[Very happy to share this postdoctoral fellowship opportunity. Dr. Flake is one of the field’s best and brightest, UVA is a wonderful institution, and Charlottesville is an absolutely gorgeous setting. Whoever wins this appointment will be lucky indeed.]

The University of Virginia’s Religious Studies Department invites applications for one full-time postdoctoral fellow and lecturer for the academic year beginning July 25, 2017. Applications are welcome from any whose work bears on American religious history, thought or practice. Preference will be given to those applicants with interest in marginal or newer religious movements, especially Mormonism. Expertise in Mormonism is not required. Rather, the Fellowship is designed to provide training for persons who wish to add such expertise to an existing disciplinary specialty.

Duties include, but are not limited to, teaching two courses per semester. Applicants should evidence experience in and commitment to undergraduate and graduate teaching in a liberal arts framework, and be prepared to participate in both a large team-taught introductory-level class and smaller upper-level courses. Specifically, the Fellow will teach three seminars in his or her discipline and on topics of his or her choice. In addition, the Fellow will team-teach, with the Richard Lyman Bushman Professor of Mormon Studies, an introductory survey on Mormonism in relation to American culture.

Compensation will be in the form of salary, benefits, and a research fund.

Applicants for the fellowship must have attained the PhD prior to July 25, 2017.

To apply, please complete a Candidate Profile online through Jobs@UVA (https://jobs.virginia.edu), and electronically attach the following: a cover letter, a current CV including the names and contact information for two references, and a statement describing, in no more than 300 words, your qualifications for and philosophy of teaching with attention to your disciplinary approach (attach statement to Other1).

For full consideration apply by February 15, 2017; however, the position will remain open until filled.

Questions regarding the position should be directed to: Kathleen Flake, Richard Lyman Bushman Professor of Mormon Studies, kathleen.flake@virginia.edu.

Questions regarding the application process or Jobs@UVA should be directed to: Julie Garmel, Administrator, Department of Religious Studies: jg4e@virginia.edu.

The University will perform background checks on all new faculty hires prior to making a final offer of employment.

The University of Virginia is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. Women, minorities, veterans and persons with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

I am disappointed and disgusted that the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has agreed to sing at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Those events are a celebration of the incoming president, not merely of the country, and the claim that the move promotes national unity overlooks the fact that Trump ran a campaign centered on the degradation of women, vilification of immigrants, and oppression of minorities. This is not an inauguration for either of the Bushes or Reagan, who were messengers of a particular political stance, or even of a Mike Pence, who is even more extreme in politics but lacks many of Trump’s fascist ills. Rather, it is an inauguration for a man who spews racist garbage, brags about abusing women, and boasts about a Muslim registry. This act makes the Church’s appeals for religious liberty, gender equality, and international peace prove hollow. 

To my friends who have been the direct targets of Trump’s attacks: even though the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is a missionary arm for the LDS Church, I hope you know that their appearance at Trump’s inauguration does not reflect my values or interests, nor many of my friends and family within the Mormon tradition. On behalf of our Church, we apologize.

I had the great honor of being interviewed by the wonderful people who run 99% Invisible, an immensely successful radio show on architecture and design. I provided some historical background for Joseph Smith’s (and later Brigham Young’s) plat of Zion. Originally conceived in the early 1830s for Missouri, parts of it were realized once the Mormons reached Utah in the late 1840s.

You can listen to the 20-minute episode, as well as read more details, here.

And if you want a deep dive into Joseph Smith’s urban vision, you can download my article on the topic.

I have a notes document on my iPhone that keeps track of scenes from tv shows and movies that I might want to incorporate into my classes. (I’ve blogged about my use of these video clips at the Junto.) Let’s just say that I made quite a few entries while watching HBO’s Westworld this last week. (I know–I’m somewhat late to the game.) There is plenty of tensions and anxieties displayed in the series that could work with a wide range of historical topics. One of the most obvious is its engagement with determinism, which I plan to invoke when discussing predestination with my American religious history students in the future. There are several clips that contain poignant rumination on free will, choices, and liberty that should start a good discussion. But one theme stood particularly prominent for me: the fear of insurrection.

(Quick side note: finding usable clips from this series is especially challenging for two reasons. First, a number of important speeches take place in the presence of grotesque nudity, like when the discussion of the confederados and their lost cause is framed by a friggin’ orgy; and second, many of the other significant quotes are tethered to plot spoilers. Why didn’t the series’s creators think of the classroom?!?!?)

We spend quite a bit of time on slavery in my US history survey courses. (According to some of my more critical students, sometimes a bit too much time.) I think it’s essential to emphasize how central the slave institution was to American culture prior to the Civil War. And one of those elements is the slaveowners’ constant fear that their slaves might one day rise up and kill them. This was a constant anxiety during the American Revolution, as several recent books have highlighted. When writing to a fellow Virginian slaveholder about rumored slave insurrections, James Madison counseled that, “It is prudent such things should be concealed as well as suppressed.” The next year he similarly remarked that if word of their vulnerable position spread, “we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret.” Alan Taylor’s award-winning Internal Enemy charts how deep this fear went during America’s first half-decade.

Previously, I’ve referenced Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained when discussing this fear. Don’t get me wrong, the movie is laughably ahistorical, but the bloody fighting scenes were a fun way to emphasize slaveholders’ consistent nightmares. But Westworld captures the anxiety just as well. Consider this scene:

“The only thing stopping the hosts from hacking us to pieces is one line of your code.”

