The Way of Improvement Leads Home: American History, Religion, Politics, and Academic life.

This year, our host John Fea has been participating in a new podcast venture on the history of American evangelicalism with historians Daniel Hummel and Maggie Capra. We want listeners to The Way of Improvement Podcast to be aware of this new 12-part podcast series, so we added it to our feed. Enjoy!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After an uneventful one-term presidency, John Quincy Adams was elected to the House of Representatives and fought against the institution of slavery. Our guest is Bob Crawford, bass player for the Avett Brothers and author of America's Founding Son: John Quincy Adams, from President to Political Maverick. We talk about Adams's moral convictions, his relationship with abolitionists, and his distrust of democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How did the suburbs shape American Catholicism? Today's guest on the podcast is historian Stephen M. Koeth, author of Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America. Koeth argues that postwar suburbanization revolutionized the Catholic parish, the relationship between clergy and laity, conceptions of parochial education, and Catholic participation in US politics, and thereby was a significant factor in the religious disaffiliation that only accelerated in subsequent decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Annette Laing, a "proper historian" with a Ph.D. in the field, wants to dispel the myth that history education occurs only in the classroom. She is the chief proprietor of "Non-Boring History,"a Substack devoted to bringing the past to bear on the present in a way accessible to history buffs of all ages. If you are a public historian, you do not want to miss this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What is the difference between "fortress thinking" and "pilgrimage thinking"? How do these modes of thinking shape the academy today? In this episode, Rhonda and Douglas Jacobsen present a new approach to the Christian intellectual life. They are the authors of Christianity and Intellectual Inquiry: Thinking as Pilgrimage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What is a “white liberal” and why do people hate them so much? Conservatives hate them for being so tolerant. Libertarians hate them for believing that the government might have a role to play in advancing a good society. Socialists and others on the left blame white liberalism for promoting capitalism. Our guest on this episode is Kevin Schultz, author of Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our guest in this episode, historian Andrew Hartman, writes, "Americans are thinking about [Karl] Marx to a degree not matched since the 1960s, or perhaps even the 1930s." Join us for a discussion of Hartman's new book, Karl Marx in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our guest on this episode of the podcast is Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. He is with us to talk about his more recent book, The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America. In the wake of the American Revolution, Hamilton and Jefferson developed contrasting, often clashing visions for balancing liberty and power in the new republic. It is a debate that continues to define–and divide–our country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most of the stories we will tell about the American Revolution during the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026 will take on a feel of American exceptionalism. They will come mostly from within the geographical bounds of what today is the United States, and most of those stories will concentrate on the eastern seaboard—the so-called "13 colonies." Our guest in this episode, University of Maryland historian Richard Bell, encourages us to take a broader view. He is the author of The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Many Americans have heard of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. But did you know that her father was a famous evangelist, her brother was "the most famous man in America," and her sister founded the home economics movement? In this episode, we talk with author Obbie Tyler Todd about the Beecher family, one of the most important families in 19th-century America. Todd is the author of The Beechers: America's Most Influential Family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, we talk with David Waldstreicher, author of the George Washington Prize-winning The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence. We discuss early American poetry as the eighteenth-century equivalent of pop music and tweeting, the influence of evangelical Christianity on Wheatley's poetry, and the tension between slavery and the American Revolution in colonial Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode we talk with historian Paul Putz about the history of Christianity and sports in America. This episode is for sports fans, history buffs, and anyone interested in how sports ministries like Fellowship of Christian Athletes and Athletes in Action navigated some of the major social, cultural, and political events of post-World War II America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What does it mean to be Black and evangelical—and why has that story been so often overlooked? In this episode, John Fea sits down with Vincent Bacote, co-creator and host of the new documentary Black and Evangelical. They explore the history of Black evangelicals in America, from the Nottage Brothers and the Great Migration to the founding of the National Black Evangelical Association and the unforgettable moment Tom Skinner took the stage at Urbana ‘70. Bacote discusses why this documentary matters today, how white evangelical institutions shaped (and sometimes constrained) Black evangelical life, and the enduring tension between gospel proclamation and confronting systemic racism. Watch the documentary for free at blackevangelicals.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode we talk with Wesleyan University historian Joseph Slaughter, author of Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in Early America. He offers a new account of the interplay between religion and capitalism in early American history by focusing on 19th-century Protestant entrepreneurs and how they infused faith into their business and, in turn, how those businesses shaped our capitalist economy today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

