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Listed below are a
number of on-line, easily accessible primary and secondary sources,
databases, and other resources for the study of religion and American
culture. These should come in quite handy for your final paper.
EMAIL LISTS & BLOGS
| GENERAL ACADEMIC RESOURCES
| LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES | MUSIC | PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIALS
| PROFESSIONAL
ORGANIZATIONS, CENTERS, & ON-LINE PROJECTS | PUBLICATIONS | RELIGION & FILM | RELIGION IN THE NEWS | RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS | STATISTICS & MAPS | TEACHING AMERICAN
RELIGIOUS HISTORY | TELEVISION & RADIO PROGRAMS
EMAIL LISTS &
BLOGS
H-AmRel
A member of H-Net Humanities &
Social Sciences OnLine. Engaged in scholarly discussion of religion in
American society from pre-colonial times to present, H-AmRel is a
premier resource for academics, clergy, and librarians alike.
H-Buddhism
The Buddhist Scholars Information
Network (H-Buddhism) serves as a medium for the exchange of information
regarding academic resources, new research projects, scholarly
publications, university job listings, and so forth, for specialists in
Buddhist Studies who are currently affiliated with academic
institutions.
H-Pentecostalism
H-Pentecostalism serves as an online
forum for communication and interaction among scholars regarding all
aspects of Pentecostal history.
H-Southern-Religion
H-Southern-Religion provides an
online venue for interaction between scholars in a broad range of
fields, from American religious history to southern religious history,
and from African American studies to gender studies.
Religion
in American History Blog
A group blog to foster discussion and
share research, insights, reviews, observations, syllabi, links, new
books, project information, grant opportunities, seminars, lectures,
and thoughts about religion in American history, and American religious
history.
Religion
News Blog
Religion News Blog is a non-profit
service providing academics, religion professionals and other
researchers with religion & cult news.
GENERAL
ACADEMIC RESOURCES
American
Women’s History: A Research Guide – Religion
Contains bibliographies, primary source information, and a list of
internet sites related to women and religion in America.
The
Andover-Harvard Theological Library: Resource Guides
ENC’s
Nease Library
Valuable
resources at the library include the ATLA Religion
Database and JSTOR. The latter contains runs of the American
Historical Review, Church History, Harvard Theological Journal of
Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion and
American Culture, and Reviews in American History. Articles can
be
downloaded as pdfs. Some of these publications run back to the
late
nineteenth century. See also, the library's countless other
resources
through Proquest and other portals.
Puritanism
& Colonial Period: to 1700 (Perspectives in American Literature)
Contains
an extensive bibliography and useful outlines on Puritan religion.
The Yale
University Library Guide to American Religious History
A
collection of links, sources, databases, and bibliographies.
LIBRARIES
AND ARCHIVES
The
American Jewish Historical Society
Arab
American National Museum Library
Archives of
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
The Associated Archives at St.
Mary’s Seminary and University, Catholic
Church
of the Nazarene Archives
Congregational Library
Dixon Pentecostal Research Center,
Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee)
Episcopal
Church Archives
Family Search,
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
The Flower
Pentecostal Heritage Center, Assemblies of God
The General Commission on
Archives and History for The United Methodist Church
International
Pentecostal Holiness Church Archives and Research Center
Islam in America Collection,
DePaul University
The Jacob Rader Marcus
Center of the American Jewish Archives
Lutheran Church--Missouri
Synod, Concordia Historical Institute
The On-line Swedenborgian
Library
New England Province of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits)
Archives
Presbyterian
Historical Society
The Southern Baptist Historical Library
and Archive
The University of Notre Dame Archives,
Catholic
MUSIC
Archives of African American
Music and Culture
A repository of materials covering a range of African American musical
idioms and cultural expressions from the post-World War II era.
Our collections highlight popular, religious, and classical music, with
genres ranging from blues and gospel to R&B and contemporary hip
hop. The AAAMC also houses extensive materials related to the
documentation of black radio.
