94: Doug Rossinow's Politics of Authenticity

With The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America, Doug Rossinow writes a history of the New Left that emphasizes continuity across both time and the broader political field of the 1960s.  Unlike many scholars of the 1960s, Rossinow was not there; this is a much-needed history of the left from the outside.  Instead of drawing on personal connections and personal experience, Rossinow relies on newspapers, TV, radio, and other media sources, as well as interviews, to understand the Left and place it in context.  He argues that the New Left operated by applying an existentialist activism to the left; from this perspective, the New Left developed in response to the Cold War of the 1950s, and it ended partly because the seeds of identity politics within existentialism fragmented the Left after 1968.

39: John Butler's Awash in a Sea of Faith

John Butler's Awash in a Sea of Faith is a welcome revisionist history of American religion before 1865.  Against a long-standing narrative of American religious decline, (the Puritans were the high point of American religion, apparently), Butler argues that religious beliefs have had an impact on American culture from the get-go, but to see them, we have to broaden our definition of religion to include multiple Christianities and multiple belief systems, including magic, the occult, astrology, that helped Americans make sense of their world.  He also broadens the scope of his investigation beyond New England to include religious history in the mid-Atlantic and slave and African religions, and he replaces narratives of linear development with patterns of religious diffusion and struggles among competing Christianities and between Christianities and various occult practices, particularly in slave communities.  And he carefully examines formal records, like church registers, parish and parishioner counts, and new church starts, to show that formal religious institutions have historically housed but a small fraction of Americans - and uses these numbers to spatially expand his study of religion beyond the confines of the church as well.