She was a privileged baby boomer who grew up on a horse farm in segregated Virginia. By her 21st birthday she had worked for peace in Communist Europe, traveled the country in the cause of racial justice, marched for voting rights in Selma, and led anti-Vietnam protests at Bryn Mawr College. Our guest in this episode is distinguished American historian and former Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust. She talks about her memoir, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In his new book Bridge & Tunnel Boys, historian Jim Cullen discusses how Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen represented what he calls "the metropolitan sound of the American century." In this episode of the podcast, we talk with Cullen about how Joel and Springsteen were shaped by their lives on the periphery of New York City. Our conversation ranges across several subjects, including politics, cosmopolitanism, history, the culture of the 1980s, and even Taylor Swift! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How did Ronald Reagan use the media to shape his evangelical vision for America, a vision rooted in political freedom, economic freedom, and religious freedom that is still with us today and continues to define the discourse of both of our political parties? In this episode we talk to Diane Winston, the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the University of Southern California, about her new book Righting the American Dream: How the Media Mainstreamed Reagan's Evangelical Vision. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Should professional historians write for the general public? If so, who is the "public" they are trying to reach? And when historians do write for the public how do they manage to make their work readable and accessible without sacrificing scholarly integrity? What role does politics, and even activism, play in popular history writing? These are questions that the historical profession, and in some respects, the nation, are currently wrestling with. Our guest today, historian Nick Witham, author of Popularizing the Past: Historians, Publishers, and Readers in Postwar America, reminds us that these questions are not new. Some of the country's most prominent writer-historians, including Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Howard Zinn, and Gerda Lerner, grappled with how to reach the public with good historical scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There was a profound difference between Christian Socialism and the so-called "Social Gospel." Janine Giordano Drake explains these differences in her new book The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement. Drake argues that Protestant reformers associated with Mainline Protestantism and the Federal Council of Churches undermined workers' efforts to bring about social democracy in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Most Americans probably think of conservative evangelicals as climate change deniers who believe global warming is a hoax. If this is you, you would not be entirely wrong. But our guest today, Neill Pogue, author of The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle Between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement, suggests that this story is much more complicated. We discuss how evangelicals moved from environmental stewards in the 1970s to opponents of global warming by the end of the 1990s. Pogue also talks about the current state of evangelical concerns about the environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What is fraternity? Our guest today, political scientist Susan McWilliams Barndt, discusses her father's 1973 magnum opus The Idea of Fraternity in America. We talk about the work of Wilson Carey McWilliams, the historical context in which he wrote his magisterial work of political theory and history, and why we still need his ideas today. The Idea of Fraternity was just re-released in a 50th anniversary edition with an introduction from McWilliams Barndt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you've listened to this podcast over the years you know that we champion "historical thinking" as one of our best hopes for sustaining and preserving American democratic life. In this episode we talk with Zachary Cote, the Executive Director of THINKING NATION, a non-profit organization devoted to helping K-12 social studies students mature into citizens who are empowered to analyze information effectively, think historically, and write persuasively in order to build a better democratic future. If you are a school superintendent, principal, or history teacher you are not going to miss this episode!