Lincoln Mullen’s internet weblog

Mittens.

→ 11:39 AM, Dec 24

In the three days before Christmas, I have been asked to review a tenure case, serve as an advisor to a grant application, and review applications for a student fellowship. While I will in fact say yes to all these things—after January 3—I submit that asking people to volunteer for extra work in the period December 20–30 is not the best of strategies.

→ 11:34 AM, Dec 24

Looking forward to reading this one.

→ 11:33 AM, Dec 22

Currently reading: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 📚

→ 11:29 AM, Dec 22

Finished reading: Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton 📚

→ 6:02 PM, Dec 20

Over the next few days I’ll share some of the more interesting parts of America’s Public Bible. Here’s the first.

What was the most quoted Bible verse of the 19th-century United States? Hint, it wasn’t John 3:16. Further hint, it is seasonally appropriate. Answer here.

→ 1:59 PM, Dec 13

I published a free, open-access book today. Called America’s Public Bible: A Commentary it uncovers the trends in a couple million quotations to the Bible in the 19th and early 20th-century United States. Here’s an example.

→ 1:57 PM, Dec 13

Currently reading: Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis by John T. McGreevy 📚

→ 10:28 AM, Dec 4

TIL that LaTeX and I were both released in the same year. A coincidence? I trow not.

→ 5:51 PM, Nov 30

I was not at all sure whether I had done a good job teaching this new course this semester. But the presentations in the final class of the work they had done this semester knocked my socks off. So one way or another, the students have done a good job.

→ 9:50 PM, Nov 29

Our one requirement for guests at Thanksgiving, or other gatherings at our house: phones must be deposited in a basket at the door. You may retrieve it only if your mother calls.

→ 5:35 PM, Nov 24

A calendrical sea change

A significant change—not much remarked on, from what I can tell—is the sea change in how Protestant churches with nondescript liturgical traditions treat the church year. In my youth, a Baptist or Presbyterian church (say) would totally ignore the Christian calendar, if not regard it with outright suspicion as a vestige of Roman Catholicism. Now, many such churches make much of the Christian calendar, even though they lack the liturgical resources for that calendar to be reflected in week-by-week worship. I am not sure how to explain the change except that fashions change, there has been a decline in anticatholicism, and perhaps the Revised Common Lectionary and other such ecumenical efforts has had an effect.

→ 10:59 AM, Nov 20

Thanks, @ayjay and @jaheppler, for checking out Mastodon for the rest of us and saving us some time.
- Mastodonic Thoughts
- Embracing the Limits
→ 10:59 AM, Nov 19

Currently reading: The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚

→ 9:47 AM, Nov 18

Currently reading: The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity by Eric L. Goldstein 📚

→ 10:31 PM, Nov 14

Currently reading: The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚

→ 12:36 PM, Nov 13

→ 1:16 PM, Nov 8

I like that each issue of the American Council of Learned Societies newsletter ends with a poem.

→ 9:42 AM, Nov 5

Currently reading: Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries by David Sorkin 📚

→ 6:58 PM, Nov 1

Beating the bounds of the elementary school

We recently moved to a new house. My children’s elementary school has a tradition they call the “Cougar Crawl”—this year coinciding with the Halloween event—of walking around the boundaries of the neighborhood in whinch the school is located. It is unlikely that there is a direct connection to beating the bounds of a parish. But the analogy underscores the way in which the elementary school is the only truly local institution in our life.

→ 11:36 AM, Oct 22

Cover for my digital book, to be published December 13. Posting this for you all on Micro.blog first.

→ 9:22 AM, Oct 20

Honest acknowledgements

My children contributed nothing to this project, and if it were not for them, I would certainly have finished it several years earlier. They are not even particularly interested in this digital monograph: they think their mother’s print book is much cooler than “just a website.” Nevertheless, I love them a lot more than this book, and I regret nothing.

→ 11:58 AM, Oct 13

6 y.o. playing white; 11 y.o. playing black. The 6y.o. was sure he was done for, but I told him to keep playing for the draw. Sure enough, from this position the 11 y.o. played Qe6 for the stalemate instead of Qe8 for the checkmate.

→ 10:34 AM, Oct 10

This is a great pattern for a notebook. Ruled by default, but grid if you need it.

