In this episode we chat with historian Jonathan Cohen about his edited collection Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen and the current state of "Springsteen Studies." Is there any connection between Cohen's current book, For a Dollar and A Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America, and his work on Springsteen?

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According to historian Kathryn Gin Lum, Americans have long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term "heathen" fell out of common use by the early 1900s, but the ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear. Americans still treat large swaths of the world as 'other' due to their assumed need for conversion to American ways. Lum is the author of Heathen: Religion and Race in American History and she is our guest in this episode.

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Are you an educator? An administrator? A school board member? Does your life intersect in some way with a public school? If so, this episode is for you. We talk about the religion and transatlantic roots of American public education with historian David Komline, author of The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education.

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Does the American Left have religion problem? What can progressives learn from people like Dorothy Day, Ignazio Silone, Henry Wallace, Staughton Lynd, and Cornell West? Many of these thinkers and activists offered a powerful vision for a moral and just society--challenging conservatives, liberals, and Marxists to think differently about the world. In this episode we talk to Vaneesa Cook, author of Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left.

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Our guest on this episode, public historian Alena Pirok, explains how John D. Rockefeller's vision of Colonial Williamsburg eventually gave way to a vision of the site championed by an early 20th century clergyman who saw ghosts. Join us for a conversion on Pirok's new book, The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg: Ghosts and Interpreting the Recreated Past. 

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Have you visited the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.? How about the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina? In this episode, historian Devin Manzullo-Thomas, author of Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Commemoration and Religion's Presence of the Past, helps us make sense of these sites of evangelical heritage. 

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In this episode, our 100th, host John Fea delivers his 2022 Conference on Faith and History presidential address.

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Do you do genealogical research? In this episode, historian Francesca Morgan talks about her new book A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History. She discusses Americans' fascination with tracking family lineage through three centuries and how the practice has intersected with race, class, religion, and commercialism. 

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What do Sammy Davis Jr., Muhammad Ali, Clare Booth Luce, Whitaker Chambers, and Charles Colson all have in common? They all had very public religious conversions. In this episode, historian Rebecca Davis joins us to talk about her new book Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed Politics. 

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Using America's obsession with Washington's hair as his window, historian Keith Beutler examines how "physicality," or the use of the material objects, was the most important way early Americans (1790-1840)--museum founders, African Amerians, evangelicals, and school teachers-- remembered the nation's founding. Beutler is the author of George Washington's Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders (University of Virginia Press, 2021).

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