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What is American evangelicalism? In her new book The Evangelical Imagination, Karen Swallow Prior, one of the most careful observers of, and participants in, evangelical life, analyses the literature, art, and popular culture that has surrounded the movement and unpacks some of its most deeply held concepts, ideas, values, and practices. Our conversation revolves around topics such as revivalism, wokeness, self-improvement, domesticity, consumerism, empire-building, and the Bible's metaphorical language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know the Jesuits were some of the largest slaveholders in colonial America? Our guest in this episode is Rachel L. Swarns, author of The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved And Sold to Build the American Catholic Church. We discuss the Jesuit's 1838 sale of 272 men, women and children for the purpose of saving Georgetown University and the implications of this sale for one enslaved family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode we talk to historian Larry Eskridge about the film "Jesus Revolution." Eskridge, the author of God's Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America, places the film in context, discusses the legacy of the Jesus People Movement for contemporary evangelicalism, and tells us a bit about his own experience with the movement. If you have seen "Jesus Revolution" and want to learn more, this episode is a must listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Have you ever heard someone say that they were "spiritual," but not "religious?" Our guest in this episode, Stephen Prothero, offers a "pre-history" of this idea. According to Prothero, the move from traditional/institutional/confessional "religion" to seeker "spirituality" runs through the Eugene Exman, the religion editor at Harper Brothers from 1928-1965. Throughout his long career, Exman published Harry Emerson Fosdick, Howard Thurman, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and others. Join us for a discussion of Prothero's recent book God the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want to learn more about the evangelical fascination with the rapture, Israel, the antichrist, and the prophetic books of the Bible you will enjoy this episode. Our guest is Daniel Hummel, author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation. We talk with Dan about John Nelson Darby, Plymouth Brethren, Dwight L. Moody, Dallas Theological Seminary, Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey. John Hagee, and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The National Basketball Association is a multi-billion-dollar industry driven by Black athletes with global influence. But as our guest Theresa Runstedtler argues, the success of today's NBA players rests on the labor activism of 1970s NBA stars who fought with owners for economic control over their labor and a Black style of hoops born in the playgrounds of urban America. Runstedtler is the author of Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation That Saved the Soul of the NBA.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode we talk with historian and biographer Nancy Koester about her new book on nineteenth-century abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth. Our discussion focuses on Truth's lifelong pursuit of a just society, a deeper knowledge of God, and a sense of community for her and her family. Koester's book is titled We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode we explore the life, ideas, and writings of one of the 20th-century most influential American historians--C. Vann Woodward, author of The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Our guest is James Cobb, author if C. Vann Woodward: America's Historian. In our conversation we discuss Woodward's liberalism and how he balanced historical writing with social activism over a career that spanned nearly five decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The American revolution happened in the midst of a smallpox epidemic. In one of the timeliest history books of the publishing season, historian Andrew Wehrman visits the podcast to talk about what the patriots of the American Revolution and the founding fathers thought about public health. His book Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution is a must read for anyone who cares about the relationship between political liberty and the government's role in preventing disease in eighteenth-century America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode we chat with historian Jonathan Cohen about his edited collection Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen and the current state of "Springsteen Studies." Is there any connection between Cohen's current book, For a Dollar and A Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America, and his work on Springsteen? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

According to historian Kathryn Gin Lum, Americans have long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term "heathen" fell out of common use by the early 1900s, but the ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear. Americans still treat large swaths of the world as 'other' due to their assumed need for conversion to American ways. Lum is the author of Heathen: Religion and Race in American History and she is our guest in this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Are you an educator? An administrator? A school board member? Does your life intersect in some way with a public school? If so, this episode is for you. We talk about the religion and transatlantic roots of American public education with historian David Komline, author of The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Does the American Left have religion problem? What can progressives learn from people like Dorothy Day, Ignazio Silone, Henry Wallace, Staughton Lynd, and Cornell West? Many of these thinkers and activists offered a powerful vision for a moral and just society--challenging conservatives, liberals, and Marxists to think differently about the world. In this episode we talk to Vaneesa Cook, author of Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our guest on this episode, public historian Alena Pirok, explains how John D. Rockefeller's vision of Colonial Williamsburg eventually gave way to a vision of the site championed by an early 20th century clergyman who saw ghosts. Join us for a conversion on Pirok's new book, The Spirit of Colonial Williamsburg: Ghosts and Interpreting the Recreated Past.