For many years I taught at Penn State University, and living in that state inevitably drew me to the region’s very rich history. Recently, I did a study of slavery in that state as it existed in the early national period. I won’t list all my relevant publications here, but I include links to some…Continue Reading Pennsylvania History
I have been publishing on Pennsylvania history for forty-plus years. During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time working on very local religious history, in Central Pennsylvania, and produced several blogposts on it. They are collected in the document that follows. I think it makes some useful points about how we “read” a historic landscape,…Continue Reading Pennsylvania Religious History
I offer the following in what we might call the spirit of intellectual archaeology. Back in 2003, when velociraptors roamed the Earth, I had what I thought was a bright idea for a book project titled Occult City: Alternative Spiritualities in an American Metropolis, 1880-1940, the city in question being Philadelphia. That seemed sensible because…Continue Reading Occult City: A Book That Never Happened
These are several papers or articles by me that are “in development” to varying degrees, or which for various reasons are not easily available in print. Several were conference papers. In some cases, I have absorbed the material into some other work such as a published book, but in other instances the papers remain “orphans.”…Continue Reading Unpublished Papers and Articles