Five questions for Paul Harvey

President's Teaching Scholar, history department, UCCS

Paul Harvey

He wants his students to understand this "perfect balance ... that fully engages creativity while remaining bound by evidence, logic and tough criticism. I want all voices/interpretations to be heard, but that does not mean that all voices/interpretations will carry equal weight once the evidence has been evaluated and measured."

A prolific researcher and writer, Harvey's specialization is the history of American religion. His 2005 book "Freedom's Coming" is an interracial history of religion in the South that represented research in dozens of libraries and archives throughout the country. He believes the book has had a significant impact on the field of study. Another book being published, "Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity," is aimed at general readers; he hopes it will become a textbook for classes involving African American history and religious history.

Harvey came to UCCS in 1996. He was a visiting professor at Colorado College and was living in Colorado Springs when a job opening was posted at UCCS.

"I was very fortunate to get that position, and even luckier to get a tenured position in a history department where I love working with fantastic colleagues," he says. "I am blessed and lucky."

As an educator, Harvey says it is important to cultivate improvisation, where interpretation rather than factual black or white answers is the rule. He says his teaching philosophy "places a considerable burden – or, as I prefer to look at it, opportunity – on the students to carry their weight."

Along with being named a President's Teaching Scholar, he has earned numerous other awards for teaching and research excellence.

— Cynthia Pasquale

1. How did you become interested in history – and the history of religion?

I was a biology and economics major in college for two years, and while I liked both, I didn't love them in the way it turned out I loved history. It seemed to me history was a way I could dabble in all other fields at once – literature, economics, biology, etc. – while also getting to snoop in other people's mail in the archives, dig up dirt, read diaries, all in the name of explaining something of the origins of how we got to where we are. I decided that the most important questions of American history involved slavery and race, and those questions came out of the history of the South. I was drawn to that subject like the proverbial moth to the flame. After studying Southern history, the study of religious history was more or less inevitable, given the centrality of religion to the history of the South.

2. You developed a blog - http://usreligion.blogspot.com – which is the only professional academic/scholarly blog devoted to posting on research and teaching in the field of American religious history. Why did you develop this and what are your goals for the blog?

I started this blog in 2007 as an experiment to see what would happen with this particular mode of professional/scholarly communication, and to encourage a growth in dialogue among people who specialize in American religious history. It has grown exponentially since then. Now I have two co-blogmeisters and about 30 contributors who range the gamut of interests/specialties in American religious history. We get about 500 to 800 "hits" daily, including a sizable cadre of regular readers as well as people who arrive randomly through Google searches.

When I go to conferences, I can scarcely walk down the hall without being stopped repeatedly by people I've never met who are eager to talk about the blog, something they saw there that interested them and started them on a research path, or something I posted there that they agreed or disagreed with. As it turns out, the blog has become the most fruitful, engaging and constantly stimulating professional venture I have ever been involved with, and I use it in classes frequently as a teaching tool since blogs show scholars "thinking out loud" about subjects they're trying to understand. The blog also has opened up opportunities for me to write for other public venues, including pieces for a well-known online journal, Religion Dispatches, as well as for other periodicals and newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal.

3. Your current book project, "Jesus in Red, White, and Black," looks at how whites created an American Jesus that sanctified exploitation of Native Americans and African Americans, blessed materialism and promoted subjugation. The book also discusses how alternate images were used to undermine these efforts. Can you give an example?

We begin the book by telling the story of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., on Sept. 15, 1963, where four girls were killed and numerous others injured. The blast at the church blew out all the stained glass windows, save for the one containing an image of Jesus; that window and frame survived, but the blast blew out the face and body of Jesus in the window. Jesus as depicted in that window was white, a replica of Warner Sallman's painting "Head of Christ," which is the single most reproduced image in the history of art, and depicts Jesus with white European features and straight, flowing hair. The depiction is a legacy of the so-called "Publius Lentulus" letter, a medieval forgery of an alleged (albeit nonexistent) ancient text describing the physical features of Jesus. Everyone in colonial and early 19th-century America knew the letter was a fraud, but it eventually came to be accepted by many as real, and the image of Jesus became dominant, one that arose between the Civil War and World War I as white supremacist thought and rhetoric grew in power.

Money raised in part by schoolchildren and others in Wales helped replace that window in the 16th Street Baptist Church. The new window featured a darker-skinned Jesus who was depicted leading not only black Americans but also South Africans in a freedom struggle.

4. It has been said that history is subjective, and in many cases, written history has been changed, including in textbooks (most recently in Texas). As an author and educator, what do you consider to be your role in writing history? Are we adequately teaching the next generation about history?

All history is "revisionist" history; the fact that the term "revisionist" history has come to have a negative connotation is ridiculous and a complete misunderstanding of what historians do as part of their daily bread and butter.

The Texas textbook case is different, because some of the changes proposed simply represented the imposition of a particular ideological agenda on history, and an outrageously bald-faced attempt to "erase" people (ranging from Anne Hutchinson to Cesar Chavez) from history texts.

Historians' role in writing and communicating history is to be faithful to the evidence while telling a narrative story that draws people in and makes them interested in history. "Facts" without context and story are meaningless, but story and narratives that stray from or betray the documentary record of evidence are myths rather than history.

Congress is just about to de-fund the "Teaching American History" program, which has done so much to help high school teachers across the country, at the time when levels of civic and historical knowledge are most needed. So, it's clear we are not teaching history adequately to the next generation, even as access to historical sources and resources has expanded far beyond anything I would have dreamed of 20 years ago.

5. During nonwork hours, where might one find you?

I spent most of my graduate school years at Yoshi's Jazz Club in Oakland, Calif., and I remain a great aficionado of jazz and all music. Beyond that, I spend most of my free time running with a group of "noonball" regulars on the basketball court. While I am 50, short, slow, uncoordinated and unable to jump, I still hope to make the NBA someday. I live by the motto, "Look to pass to your teammate first, but when you're open take the shot; if you miss it, grab the rebound and take it again."

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