→ 10:26 AM, Oct 10

Finished reading: Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Commemoration and Religion’s Presence of the Past by Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas 📚

→ 8:56 AM, Oct 7

Currently reading: Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk 📚

→ 9:52 PM, Sep 28

Currently reading: Make Noise: A Creator’s Guide to Podcasting and Great Audio Storytelling by Eric Nuzum 📚

→ 4:26 PM, Sep 24

My colleagues have been creating software to transcribe structured historical data, which we call DataScribe. They will be hosting a number of fall workshops to teach people how to use the software.

→ 4:19 PM, Sep 21

The Green Tunnel podcast has released the trailer for season two on the history of the Appalachian Trail.

→ 9:53 AM, Sep 21

Finished reading: People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn 📚

→ 7:31 PM, Sep 16

Podcast on the history of American antisemitism

R2 Studios at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media has received a grant from the Luce Foundation to create a podcast on the history of American antisemitism. It’s a sobering subject, and one where the American people truly need a better historical perspective.

In episodes that take listeners from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the team will unpack instances or aspects of antisemitism in U.S. history through narration, primary sources, and expert interviews. These stories will discuss what antisemitism is and how it developed and persisted alongside other forms of bigotry and hatred in the United States. Each episode will relate to the project’s broad themes: that antisemitism is a deep-rooted American problem, that it spans the political and religious spectrum of the United States, that it is intertwined with the history of race in America, and that knowledge and understanding of the history of American antisemitism makes it easier to identify and oppose it in the present.

With the support we have received, we have lined up a collaboration with other scholars, including Zev Eleff, who will lead our editorial board, and Mark Oppenheimer, who will be the podcast’s host. (We have more collaborators to come, we hope.) You can read more about the podcast, which we will be working on over the coming year.

→ 12:38 PM, Sep 15

R2 Studios has a new website making it easier to find and subscribe to our historical, narrative podcasts.

→ 12:26 PM, Sep 15

Here is my colleague John Turner, writing about how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints participated in the 1926 U.S. Census of Religious Bodies.

→ 11:42 AM, Sep 15

Currently reading: Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music by Ted Gioia 📚

→ 6:39 PM, Sep 10

→ 6:18 PM, Sep 10

Finished reading: Good Booty by Ann Powers 📚

→ 5:56 PM, Sep 9

Finished reading: Country Music by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns 📚

→ 5:56 PM, Sep 9

Essays interpreting pandemic collections
Over the past couple years RRCHNM has partnered with many Jewish cultural heritage institutions to collect their materials about the pandemic. We’ve commissioned five scholars to write about what they learned from the collection, and here are their essays.
- Maddie Bender, “Windows into Our Lives”
- Susan R. Breitzer, “‘An Extraordinary Time’: Conservative and Orthodox Halachic Approaches to Jewish Observance during the Covid-19 Pandemic.”
- Sarah Imhoff, “The COVID-19 Pandemic and the ‘Social Model’ of Disability”
- Hanna Shaul Bar Nissim, “American Jewish Giving and Engagement in the First Year of COVID-19”
- Vanessa Ochs, “Whose Story is Told: Lived Religion and the Jewish Digital Artifacts of the Pandemic”
→ 9:13 AM, Sep 8

Four guides to teaching religion and U.S. history with Library of Congress sources, from my colleague Nate Sleeter:
→ 4:11 PM, Sep 2

My friend and collaborator Kellen Funk and I are working on a set of research questions—mostly through computation—about the modernization of law in the nineteenth-century U.S. We’ve put together a website, which now has our “back catalog” but which will hold our new work soon.

→ 7:46 PM, Aug 27

One of the best parts of my job is being the coordinator for graduate students at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. I wrote about the graduate student experience at RRCHNM for the start of the semester.

→ 7:15 PM, Aug 27

Most used languages

→ 2:33 PM, Aug 26

Red Sox at Orioles.

If you had told me when I booked these tickets months ago that the Orioles would have a better record than the Red Sox, I would not have believed you.

→ 8:56 PM, Aug 20

On the ramparts of Fort McHenry.

→ 8:53 PM, Aug 20

The other new office view.

→ 10:11 AM, Aug 12

Currently reading: The Beat Cop: Chicago’s Chief O’Neill and the Creation of Irish Music by Michael O’Malley 📚

→ 7:28 AM, Aug 8

This is not the ASCH you are looking for.

→ 2:19 PM, Jul 29

We recently moved to a new house. I believe I will be able to make this working arrangement work.