This fear is present throughout the entire season. Humans are surrounded by those that could be their executioners. This required a careful implementation of rules, regulations, and protocols—in other words, slave codes—to make sure everything stayed in control. But there was always the legitimate concern that too much time, too much suffering, and too much punishment would eventually lead to a bloody apocalypse. In nineteenth-century America, many anti-slavery advocates, even those who retained racist theories concerning black potential, wanted to disband the practice because it was destined to climax in a war for extermination. It’s clear that those who worked in Westworld feared the same.

Even the fictional Dr. Robert Ford’s theory on the importance of suffering—and I’m trying not to give spoilers!—had historical echoes. Here, for instance, is Thomas Jefferson on why descendants of slaves could never integrate into a society with descendants of slaveholders:

Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.

Memory of suffering, according to Jefferson, was a primary mover of the human will. Dr. Ford would have agreed.

The analogy could of course be taken so far. The past few decades of scholarship on slavery have sought to emphasize the agency of enslaved persons, so I admit that it may very well flirt with the respectability line to bring up any comparison to quasi-sentient beings. And associating humans with robots who were created solely for the purpose of their creators is itself an extension of the slaveholding mentality. So it is important to emphasize the differences here in order to make a clear point. But if we can compartmentalize the issues and focus on a historical feeling, there are usable tools for the classroom.

And for a show that seems at least partly dedicated to exploring the limits and purposes of feelings, that seems appropriate.

I am perpetually on the lookout for the perfect monograph to assign in the US survey course (pre-1877). Finding something that disinterested freshman, who have no plans to major in history (at least not yet), would enjoy is a daunting task. I have a number of criteria: it has to be short (ideally less than 200 pages), readable (light on theory), narrative driven (students like a story), and addresses a broad theme that aligns with my lectures. Lately I’ve been rotating through John Demos’s Unredeemed Captive, Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages, Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz’s Kingdom of Matthias, and Tiya Mile’s Ties that Bind. When we get to the Civil War period, I typically turn to Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion, which works exceptionally well because it’s brief (81 pages!) and delivers an ever-important message (that the war was about, well, slavery).

But this year, my first at Sam Houston State, I decided to venture out a bit and try Adam Rothman’s Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (Harvard UP, 2015). I’m glad I did, because I loved the book and it worked well with the students. I don’t want to review the book here—I’ll leave the critiquing of methods and arguments to academic journals—but I do want to highlight why the book fits in an undergraduate survey.

Beyond Freedom’s Reach traces the story of Rose Herera, an African American woman born into slavery in rural Louisiana. She is raised on a plantation, but eventually passes through several different owners before landing in the custody of the De Hart family in New Orleans. Once in this big city, where she served as a domestic slave, Rose met her eventual husband, George, and gave birth to five children just as the Civil War commenced. Once union troops took possession of New Orleans, Rose’s master, James De Hart, like many other confederates, fled to Havana. Soon thereafter his husband, Mary, sought to join him. She aimed to bring Rose and her children, as slavery was still allowed in Cuba. When Rose, who was sick and in jail, refused to go with her, Mary took three of Rose’s children. (The youngest child was with Rose in jail, and the fifth would not be born until later.) The remainder of the book follows Rose’s quest to retrieve her children, and the complex and meandering process highlighted the evolving, dynamic, and inchoate legal system in the wake of the Civil War. (See a brief promotional video here.)

I am a sucker for microhistories, and I believe the genre works best in the classroom. Rothman tells a gripping tale, but he’s constantly aware of the broader context. Here’s how he frames the story:

“United States v. Mrs. De Hart was not the trial of the century. It was an obscure child custody case that barely made the local papers, eclipsed by the news of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln’s assassination. Yet the confrontation between De Hart and Herera in New Orleans over the three slave children in Cuba is significant because it illuminates the ad hoc structure of local justice in the twilight of slavery.” (152)

The book isn’t only a story about Rose Herera, but about Rose Herera’s world. This is especially the case for the chapters that cover her life outside of the kidnapping case, given that she left a limited written record. Rothman reconstructs slavery in rural Louisiana during the antebellum period, and makes smart notes about nuanced topics like our narratives of slavery’s “natural growth.” When Herera moves to New Orleans, Rothman paints a colorful picture of a colorful city, where elite slavers, cosmopolitan businessmen, domestic slaves, and freed people of color intermingle. During the war chapter, we get a glimpse of what the city was like under military rule, as confederates struggled to retain their world even as enslaved men and women increased their fight for freedom. Rothman’s discussion of the kidnapping case itself was my favorite portion, as it captured the ad-hoc nature of governance and the liminality of law at the moment of cultural disruption. And then in the chapter that recounts the eventual reunion, the book provides a powerful discussion concerning the numerous rumors of kidnapping in the American South, especially the role played by Cuba.

Reading the book allowed my students to engage the tedious lived realities of slavery, the importance of slave families, the unreliable nature of the domestic slave trade, the lived repercussions of war, the evolution of emancipation laws, and, especially, the persistence of racist governance and undemocratic rule in the immediate post-emancipation era. Slavery was a difficult institution to give up, and southerners fought tooth and nail to retain their old social structure.

But perhaps one of the lessons that I appreciated the most in the book is the observation that a teleological progression toward freedom was impossible. “For Rose Herera and her children, and many others, wartime emancipation did not follow a straight line from slavery to freedom,” Rothman insists. “The experience was more like wandering a maze” (146). Freedom was not merely granted through Lincoln’s signature on the Emancipation Proclamation, nor even with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. It was fought for, tooth and nail, by African Americans were forced to clamor for every inch of liberty they could get from a racial system that sought to oppress them in any way possible.

The message of delayed equality and persistent fighting seems particularly relevant right now.