microhistory, and the Perils of Historical Research

January 19, 2015 By Roy Rogers in Commentary, Opinion Tags: microhistory, research, Serial 12 Comments

I’ve been listening to Serial again. Part of this is the spate of articles and interviews that attack (perhaps not persuasively) the foundations of Sarah Koenig’s research and reporting. Another reason is that, as someone in the midst of researching and writing a dissertation, I find Serial’s storytelling and depth of research very compelling and inspiring. At the same time, as a historian, the popular podcast has left me deeply troubled and uncomfortable with its final product. Continue reading →