→ 8:35 AM, Jul 28

Currently reading: Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West by Cameron Blevins 📚

→ 9:16 PM, Jul 25

Here is an amazing eighteenth-century devotional and illuminated manuscript that the Winterthur Museum is digitizing and that RRCHNM is going to help present online.

→ 5:52 PM, Jul 15

A fun kids’ playground next to a municipal airport, where the kids can watch light planes take off and land.

→ 9:44 AM, Jul 15

JBJ struck out one and got out of the inning allowing only one run. Which is better than every Red Sox pitcher in this game.

→ 9:55 PM, Jul 8

Jackie Bradley Jr. is one of my favorite Red Sox players.

Watching JBJ, a position player, pitch against the Yankees in the ninth inning is not my favorite.

→ 9:47 PM, Jul 8

My colleague and I submitted two grants today. Pretty wiped out.

→ 9:37 PM, Jul 8

Currently reading: Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen 📚

→ 2:22 PM, Jul 2

Writing grants all this week. It occurs to me that as a historian I am a non-fiction writer, but that grants are a form of speculative fiction.

→ 12:45 PM, Jun 29

Currently reading: Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers by Charles McCrary 📚

→ 6:19 PM, Jun 26

In our most recent Religion @ RRCHNM newsletter, we feature Jannelle Legg’s digitally-inflected dissertation on the Episcopal Church’s 19c Mission to Deaf-Mutes, as well as current PhD student Caroline Greer’s work on the Reverend Ida Bedell Manville. Grad student themed issue!

→ 3:12 PM, Jun 15

Pleasant walk beside the canal in Indianapolis.

→ 5:19 PM, Jun 2

I wish there were a way to write a 1,500 word essay without first writing a 3,500 word essay and then cutting it back. But if there is such a way, it has thus far eluded me in life.

→ 5:18 PM, Jun 2

I’m looking forward to attending the biennial conference hosted by Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. The conference format—a single session at a time with audience surrounding panelists—makes for good discussion. Plus there is a great line up this year.

→ 10:30 AM, Jun 2

Currently reading:
- Washington Gladden’s Church: The Minister Who Made Modern American Protestantism by David Mislin 📚
- A.B. Simpson and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism by Daryn Henry 📚
→ 3:55 PM, Jun 1

Currently reading: Radicalized by Cory Doctorow 📚

→ 2:11 PM, May 30

My children love ribs more than anything, so I did the best I could with my humble kettle grill and my even humbler ability.

→ 2:08 PM, May 30

Congratulations to Kris Stinson, who has published his first article, “American Babel: History and Empire in the Early American Republic,” out in the most recent issue of the Journal of the Early Republic.

→ 6:13 PM, May 23

Currently reading: The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe 📚

→ 12:48 PM, May 18

Currently reading: A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization by Sam Lebovic 📚

→ 12:42 PM, May 18

It’s important to me that I have a place to put my “outtakes and scraps” when writing. The folder is a complete fiction: I’ve never even once returned an outtake to the draft. But it’s mentally easier to move prose to a different folder than to delete it.

→ 11:32 AM, May 18

After threatening to upend my digital life with their changes to GSuite, Google has backed down. My steely-eyed resolve (i.e., procrastination) surely led to this decision. I still intend to move away from Google and GSuite entirely, but glad I don’t have to do so in a rush.

→ 10:20 AM, May 18

→ 7:51 PM, May 17

Most recent issue of our “American Religion @ RRCHNM” newsletter. Features a well-done graduate student presentation on women preachers in the early American republic, the re-opening of archives, and our pandemic collecting project for American Jews. Subscribe here.

→ 3:34 PM, May 16

Okay, Micro.blog friends. What examples of popular musicians who made their best (or at least, very good) music in old age can you think of? No points for saying Johnny Cash: who else?

→ 1:12 PM, May 14

What do you call a book “manuscript,” but for a book-length interactive scholarly work? Whatever you call it, I sent the final version to my publisher on Friday afternoon. I hope Stanford UP will have it through production and published this year.

→ 12:37 PM, May 14

Here is an excerpt from the development version of America’s Public Bible, showing how books of the Bible quote one another. This is probably pretty obvious to anyone who has read the Bible a few times, but it is fun to see visually.

→ 10:54 AM, May 11

Working on final copyedits and proofreading for a project.

One never finishes a project; one simply becomes so weary of it that one casts the project out into the world to fend for itself.

