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| Jagiellonian University. Collegium Maius. Assembly Hall. Credit |
We have an announcement of a conference on Richard Brooks and Carol M. Rose’s Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law and Social Norms, to be held at the University of Arizona College of Law, in Tucson, Arizona, on January 31, 2014. Moderators are Robert Glennon and Brent White. Featured panelists include Robert Gordon, Lani Guinier, Gabriel "Jack" Chin, Risa Goluboff. Gerald Torres, and Price Fishback. Space is limited; register here.
R.B. Bernstein (New York Law School) has published a review of Denise A. Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders in the Daily Beast. The book is "enlightening," Bernstein A few blurbs:Between Court and Confessional explores the lives of Spanish inquisitors, closely examining the careers and writings of five sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inquisitors. Kimberly Lynn considers what shaped particular inquisitors, what kinds of official experience each accumulated, and to what ends each directed his acquired knowledge and experience. The case studies examine the complex interplay of careerism and ideological commitments evident in inquisitorial activities. Whereas many studies of the Spanish Inquisition tend to depict inquisitors as faceless and interchangeable, Lynn probes the lives of individual inquisitors to show how inquisitors' operations in their social, political, religious, and intellectual worlds set the Inquisition in motion. By focusing on specific individuals, this study explains how the theory and regulations of the Inquisition were rooted in local conditions, particular disputes, and individual experiences.
"The Inquisitor is a figure engulfed in myth, yet about whom very little is actually known. Kimberly Lynn sets the record straight in this thoroughly researched and well-written book. Showcasing individual portraits of five inquisitors from different parts of the early modern Hispanic empire, she offers a lively and convincing composite biography of a unique - and uniquely complex - figure poised between medieval theocracy and modern bureaucracy." -- James S. Amelang, Universidad Autónoma, Madrid
"This outstanding piece of scholarship demonstrates how little the Spanish inquisitors fit the conventional view of them as insular men in single-minded pursuit of heresy. In a series of exacting and illuminating portraits, Kimberly Lynn reveals them in the full range of their activities, engaged in turf battles, jostling for position at court, moving from post to post, suffering career setbacks and disappointments, and seeking patronage and bestowing patronage - that is, negotiating the complex power structures of early modern Spain like other members of the power elite." -- Miriam Bodian, the University of Texas at Austin
Largely unknown to historians, the much-neglected records of rabbinic courts represent an unusually rich source for the study of the early modern family, community, social and economic life, and jurisprudence. With the approaching publication of the Pinkas of the Metz Beit Din, and following the recent appearance of the Frankfurt rabbinic court diary, “Hidden from History” will explore the range of issues that came before rabbinic courts in the last third of the eighteenth century and the implications of these records for the construction of memory and historical narrative.Schedule and contacts after the jump.
The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley reviews William P. Jones's The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (Norton). Yardley writes,"This is the central theme of “The March on Washington”: The powerful economic impulses of the march have been lost to view as historians emphasize the eloquence of King’s speech and its effect on the political climate as the country moved to address the questions of basic civil rights and opportunities that he articulated. Initially the march’s organizers demanded “federal jobs creation, raising the minimum wage, a Fair Employment Practice law, and support for [President John F.] Kennedy’s civil rights bill,” demands that “expanded as new groups joined.”"
This week there are also several reviews of For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (Pantheon) by Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, including a lengthy L.A. Times review, a Washington Post review, and a Wall Street Journal review for subscribers.
These two books serve as a reminder that the Lincoln theme, far from being exhausted, continues to be explored in new ways by historians. Pure biography remains a subject of lively interest, but so do efforts to connect Lincoln to issues related to antislavery and the Civil War. Additionally, several works are but marginally connected to history, and instead examine the ongoing impact Lincoln had, and continues to have, on American culture. Moreover, as these two volumes suggest, academic historians continue to widen the parameters of our understanding of Lincoln.
Mark Neely and Michael Burlingame have written widely not only about Lincoln, but Civil War America as well. Their approach in these volumes is different, yet similar. Neely presents a constitutional and legal history of the Civil War which, despite the title, is only partly about Lincoln. Burlingame has written a compressed history of Lincoln’s presidency and its influence on the Civil War. Both works reveal these historians’ impressive scholarship and wide reading in manuscript sources; both provide insight into the subject. It takes courage to try and do something different and provocative, and both men are to be commended for seeking new approaches.n+1 reviews Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press).
HistoryToday asks "How could the first nation to cleave church from state remain so pious?"as it reviews The Creation of the American Soul: Roger Williams, Church and State, and the Birth of Liberty (Duckworth) by John Barry. |
| David Garland (credit) |
More information is available here.In Trying Biology, Adam R. Shapiro convincingly dispels many conventional assumptions about the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. Most view it as an event driven primarily by a conflict between science and religion. Countering this, Shapiro shows the importance of timing: the Scopes trial occurred at a crucial moment in the history of biology textbook publishing, education reform in Tennessee, and progressive school reform across the country. He places the trial in this broad context—alongside American Protestant antievolution sentiment—and in doing so sheds new light on the trial and the historical relationship of science and religion in America.
