I have a couple of book projects in the works.
One is a history of George Washington’s Mount Vernon as a Protestant pilgrimage site. There is a chapter dedicated to Washington’s relics in and stories about Washington’s relics appear throughout Protestant Relics in Early America, but there is a much longer story to tell about Washington’s relics and their role in the preservation and elevation of Mount Vernon as a site of national memory. Most nineteenth-century Americans regarded Washington’s bodily relics as supernatural objects that connected the living on earth to his soul in heaven. And most Americans regarded Mount Vernon as a sacred Protestant place where heaven and earth were connected because Washington’s corpse was buried there. Washington’s relics and Mount Vernon became embroiled in debates over American citizenship, slavery, religious freedom, national identity, and historic preservation. This book will explore how material practices of Protestantism that focused on sensing Washington’s relics at Mount Vernon shaped American politics in the nineteenth century.
I presented some of this research at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) and at a book talk at The George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon in August 2025. This research will also appear in a short essay titled “Bones” for a special 20th anniversary issue of Material Religion in December 2025.
Image: “The Spirit of the Union,” Currier & Ives, lithograph, 1860. Image from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the family of C. B. Shafer.
I am also working on a book about the material history of Bibles and relics from the Civil War era to the early twentieth century United States. This book will take seriously the role of supernatural objects—Bibles and relics—in debates over slavery, the Civil War, and Confederate memory practices. It will start with a reinterpretation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin that explains how Bibles and relics were at the heart of this book and why Stowe’s depiction of these objects incited anger among Protestant slaveholders and support among evangelical abolitionists. Other chapters will examine how Bibles worked as supernatural weapons and relics in the war, the development of Confederate museums as repositories for Protestant relics after the war, and the burial of Protestant relics under Confederate monuments in the early 1900s.
Some of my research on Bibles in the Civil War has been published in Material Religion, titled “How Dare Men Mix up the Bible so with Their Own Bad Passions”: When the Good Book Became the Bad Book in the American Civil War.”
Image: New York Bible Society label pasted inside the front cover opposite title page, The New Testament (New York: American Bible Society, 1860). Image and Bible from my personal collection.