The early weeks of the Trump presidency have been dominated by discussions of the ethics and propriety of his immigration policies. But Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced a flood of immigration that makes today’s issues look modest in comparison. Between 1877 and 1890 alone, a total of 6.3 million new arrivals entered the United States. Even more would arrive before the coming of World War I. The total American population in 1900 was just over 72 million, so the..

Since Frederick Douglass is in the news these days—with President Trump calling him “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice”—I thought I’d share a haunting paragraph from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written in 1845, sixteen years before the Civil War began.

It is a beautiful expression of the horrific hypocrisy of some antebellum churches:

I . . . hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, crad..

In the era of the American Revolution, intellectual topics like seashell fossils, the Genesis flood, and the age of the earth were all the rage. In December 1778, as the British prepared an invasion of Savannah, Georgia, seniors at Yale College held a debate on whether the flood had been global, or just restricted to the ancient Middle East. Writers associated with the “American Enlightenment,” not least Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, speculated for decades over what the discovery of co..

The “eugenics” movement, which sought to protect and improve hereditary racial stock, was phenomenally popular in early 20th century America, and it has an important connection to today’s pro-abortion movement. Thomas C. Leonard explains eugenics in his 2016 book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era:

“Eugenics” derives from the Greek for “well born” and describes the movement to improve human heredity by the social control of human breeding. The con..

Douglas Sweeney—Professor of Church History and the History of Christian Thought, Chair of the Department, and Director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School—has published widely on Edwards, early modern Protestant thought, and the history of evangelicalism. In 2015 Oxford University Press published his long-awaited Edwards the Exegete Biblical Interpretation and Anglo-Protestant Culture on the Edge of the Enlightenment. He kindly answered some questions about the..

In today’s post, I am interviewing historian Paul Harvey of the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs. Dr. Harvey is one of America’s most distinguished historians of religion and race, and is the author of the new book Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History.

[TK] The intersections between race and religion in America have inspired everything from courageous moral reform movements to the most loathsome kinds of bigotry. Why have racial and religious issues been so..

If Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Had a Dream” speech (August 28, 1963) was the visionary sermon of the Civil Rights Movement, his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was its epistolatory defense.

On April 12, 1963—Good Friday—an open letter had appeared in the Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper issuing “A Call for Unity” and protesting the recent Civil Rights demonstrations in Birmingham.

The eclectic group of eight white clergymen from Alabama who wrote and signed the letter—two Episcopalians and two Met..

Today’s guest post is from Daniel L. Dreisbach, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C. He has authored or edited 10 books, including Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers (Oxford University Press, 2017), from which this article is adapted. You can follow him on Twitter at @d3bach

John Adams, in his retirement, was disheartened. What had his life in politics counted for? he wondered.

The renewal in 1805 of a 30-year friendship with Doctor Benjamin Rush reinvigorated him. T..

To generalize, the mainstream media only knows one form of “evangelicalism,” which can be frustrating.

In his book, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, historian Matthew Avery Sutton primarily focuses on the apocalyptic radicalism of early fundamentalist-evangelicals, which went from being the overwhelmingly dominant perspective to fissuring into various tracks.

Here’s a nice summary of the divergence using the metaphor of tracks:

At precisely the same time that elite, hi..

For three decades Eric Foner—author of books like Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, and Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad—has taught a three-class unit on the Civil War for Columbia University. In his final year teaching the class, he partnered with edX to make them available online for free.

One helpful feature of these classes is that they provide undergraduate students—and others—a primer o..