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Via Dolorosa of the Confederacy
My piece on visiting Appomattox Court House is up on the blog of StreetLight Magazine. Click here. →
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#7–The War Before the War: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
A second history book makes the list in the #7 spot of our annual countdown of Best Reads. Anthony Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, focuses on a potent symbol of antebellum America, the fugitive slave, and shows how the unspooling →
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#8–These Truths: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
Jill LePore’s These Truths: A History of the United States came out in 2018 but I got to it this year and was glad I did. The audacity of a one-volume history covering a 500+ year arc of the American story, especially when that story has become so contested and fragmented, was a thing to behold. →
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Who’s Going to Make the Case for America? (I Mean, Along with Jill Lepore)
Late in her brief but thought-provoking new book, historian Jill Lepore gets down to why she would write something titled This America: The Case for the Nation: “In American history, liberals have failed, time and again, to defeat illiberalism except by making appeals to national aims and ends…Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But →
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Stirring, Terrifying, Inspiring, Troubling—Yeah, That’s America
The first thing I note about Jill Lepore’s new one-volume history of the United States is how out of style it is. In an age of disintegrating consensus and competing truths, who would dare to attempt a comprehensive narrative of our national story? Fortunately, Jill Lepore would and the result is a book you’ll surely →
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Why a Story of Fugitive Slaves May Not Just Be History
In light of the current Great Divide, there is no innocent reading of history. We mine every thesis about the Constitutional Convention or the Civil War for evidence of another agenda. History becomes covert commentary on Trump and the Resistance. So when Andrew Delbanco’s wonderful new book on fugitive slaves in antebellum America landed in →
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What If We Can’t ‘Get Past’ Sex? A Review of Entangled
The following review was originally published on The Englewood Review of Books and is republished with permission. The author is Heartlands editor, Alex Joyner. What if questions of human sexuality are not something that the United Methodist Church (UMC), like other mainline Protestant denominations, have to settle and get past, but rather are the foundation on which the →
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#7 Heartlands Best Reads of 2018: The Thin Light of Freedom
History books are always going to find a way to my reading stand. One of the reasons is that I had one of the country’s greatest historians as a professor back in the day. Ed Ayers told the story of the United States, particularly of the American South, with an eye for conflicts, resilience, and →
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Jarena Lee and the Day the Preacher Stumbled: Exhortation and the Methodist Future
The preacher was in trouble. It’s hard to take the life out of the story of Jonah, but somehow he had. Struggling preachers are not unusual. We’ve all had a Sunday. Or several. But in early 19th-century Methodism, including the AME branch of Methodism, (of which this preacher was a part), the official preachers had →
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The Vicious State of Politics…Then: Ed Ayers on Heartlands-part 1 of 3
Edward Ayers is not only one of the nation’s preeminent interpreters of American History, he is a consummate storyteller and educator. Ayers is the Tucker Boatwright Professor of the Humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. His latest book, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America won →
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