The Way of Improvement Leads Home: American History, Religion, Politics, and Academic life‪.‬ John Fea

In this episode we talk with historian and biographer Nancy Koester about her new book on nineteenth-century abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth. Our discussion focuses on Truth's lifelong pursuit of a just society, a deeper knowledge of God, and a sense of community for her and her family. Koester's book is titled We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth.
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In this episode we explore the life, ideas, and writings of one of the 20th-century most influential American historians--C. Vann Woodward, author of The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Our guest is James Cobb, author if C. Vann Woodward: America's Historian. In our conversation we discuss Woodward's liberalism and how he balanced historical writing with social activism over a career that spanned nearly five decades.
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The American revolution happened in the midst of a smallpox epidemic. In one of the timeliest history books of the publishing season, historian Andrew Wehrman visits the podcast to talk about what the patriots of the American Revolution and the founding fathers thought about public health. His book Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution is a must read for anyone who cares about the relationship between political liberty and the government's role in preventing disease in eighteenth-century America.
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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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