“Now What a
Time”: Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943
(Library of Congress)
Consists of approximately one hundred sound recordings, primarily blues
and gospel songs, and related documentation from the folk festival at
Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), Fort
Valley, Georgia. The documentation was created by John Wesley Work III
in 1941 and by Lewis Jones and Willis Laurence James in March, June,
and July 1943.
The John and
Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip (Library of Congress)
A multiformat ethnographic field collection that includes nearly 700
sound recordings, as well as fieldnotes, dust jackets, and other
manuscripts documenting a three-month, 6,502-mile trip through the
southern United States.
Music for the
Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885 (Library of Congress)
Consists of over 47,000 pieces of sheet music registered for copyright
during the years 1870 to 1885. Included are popular songs, piano music,
sacred and secular choral music, solo instrumental music, method books
and instructional materials, and music for band and orchestra.
Hispano Music
and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B. Rael Collection
(Library of Congress)
An online presentation of a
multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting religious and
secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural Northern New
Mexico and Southern Colorado.
PRIMARY
SOURCE MATERIALS
The
African American Odyssey (Library of Congress)
The exhibition The African American
Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the incomparable
African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying
more than 240 items, including books, government documents,
manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this
is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library, and the
first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of
the Library's buildings.
American Life
Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers Project, 1936-1940
(Library of Congress)
These life histories were written by
the staff of the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers' Project for
the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from
1936-1940. The Library of Congress collection includes 2,900 documents
representing the work of over 300 writers from 24 states. Typically
2,000-15,000 words in length, the documents consist of drafts and
revisions, varying in form from narrative to dialogue to report to case
history. The histories describe the informant's family education,
income, occupation, political views, religion and mores, medical needs,
diet and miscellaneous observations. Pseudonyms are often substituted
for individuals and places named in the narrative texts.
Boston Public Library
Digital Resources
The BPL has a host of tremendous
resources on its web page. All you need to access this is a BPL
card, which is free and available to all Boston-area residents.
The site's History material is particularly convenient. There you
can find datatbases like American History and Life, Archive of
Americana, History Resource Center: U.S., and Gale Virtual Reference
Library. See also the Newspapers section, where you'll find
hundreds of searchable weeklies and dailies, including a number of
southern papers going back to the 1860s. In addition this link
contains sublinks to full-text academic journals and magazines.
Documenting the American
South
Documenting the
American South (DocSouth)
is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to
texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature,
and culture. Currently DocSouth includes ten thematic collections of
books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews,
and songs.
Early
Virginia Religious Petitions (Library of Congress)
Early Virginia Religious Petitions
presents images of 423 petitions submitted to the Virginia legislature
between 1774 and 1802 from more than eighty counties and cities. Drawn
from the Library of Virginia's Legislative Petitions collection, the
petitions concern such topics as the historic debate over the
separation of church and state championed by James Madison and Thomas
Jefferson, the rights of dissenters such as Quakers and Baptists, the
sale and division of property in the established church, and the
dissolution of unpopular vestries.
First-Person
Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920 (Library of Congress)
This compilation of printed texts
from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
documents the culture of the nineteenth-century American South from the
viewpoint of Southerners. It includes the diaries, autobiographies,
memoirs, travel accounts, and ex-slave narratives of not only prominent
individuals, but also of relatively inaccessible populations: women,
African Americans, enlisted men, laborers, and Native Americans. An
award from the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library
Competition supported the digitization of 101 titles published during
and after the Civil War. The University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill supplemented these titles with another forty first-person
narratives, many published before 1860.
Google
Books
Access millions of religious titles from the 1600s to the
present. Many are available in full.
Making of America
MoA is a digital library of primary
sources in American social history from the antebellum period through
reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject
areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion,
and science and technology. The collection currently contains
approximately 9,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century
imprints. For more details about the project, see About MoA. Making of
America is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation.
Religion and the
Founding of the American Republic (Library of Congress)
This Library of Congress exhibition
demonstrates that many of the colonies that in 1776 became the United
States of America were settled by men and women of deep religious
convictions who in the seventeenth century crossed the Atlantic Ocean
to practice their faith freely.
