Amanda Furiasse received her PhD in Religion and Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from Florida State University in 2018. Her research unfolds at the convergence of religion, health, and technology and explores how African communities use religious ritual as a mechanism to heal from violence and trauma. She is Co-Founder and Curator at the Religion, Art, and Technology Lab where she produces multi-sensory exhibitions for the public on the relationship between faith, aesthetics, and innovation.
In U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America(Backbeat, 2021) Bradley Morgan examines U2's iconic album and their critique of America as a symbol of hope. Through analysis of each track on The Joshua Tree, Morgan examines the 1987 release, the subsequent 2017 30th anniversary tour, and his own connection with the band and his Irish heritage.
U2 planted the seeds for The Joshua Tree during an existential journey through America. As Irishmen in the 1970s, the band grew up with the belief that America was a place of freedom and prosperity, a symbol of hope and a refuge for all people. However, global politics of the 1980s undermined that impression and fostered hypocritical policies that manipulated Americans and devastated people around the world.
Originally conceived as "The Two Americas," The Joshua Tree was U2's critique of America. Rather than living up to the ideal that the country was "an idea that belongs to people who need it most," the band found that America sacrificed equality and justice for populism and fascism. This book explores the political, social, and cultural themes rooted in The Joshua Tree when it was originally released in 1987 and how those themes resonated as a response to the election of Donald Trump when U2 toured for the album's 30th anniversary.
Working with a group of over fifty students at the Little Wound School in Kyle, South Dakota, Mark Hetzel collected countless hours of oral history interviews with Oglala Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Mark and his students then turned those interviews into a 7-part audio series that attempts to piece together the long and complicated story of the Lakota oyate, or nation, through the voices of local elders and community members. These are available in the form of a podcast called the “Heart of All Oral History Project.”
As Mark’s students write on the Heart of All website, “We see this project as an opportunity to finally tell our own story, to set the record straight, and to be reminded, by our own relatives, where we came from and who we really are.” Framed as a conversation between community elders and students at the Little Wound School, the podcast series reflects the oral storytelling tradition that represents how Lakota people traditionally passed their knowledge from one generation to the next. But this process was interrupted by the US Federal Government’s assimilationist policies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which punished Lakota people from speaking their language or practicing their traditional culture in boarding schools and other institutions of settler colonialism. By providing a space for Lakota people to tell their own history in their own voices, this oral history project thus represents a profound statement of Indigenous sovereignty and Lakota resistance to the epistemic imperialism of the United States. It is also a rich resource for non-Native people who are interested to learn more about the violent history of settler colonialism, the immense courage and steadfast resilience of Lakota people, as well as the beauty, creativity, and humor that characterizes Lakota culture.
This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here. If you want to learn more about the Heart of All Oral History Project, please go here.
Who are America's creationists? What do they want? Why do they think Jesus rode around on a dinosaur? In Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution(Oxford UP, 2021), Adam Laats reveals that common misconceptions about creationism have led Americans into a full century of unnecessary culture-war histrionics about evolution education and creationism. In fact, America does not now and never has had deep, fundamental disagreement about evolution. Not about the actual science of evolution, that is, and not in ways that truly matter to public policy. Americans do have significant disagreements about creationism, though, and Laats offers a new way to understand those battles. By describing the history of creationism and its many variations, this book demonstrates that the real conflict about evolution is not between creationists and evolution. The true landscape of American creationism is far more complicated than headlines suggest.
Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.
Working with a group of over fifty students at the Little Wound School in Kyle, South Dakota, Mark Hetzel collected countless hours of oral history interviews with Oglala Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Mark and his students then turned those interviews into a 7-part audio series that attempts to piece together the long and complicated story of the Lakota oyate, or nation, through the voices of local elders and community members. These are available in the form of a podcast called the “Heart of All Oral History Project.”
As Mark’s students write on the Heart of All website, “We see this project as an opportunity to finally tell our own story, to set the record straight, and to be reminded, by our own relatives, where we came from and who we really are.” Framed as a conversation between community elders and students at the Little Wound School, the podcast series reflects the oral storytelling tradition that represents how Lakota people traditionally passed their knowledge from one generation to the next. But this process was interrupted by the US Federal Government’s assimilationist policies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which punished Lakota people from speaking their language or practicing their traditional culture in boarding schools and other institutions of settler colonialism. By providing a space for Lakota people to tell their own history in their own voices, this oral history project thus represents a profound statement of Indigenous sovereignty and Lakota resistance to the epistemic imperialism of the United States. It is also a rich resource for non-Native people who are interested to learn more about the violent history of settler colonialism, the immense courage and steadfast resilience of Lakota people, as well as the beauty, creativity, and humor that characterizes Lakota culture.
This interview was conducted by Lukas Rieppel, a historian at Brown University. You can learn more about his research here. If you want to learn more about the Heart of All Oral History Project, please go here.
As globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity leaping towards extinction. The science of how languages are acquired is becoming more advanced and the internet is bringing us new ways of teaching the next generation, however it is increasingly challenging for minority languages to survive in the face of a handful of hegemonic 'super-tongues'.
In Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language(Zed Books, 2021), James Griffiths reports from the frontlines of the battle to preserve minority languages, from his native Wales, Hawaii and indigenous American nations, to southern China and Hong Kong. He explores the revival of the Welsh language as a blueprint for how to ensure new generations are not robbed of their linguistic heritage, outlines how loss of indigenous languages is the direct result of colonialism and globalisation and examines how technology is both hindering and aiding the fight to prevent linguistic extinction.
Introducing readers to compelling characters and examining how indigenous communities are fighting for their languages, Griffiths ultimately explores how languages hang on, what happens when they don't, and how indigenous tongues can be preserved and brought back from the brink.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches perspective to explain the factors - historical, political, and institutional - that led to the current system of mass imprisonment. Jeffrey Bellin's book Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover (Cambridge UP, 2022) examines the causes and impacts of mass incarceration on both the political and criminal justice systems. With accessible language and straightforward statistical analysis, former prosecutor turned law professor Jeffery Bellin provides a formula for reform to return to the low incarceration rates that characterized the United States prior to the 1970s.
Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.
As globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity leaping towards extinction. The science of how languages are acquired is becoming more advanced and the internet is bringing us new ways of teaching the next generation, however it is increasingly challenging for minority languages to survive in the face of a handful of hegemonic 'super-tongues'.
In Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language(Zed Books, 2021), James Griffiths reports from the frontlines of the battle to preserve minority languages, from his native Wales, Hawaii and indigenous American nations, to southern China and Hong Kong. He explores the revival of the Welsh language as a blueprint for how to ensure new generations are not robbed of their linguistic heritage, outlines how loss of indigenous languages is the direct result of colonialism and globalisation and examines how technology is both hindering and aiding the fight to prevent linguistic extinction.
Introducing readers to compelling characters and examining how indigenous communities are fighting for their languages, Griffiths ultimately explores how languages hang on, what happens when they don't, and how indigenous tongues can be preserved and brought back from the brink.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male.
God: An Anatomy (Knopf, 2022) present a portrait—arrived at through the author’s close examination of and research into the Bible—of a god in ancient myths and rituals who was a product of a particular society, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then, shaped by their own circumstances and experience of the world. From head to toe—and every part of the body in between—this is a god of stunning surprise and complexity, one we have never encountered before.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Jeremy Duperteis Bangs, a leading expert in the history of the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony, overturns stereotypes with exciting new analyses of colonial and Native life in Plymouth Colony, of religious toleration, and of historical memory. New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration (Brill, 2019) brings together a wealth of insights that will surely benefit anyone interested in the origins of New England's first colony.
Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.
