The American Exceptionalisms of Foner and the Cheneys
I’m pleased to present a guest post by John Wilsey, an assistant professor of history and Christian apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of the forthcoming...
View ArticleDeath and Faith in the Civil War
In February of 1864, a Confederate officer named Franklin Gaillard received word of his father’s death. Gaillard was numb to death, having fought at Gettysburg the previous July. “It was the most...
View ArticleThe Roots of a Public Housing Crisis in Cairo, Illinois
We are joined today at the Anxious Bench by Kerry Pimblott, author of Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois, and Lecturer in International History at the University of...
View ArticleWhy Kids in Kentucky Didn’t Dress Up as Pilgrims after the Civil War
And how is it that my own children now celebrate Thanksgiving in their Jessamine County public school by dressing up like Pilgrims?
View ArticleThe Honest Patriotism of Frederick Douglass
Ahead of America's national holiday, Chris considers the patriotism of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said that the "best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins."
View ArticleIt’s Not “Erasing History” to Remove Confederate Memorials
Chris argues that it's not "erasing history" to remove Confederate commemoration from public spaces. Instead, it offers Americans a second chance at realizing an "emancipationist vision" of Civil War...
View ArticleWhen History Was Really Cancelled: A Black Cemetery in Waco, TX
The nothingness surprised me. I stepped over the low stone wall and walked down the path to the river. The water of the Brazos stood still in the summer evening, reflecting only a slightly blurred...
View ArticleWill Reformed Evangelicalism Divide Over Racial Politics? The 19th-Century...
Is the theologically conservative Reformed wing of evangelicalism going to permanently divide over race and politics? This month, Kevin DeYoung, a pastor and professor at Reformed Theological Seminary...
View ArticleBiblical Authority amidst American Christian Division: From the Civil War to...
Supposedly, the split among American evangelical Protestants over slavery in the Civil War era reduced the hegemony of biblical authority in American religious and public life. Before the Civil War,...
View ArticleThanksgiving for What?
Today we’re happy to welcome back to the Bench Janine Giordano Drake. A faculty member in History at Indiana University, where she specializes in US labor and working class history, US religious...
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