In the
Beginning Was the Word: The Russian Church and Native Alaskan Cultures
(Library of Congress)
The coming together of a renowned
scholar and a rich, but relatively unknown and unused archive of
historically significant documents is a rare phenomenon. Last winter
[1993-1994] the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James H. Billington, asked
Dr. Vyacheslav Ivanov, one of the foremost linguists of our day, to
review and evaluate the Alaskan Russian Church Archives, and to select
some items for an exhibition. This installation is the direct result of
that encounter, and it offers a rare opportunity to witness the
insights that such an exchange can produce.
PROFESSIONAL
ORGANIZATIONS, CENTERS, & ON-LINE PROJECTS
American Academy of Religion
In a world where religion plays so central a role in social, political,
and economic events, as well as in the lives of communities and
individuals, there is a critical need for ongoing reflection upon and
understanding of religious traditions, issues, questions, and values.
The American Academy of Religion's mission is to promote such
reflection through excellence in scholarship and teaching in the field
of religion.
American
Society of Church History
Beliefnet
Beliefnet has
a wide variety of resources--articles, quizzes,
devotionals, sacred text searches, message boards, prayer circles,
photo galleries and much more. . .
The
Boisi
Center for Religion and American Public Life, Boston College
The goal of the Boisi Center is to create opportunities where a
community of scholars, policy makers, media and religious leaders in
the Boston area and nationally can connect in conversations and
scholarly reflection around issues at the intersection of religion and
American public life.
Buddhist Studies at UC Berkeley
Center
for the Study of Religion and American Culture, Indiana
University-Purdue University Indianapolis
A research and public outreach
institute devoted to the promotion of
the understanding of the relation between religion and other features
of American culture.
Center for the
Study of Religion and Culture, Vanderbilt University
“The Center for the Study of Religion and Culture (CSRC) was
established in 2003 by the University to develop, promote, and increase
faculty research at the intersections of religion and culture.”
The Center for the Study
of Religion at Princeton University
The CSR a major academic initiative that aims to encourage scholarly
research, teaching, and public discussion about religion through
diverse perspectives of the humanities and social sciences.
Center for
the Study of Religion, UCLA
The
Center grew out of an informally organized group of faculty and
students interested in religion. This group has held a weekly
colloquium and mounted annual conferences and evening lecture series
since 1990. UCLA has also had for over twenty years an
Interdepartmental Degree Program (IDP) offering an undergraduate major
in the Study of Religion.
The Cushwa Center for
the Study of American Catholicism, Notre Dame University
Provides resources and critical commentary for media coverage of U.S.
Catholicism and collaborating with church leaders and pastoral workers
to enhance the vitality of Catholic life in the United States.
French
and Spanish Missions in North America
Part of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, this site, created by
John Corrigan and Tracy Leavelle, with Arthur Remillard, includes maps,
data files, and a number of useful links.
The
Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals
Founded in 1982 to encourage and support research on evangelical
Christianity in North America. Read back issues of the ISAE bulletin,
find links to a variety of websites related to evangelicalism, and
other valuable resources.
The
Leonard E. Greenberg
Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, Trinity College
The Center was established in 1996 to advance knowledge and
understanding of the varied roles that religious movements,
institutions, and ideas play in the contemporary world; to explore
challenges posed by religious pluralism and tensions between religious
and secular values; and to examine the influence of religion on
politics, civic culture, family life, gender roles, and other issues in
the United States and elsewhere in the world.
The
Material History of Religion Project
More than just ideas and institutions, religion in America is a rich
mixture of objects, behaviors and people. Working from 1995
through 2001, the Material History of American Religion Project studied
the history of American religion in all its complexity by focusing on
material objects and economic themes.
Mormon
History Association
Religion and American
Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association
We are pleased to welcome you to the Religion and American Culture
Caucus of the American Studies Association. We invite and encourage all
ASA members who are interested in exploring the place of religion in
American life, and promoting the study and teaching of religion within
American Studies, to join.
Society
for Pentecostal Studies
Wesleyan
Theological Society
PUBLICATIONS
Books and Culture
A wide-ranging review, covering the arts, religion, the humanities,
music, and film.
