Randall Stephens chairs the history department at Eastern Nazarene College. He is the author (with Karl Giberson) of the forthcoming The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Harvard).
"Open conversation that leads to nothing." That's how Jon Stewart summed up his interview with popular right-wing historian David Barton. He was right: After 30 minutes of glib back-and-forth with Barton (ten of which made it onto TV), Stewart was flummoxed, worn down, unfunny.
To European visitors in the first half of the 19th century, Americans were like their newfangled steamboats: noisy, combustible, always on the move—and dirty. "I hardly know any annoyance so deeply repugnant to English feelings as the incessant, remorseless spitting of Americans," Frances Trollope reported.
Books
Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal
In the early 1900s an Englishman made his way across the American South. William Archer ventured by train and on horseback, observing the region’s peculiar folkways. He met with leading men, Booker T.
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