→ 10:08 AM, May 11

→ 3:13 PM, May 10

Small family dinner to celebrate Abby signing on the dotted line to become assistant professor of U.S. naval history at—you guessed it—the U.S. Naval Academy.

→ 6:14 PM, May 3

Currently reading: Cash: by the editors of Rolling Stone 📚

→ 11:48 AM, May 3

The Fall.

→ 11:45 AM, May 3

Caroline Greer writes about what you can learn about the first community of Shakers in the U.S. from the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies, a century and a half after they had been founded.

→ 10:21 AM, May 3

The progress bar is not strictly necessary, but it does make one feel better.

→ 8:17 PM, Apr 29

Thanks to my colleague, John Turner, a group of us from GMU got to take a tour of the Latter-day Saints Washington, DC temple during its open house. Here is a group of us from RRCHNM.

→ 4:22 PM, Apr 29

Currently reading: A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears by Antonino D’Ambrosio 📚

→ 9:38 AM, Apr 29

Currently reading: I Shot a Man in Reno: A History of Death by Murder, Suicide, Fire, Flood, Drugs, Disease and General Misadventure, As Related in Popular Song by Graeme Thomson 📚

→ 10:21 PM, Apr 28

What to do after Google Apps for Your Domain?

Friends, I have been caught by the end of Google Apps for Your Domain, or whatever that program is called. My entire online identity is tied to my email address lincoln@lincolnmullen.com, which is a GMail account. I have Google Docs, calendars, OAuth authentication and so on tied to that account. What should I do? It appears that Fastmail is the leading candidate, with good migration support from GMail. Any other possible email providers? Any considerations I am not thinking about?

→ 6:22 PM, Apr 28

Pleased to learn that the Commonwealth of Virginia appears to have upgraded me from a Human Resource to a Human Capital.

→ 5:07 PM, Apr 25

Nice enough to work outside again.

→ 11:10 AM, Apr 22

I have been a member of the American Society of Church History since graduate school, and every time I write out the name I have to look up whether it is of or for.

→ 2:36 PM, Apr 21

📧 New issue of the “American Religion @ RRCHNM” newsletter, featuring our most recent interactive map of city-level data from the 1926 census, a blog post about women’s leadership of an Adventist church, and Passover/Easter items from our pandemic collecting projects.

→ 12:41 PM, Apr 15

My collaborators at RRCHNM (@chnm) recently started a newsletter: “American Religion @ RRCHNM.” All things about digital history and American religion, including maps, visualizations, datasets, digital collections, digital editions. New issue coming soon. Subscribe here.

→ 4:06 PM, Apr 14

So far today I have gotten 26 spam phone calls, which is not typical. What is going on?

→ 5:57 PM, Apr 11

The German Historical Institute and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media are offering a 12-month fellowship in digital history at both institutions. We’ve had some excellent scholars come through as postdocs over the past few years.

→ 11:20 AM, Apr 8

This is definitely inside baseball, but here is a description of how @chnm runs our data-heavy projects via a database and a custom API.

RRCHNM’s Custom API for Data-Driven Projects

→ 11:04 AM, Apr 8

The 10 y.o.’s favorite song might be “Blue Suede Shoes.” She is intensely loyal to Carl Perkins and hates Elvis, whom she dismisses as a Perkins impersonator.

→ 10:09 PM, Feb 7

Currently reading: Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick 📚

→ 9:50 PM, Feb 7

Pleased beyond measure to have contributed to this documentary collection in honor of Jonathan Sarna … but not nearly as pleased and grateful as I am to number myself among his students. There can be no scholar or advisor more generous and wise than Jonathan Sarna.

→ 4:46 PM, Jan 31

Good mail day.

→ 4:41 PM, Jan 31

Currently reading: Citizen Cash by Michael Stewart Foley 📚

→ 12:52 PM, Jan 23

This Friday afternoon, two reader reports recommending publication for the large-ish digital project, and both offering helpful suggestions I largely agree with for revision. I’ll take it.

→ 5:45 PM, Jan 7

I rewrote a complicated Go program this afternoon, stripping out a major component, deleting 100 lines of code and adding 300. And it worked the first time. That why I like Go: a simple, strongly-typed language.

→ 5:43 PM, Jan 4

Everybody complains about reviewer number two but sometimes reviewer number two has to install the Java JDK to do the review, and if that’s not wanting you to succeed, I don’t know what is.

→ 12:31 AM, Jan 4