Year-End Best Books in Race and Religion in American History
BY PAUL HARVEY
DECEMBER 26, 2016
Wth all the memes wishing a good riddance to 2016, and John Oliver’s epic send-off to this annus horribilis, it may seem small comfort that this was a year that might be remembered as one of the most important in a long time in my corner of the scholarly universe: for works that illuminate race and religion in America, and for books reinterpreting African American religious history for a new, more disillusioned generation.
If you surmise this could be self-serving, very well, it is. My own attempt at a broad and readable narrative of the subject, Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History, was published just in the wake of the November counter-revolution.
As I completed the book in January with an epilogue about the present, however, I fell prey to the historian’s trap – to play prophet rather than analyst of the past. And hence, in a couple of paragraph about Donald Trump’s campaign, which seemed in January destined to fizzle out at some point, I wrote that “Trump’s suggestion were less policy proposals than symbolic statements articulating the historic prejudices of great numbers of Americans, who feared immigrants generally, and he decline of white American nationalism particularly.”
And voila! Ten months later, and the primary enabler, publisher, and purveyor of those fears, Stephen Bannon, sits aside the President-Elect, while fake news outlets, white supremacist sites, and messengers of a populist ethno-nationalism have ascended to a central place in public discourse. As noted above, “Bad: Everything else.”
http://religiondispatches.org/year-end-best-books-in-race-and-religion-in-american-history/