Currently reading: The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚
I like that each issue of the American Council of Learned Societies newsletter ends with a poem.
Currently reading: Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries by David Sorkin 📚
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.
Cover for my digital book, to be published December 13. Posting this for you all on Micro.blog first.
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.
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.
This is a great pattern for a notebook. Ruled by default, but grid if you need it.
Finished reading: Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Commemoration and Religion’s Presence of the Past by Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas 📚
Currently reading: Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk 📚
Currently reading: Make Noise: A Creator’s Guide to Podcasting and Great Audio Storytelling by Eric Nuzum 📚
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.
The Green Tunnel podcast has released the trailer for season two on the history of the Appalachian Trail.
Finished reading: People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn 📚
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.
R2 Studios has a new website making it easier to find and subscribe to our historical, narrative podcasts.
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.
Currently reading: Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music by Ted Gioia 📚
Finished reading: Good Booty by Ann Powers 📚
Finished reading: Country Music by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns 📚
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.
Four guides to teaching religion and U.S. history with Library of Congress sources, from my colleague Nate Sleeter:
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.