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Have you visited the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C.? How about the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina? In this episode, historian Devin Manzullo-Thomas, author of Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Commemoration and Religion's Presence of the Past, helps us make sense of these sites of evangelical heritage.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, our 100th, host John Fea delivers his 2022 Conference on Faith and History presidential address. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do you do genealogical research? In this episode, historian Francesca Morgan talks about her new book A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History. She discusses Americans' fascination with tracking family lineage through three centuries and how the practice has intersected with race, class, religion, and commercialism.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What do Sammy Davis Jr., Muhammad Ali, Clare Booth Luce, Whitaker Chambers, and Charles Colson all have in common? They all had very public religious conversions. In this episode, historian Rebecca Davis joins us to talk about her new book Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed Politics.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Using America's obsession with Washington's hair as his window, historian Keith Beutler examines how "physicality," or the use of the material objects, was the most important way early Americans (1790-1840)--museum founders, African Amerians, evangelicals, and school teachers-- remembered the nation's founding. Beutler is the author of George Washington's Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders (University of Virginia Press, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode we talk with historian Bruce Berglund about Vladmir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Our conversation focuses on Putin's use of history to justify the invasion, the insufficiency of the Russian military, the international ban on Russian athletics, and the role that race has played in the invasion.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

American universities entered the 1960s with the hope of bringing a high-quality system of universal higher education to all comers. But by the early 1970s hope turned to despair as universities gave way to neoliberalism, corporatism, and a powerful conservative backlash. In this episode we talk with historian Ellen Schrecker about her new book The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our guest in this episode is Gettysburg College historian Jill Ogline Titus. Her new book, Gettysburg 1963, tells the story of the centennial celebration of the Civil War in the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. Through an examination of the experiences of political leaders, civil rights activists, preservation-minded Civil War enthusiasts, and residents, Titus shows how this town continues to serve as a place where Americans work-out their understanding of national identity.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Less than a year after the American Revolution, a group of North Carolina farmers hatched a plot to assassinate the colony's leading patriots, including the governor. In this episode, Boston University historian Brendan McConville talks about the Gourd Patch Conspiracy. The catalysts of this movement were "The Brethren," a group of Protestants who were angry about Catholic and deists influences in the revolutionary North Carolina government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our guest in this episode is historian Robert Tracy McKenzie, author of We the Fallen the People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy. In the spirit of the 20th-century theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr, McKenzie places the Christian doctrine of original sin at the center of early American political history. He believes that we must come to grips with the fact that America has not always been great or even good. His work forces us to rethink just about everything we thought we knew about democratic life in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did Marcus Whitman "save" Oregon? In this episode we talk with Sarah Koenig, author ofProvidence and the Invention of American History. She tells the story of a Protestant missionary to the Pacific Northwest and how his story provides a window into debates over the meaning of the past in both the 19th-century and today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Charles Lindbergh was a celebrated aviator, the father of the baby abducted in the "crime of the century," a Nazi sympathizer, and a believer in eugenics. He also carried a small New Testament with him as he entered the South Pacific theatre of World War II and offered a spiritual critique of technological progress. Our guest in this episode is Christopher Gehrz, author of Charles Lindbergh: A Religious Biography of America's Most Infamous Pilot. Gerhz helps us make sense of these contradictory impulses in the life of one of the 20th-centuries most famous men. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

John C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. In this episode we talk with Robert Elder, author of Calhoun: American Heretic. Elder shows that Calhoun's story is crucial for understanding the political climate in which we find ourselves today. If we excise him from the mainstream of American history, he argues, we are left with a distorted understanding of our past and no way to explain our present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode we talk with Nathan McAlister, Humanities Program Manager at the Kansas State Department of Education in Topeka. When it comes to history education, Kansas is doing it the right way. Join us for a wide-ranging discussion on civics, historical thinking, social studies standards, and the controversial debates over race in the American history classroom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices