Paul Harvey, “Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)

Paul Harvey is a professor of history at the University of Colorado. His book Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) provides an accessible and expansive narrative of the relationship between race, religion and the American nation from the colonial age to recent times. Harvey encompasses the story of Anglo-Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans and how their religious experience defined their place within the national promise of religious freedom and pluralism. He demonstrates how religion was a tool for both subjugation and resistance to racial hierarchy. More recently Muslim, against the tide of religious prejudice and racialization, have sought their place in the nation and new immigrants are changing the face American Christianity. From the Spanish-American missions in the southwest to contemporary multi-ethnic urban churches, Harvey demonstrates the unique nature of American culture and how the nation has dealt with religious and racial diversity. As a synthesis of broad scholarship, Bounds of their Habitation is a must-read for anyone venturing out to understand this distinctive American phenomenon. Here is my conversation with Paul Harvey.

Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

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