For the first time we see how religious objections to evolution became a prevailing concern to the American textbook industry even before the Scopes trial began. Shapiro explores both the development of biology textbooks leading up to the trial and the ways in which the textbook industry created new books and presented them as “responses” to the trial. Today, the controversy continues over textbook warning labels, making Shapiro’s study—particularly as it plays out in one of America’s most famous trials—an original contribution to a timely discussion.
Faith and Outsiders in Spanish AmericaKif Augustine-Adams, Brigham Young University
Counting Chinese in a Catholic Country: The 1930 Mexican Census and Religious Difference
Orlando Rivero-Valdés, University of Pittsburgh
Afro-Cuban Religions and Brujería in Post-Colonial Cuba, 1898-1938
Commentators: TBA
Keynote Address and Reception
June 13:Dylan Penningroth, Northwestern UniversityFaith and Property in African American History
Faith and Freedom in Nineteenth Century United States
Abigail Cooper, University of Pennsylvania“A Mere Form”: Marriage Rites and Lived Religion in the Refugee Camps of the American Civil War
Lucas Volkman, University of MissouriFaith and Citizenship in a Secular Polity
Turmoils and Temporalities: The Slavery Question and Church Property Disputes in Missouri
Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Irvine
Debt, Death, and Redemption: Toward a Soterial-Legal History of the Turner Rebellion
Commentators: William Novak, University of MichiganWinston Bowman, Brandeis UniversityFaith and Government in Modern America
A Civil Death: Mormon Disenfranchisement in the Mountain West
Kellen Funk, Princeton Univeristy
“This Stone Which I Erect Shall Be a House of God”: Disestablishment and Religious Corporations in New York, 1784-1854
Jeffrey Perry, Purdue University
“For the Peace of Society”: Baptist Church Discipline and Legalities in Early Kentucky
Commentators: Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of PennsylvaniaKathleen Holscher, University of Minnesota
School Prayer, Bible Reading, and the Catholic Vocabulary of Religious Freedom in Mid-Century America
Ronit Stahl, University of Michigan
Basic Training: The Unintentional Consequences of the Education Requirements for Military Chaplains
Commentators: Barbara Young Welke, University of Minnesota
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| Credit: Library of Congress |
Anecdotes from the Convention continue to inform contemporary discussions on the Constitution’s meaning. This article discusses an anecdote from the Convention that shows how history and false history shape our laws and cultural traditions.
The article focuses on Benjamin Franklin’s proposal to hire a chaplain and begin each day with a prayer. The Convention deputies showed little interest in the proposal, and it died aborning. However, decades later, a fictional version emerged in which Franklin’s proposal succeeded and saved the Convention from collapse.
The factual and mythical Franklin prayer narratives offer us the opportunity to examine their history and rhetorical use in arguing for integrating religion into America’s public life. This examination also offers the opportunity to reflect on how advocates can use history to fashion a persuasive argument. The history of the narrative demonstrates how writers, government officials, lawyers, and judges have employed it to further their own purposes. As for the continuing popularity of the story, Franklin and the archetype he personifies play a critical role in making the narrative persuasive. And as the narrative shows, histories, both factual and mythical, can support persuasive narrative arguments.
A blurb:Generating over $12 billion in annual sales, kosher food is big business. It is also an unheralded story of successful private-sector regulation in an era of growing public concern over the government’s ability to ensure food safety. Kosher uncovers how independent certification agencies rescued American kosher supervision from fraud and corruption and turned it into a model of nongovernmental administration.
Currently, a network of over three hundred private certifiers ensures the kosher status of food for over twelve million Americans, of whom only eight percent are religious Jews. But the system was not always so reliable. At the turn of the twentieth century, kosher meat production in the United States was notorious for scandals involving price-fixing, racketeering, and even murder. Reform finally came with the rise of independent kosher certification agencies which established uniform industry standards, rigorous professional training, and institutional checks and balances to prevent mistakes and misconduct.
In overcoming many of the problems of insufficient resources and weak enforcement that hamper the government, private kosher certification holds important lessons for improving food regulation, Timothy Lytton argues. He views the popularity of kosher food as a response to a more general cultural anxiety about industrialization of the food supply. Like organic and locavore enthusiasts, a growing number of consumers see in rabbinic supervision a way to personalize today’s vastly complex, globalized system of food production.
On October 31, the New York Times highlighted China's difficulties in keeping residents from emigrating to other developed nations. While China's economy has experienced robust economic growth in recent years, more and more Chinese continue to leave the nation in search of a new life. The lack of religious freedom and the lure of a more liberated social and economic environment has driven an increasingly high number of Chinese out of the country. In 2010, 508,000 Chinese departed for one of the 34 developed countries that compose the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The U.S. welcomed 87,000 permanent residents in 2011, up from 70,000 in 2010. But this feeling of uncertainty and unrest is not a one-way street. The lethargic recoveries hampering the economies in the West has driven Chinese students back home in droves. In 2011, the number of students returning to China was up 40% from the previous year. Even still, it appears China is experiencing a sort of "brain drain." The United States' investment-based green card program allows foreigners to obtain a green card if they invest over $500,000 into American businesses. Chinese citizens obtained well over 2,000 of these specialized permits, more than double the investment-based green cards of all other nationalities combined. 