The Christian Century
The
Christian Century magazine believes that the Christian faith
calls Christians to a profound engagement with the world--an engagement
of both head and heart. We think Christians can and must articulate
their faith in a way that is meaningful and intellectually compelling
to those around them.
First Things
Is
published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an
interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose
purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the
ordering of society.
The Journal of Religion and Film
Examines the description,
critique, and embodiment of religion in film.
The Journal of Southern Religion
This is a peer-reviewed academic journal that I co-edit with Bland
Whitley, Library of Virginia. It is parked on the Florida State
University server. The JSR is entirely online and contains
articles and reviews by the leading scholars in the field. It
will be especially of use to anyone researching religion in the
American South. Topics include Catholicism, civil rights,
southern sacred music, violence and southern religion, fundamentalism,
pentecostalism, gender, and much more.
The North Star Journal
An on-line journal covering African American religious history and
culture.
The Revealer
A daily review of religion and the press.
Sojourners
The publications mission is “to articulate the biblical call to social
justice, inspiring hope and building a movement to transform
individuals, communities, the church, and the world.”
RELIGION
& FILM
Religion and
Myth in the Movies: A Bibliography of Books and Articles in the UC
Berkeley Libraries
RELIGION IN THE NEWS
Beliefnet: News
and Blogs
The Christian Science Monitor:
Religion and Ethics
The Journal of Southern Religion:
Southern Religion in the News
National
Public Radio: Religion
The New York Times: Religion and
Belief
Religion
and Ethics Newsweekly
Religion News from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life
Collects headlines from newspapers and magazines across the U.S.
Browsers can sort by category: bioethics, death penalty, gay marriage,
religion and politics, religion and public schools…
Religion News Service
“For over 70 years, Religion News
Service has been an authoritative
source of news about religion, ethics, spirituality and moral issues.
Based in Washington, D.C., RNS has a network of correspondents around
the world, providing news and information on all faiths and religious
movements to the nation's leading newspapers, news magazines, broadcast
organizations and religious publications.”
Washington Post: Religion
RELIGIOUS
MOVEMENTS
STATISTICS
& MAPS
The American Religion Data
Archive
Providing free access to quality data on religion. The ARDA allows you
to interactively explore the highest quality data on American and
international religion using online features for generating national
profiles, maps, church membership overviews, denominational heritage
trees, tables, charts, and other summary reports.
Glenmary Research Center
Disseminates religious demography in three primary formats: books,
maps, and data files. Some of these resources are now available for
ordering over the Web.
American
Ethnic Geography: Map
Gallery of Religion in the U.S.
A series of county-level choropleth maps reveals the distribution of
the larger and more regionally concentrated church bodies. The maps are
in GIF format.
The Pew
Forum on Religion and Public Life: Research, News, Discussion
Seeks to promote a deeper understanding of issues at the intersection
of religion and public affairs. The Forum pursues its mission by
delivering timely, impartial information to national opinion leaders,
including government officials and journalists. As a nonpartisan,
non-advocacy organization, the Forum does not take positions on policy
debates.
The Pew Forum on Religion
and Public Life: U.S. Religious Landscape Survey
TEACHING
AMERICAN RELIGIOUS HISTORY
TELEVISION
& RADIO PROGRAMS
Speaking of
Faith
Public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas.
Each week, Krista Tippett probes the myriad ways in which religious
impulses inform every aspect of life and culture, nationally and
globally. Hear full broadcasts and read additional content.
Religion
and Ethics Newsweekly
Hosted by veteran journalist Bob Abernethy, this one-of-a-kind
television newsmagazine provides insightful coverage and analysis of
the news, people, events and trends behind the headlines in the rich
world of religion and ethics. Read transcripts and view programs
at this companion site.
Religious
Broadcasting Site at the University of Virginia
A gateway to Internet resources about religious broadcasting. We will
begin with the simple goal of creating easy access links to the
resources that broadcasters themselves have created. When that task is
accomplished, we will attempt to identify other Internet commentary
about religious broadcasting….
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