Blog CCXXV (225): Author's Corner

John Fea has an interesting series on his blog called the "Author's Corner" For the record, I should note that Fea states, "The Way of Improvement Leads Home is more than just a blog (or a book).  It is a multi-faceted effort to bring history and historical thinking to the public."  There is a lot to this view.  The site has a number of correspondents that contribute and it uses all the media formats (text, audio, visual) that the internet has to offer.  The "Author's Corner" series is part of this larger undertaking.  In these author interviews, Fea and/or one of his contributors ask the authors of new books questions about their work, its origins, and its importance. 

The series started in 2014, but really took off in 2016.  Although the series tends to lean in the direction of Fea's teaching and research interests (religious history, 19th Century U.S. history), it reflects an impressive effort to diversify.  The topics investigated include religious, economic, urban, political, diplomatic, native American, African American, military and intellectual histories.  The time periods go as far back as the 17th Century, and come forward into the 20th and 21st Centuries.  Fea has also done a good job of interviewing authors from a number of different professional backgrounds and stages in their careers.  Most of the authors are historians, but some are theologians, and journalists.

The series grabbed my attention when it interviewed Jon Scott Logel, a colleague of mine here at the NWC, and a former office mate of mine.  (We arrived within a week of each other and were both tying to figure out a new institution and our new teaching duties.  He was also trying to finish his dissertation.) 

Long story made short, I cannot recommend the series enough.  (I should also note that when this blog was running the "Eight Questions" series, Fea had a post on his blog pointing his viewers towards In the Service of Clio, so this is an opportunity to repay the favor.)  Fea states that "Author's Corner" is one of the more popular features on his blog.  If you take a look at the interviews, you will see why.

	Phillip Luke Sinitiere Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
	Glenn Jonas A Cloud of Witnesses from the Heart of the City: First Presbyterian Church, Raleigh, 1816-2016 (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2016).
	Zara Anishanslin Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
	Luke Mayville John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
	Emily Clark A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
	Jon Scott Logel Designing Gotham: West Point Engineers and the Rise of Modern New York, 1817-1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016).
	Caroline Winterer American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
	Jennifer Goloboy Charleston and the Emergence of Middle-Class Culture in the Revolutionary Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016).
	David Silverman Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).
	Michael Klarman The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
	Matthew Harper The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
	Rashauna Johnson Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
	Willem Klooster The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).
	Matthew Karp This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016)
	Steven Pincus The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
	Leigh Eric Schmidt Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016)
	Matthew Pehl The Making of Working-Class Religion (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016).
	Michael Lansing Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
	Alan Taylor American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).
	Chandra Manning Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2016).
	Matthew Mason Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
	Colin Chapell Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him: Radical Holiness Theology and Gender in the South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016).
	Christy Clark-Pujara Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
	Rebecca Barrett Fox God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016).
	Jonathan Yeager Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
	Julie L. Holcomb Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).
	Robert Orsi History and Presence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
	Laurel Clark Shire The Threshold of Manifest Destiny: Gender and National Expansion in Florida (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
	Barry Hankins Woodrow Wilson: Ruling Elder, Spiritual President (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
	Andrew Diemer The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African-Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016).
	Thomas Robinson Preacher Girl: Uldine Utley and the Industry of Revival (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016).
	Caitlin Fitz Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York: Liverlight/W.W. Norton, 2016).
	Robert Parkinson  The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
	Sara Paretsky Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing: The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England Before Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
	R. Scott Hanson City of Gods: Religious Freedom, Immigration, and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).
	Zev Eleff Who Rules the Synagogue?: Religious Authority and the Formation of American Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
	Amanda Moniz From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution & the Origins of Humanitarianism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
	Max Longley For the Union and the Catholic Church: Four Converts in the Civil War (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2015).
	Rebecca T. Alpert Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
	Stephen H. Browne The Ides of War: George Washington and the Newburgh Crisis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016).
	Kristin Kobes Du Mez A New Gospel for Women: Katherine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
	Tim Huebner Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism  (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016).
	David Mislin  Saving Faith: Making Religious Pluralism an American Value at the Dawn of a Secular Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).
	John T. McGreevy American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
	J.L. Bell The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War (Yardley, Pennsylvania: Westholme Publishing, 2016).
	Daniel W. Crofts Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
	Sean Kelley The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
	Robert Elder The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South, 1790-1860 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
	Nicholas Guyatt Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
	Brian Gabrial The Press and Slavery in America 1791-1859: The Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016).
	Edward Gray Tom Paine’s Iron Bridge: Building a United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).
	Jared Hardesty Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
	Todd Braisted Grand Forage 1778: The Battleground Around New York City (Yardley, Pennsylvania: Westholme Publishing, 2016).
	Mark Guenther Schmeller Invisible Sovereign: Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
	John Turner The Mormon Jesus: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
	Emerson Powery The Genesis of Liberation: Biblical Interpretation in the Antebellum Narratives of the Enslaved (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016).
	Randy J. Sparks Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives across the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
	Carl Richard The Founders and the Bible (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016).
	John Dixon The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden: Empire, Science, and Intellectual Culture in British New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).
	Bridget Ford Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, and Politics in a Civil War Borderland (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
	Seth Dowland Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right: Politics and Culture in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
	Peter Macleod Northern Armageddon: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham and the Making of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2016).
	Alejandra Dubcovsky Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
	Elizabeth J. Clapp A Notorious Woman: Anne Royall in Jacksonian America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016).
	Tim Grove A Grizzly in the Mail and Other Adventures in American History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
	Christopher D. Cantwell Heath W. Carter Janine Giordano Drake The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016).
	Manisha Sinha The Slave Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
	Andrew Lipman The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
	Antoinette Sutto  Loyal Protestants & Dangerous Papists: Maryland and the Politics of Religion in the English Atlantic, 1630-1690 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).
	Padraig Riley Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
	Eric Gardner Black Print Unbound:  The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
	Christina Vella George Washington Carver: A Life (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015)
	Patrick Rael Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).
	Michael Oberg Professional Indian: The American Odyssey of Eleazer Williams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
	Calvin Schermerhorn The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
	Louis Masur  Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
	Robert Morrissey Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in the Colonial Illinois Country (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
	Sam Haselby The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
	Philip F. Gura The Life of William Apess, Pequot (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
	Martha Hodes Mourning Lincoln (New Haven: Yale University Press,  2015).
	Emily Blanck Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014).
	Jim Gigantino The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
	Matthew McCullough  The Cross of War: Christian Nationalism and U.S. Expansion in the Spanish-American War (Studies in American Thought and Culture) (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).
	Christopher Cameron  To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, June 2014)
	Jonathan White Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014).
	Gerald Horne The Counter Revolution of 1776: Slavery Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2014)