More is permitted to our power there

than is permitted here, by virtue of

that place, made for mankind as its true home.

Divine Comedy, Paradiso I, 55–57*

Paradiso begins with a proem, with Dante the poet addressing the reader about the work itself rather than Dante pilgrim talking solely about what he experienced. …

I came across this book somewhere the other day — I can’t recall exactly, but maybe it was a newsletter from The Hedgehog Review. The book is out just last week from Belt Publishing:

A tour de force of high-flying writing and fiercely independent thought, Phil Christman’s Midwest Futures grapples with grace and dark humor with the past, present, and future of the country’s most misunderstood region.

Inspired by the Jeffersonian grid, the famous rectangular survey of the Old Northwest Territory that mapped everything from Ohio to Wisconsin into square-mile lots of 1,000 square feet, Midwest Futures is structured as…

“Do you not know that we are worms and born

to form the angelic butterfly that soars,

without defenses, to confront His judgment?”

Divine Comedy, Purgatory, Canto X, lines 124–126.

This piece originally published at Religion in American History, March 6, 2017.

I’ve had occasion to read more broadly since defending my dissertation in December. I’ve also been grateful for the opportunity to reflect on my research interests and where they might fit into broader conversations moving forward.

In the roundtable on food history published in the December 2016 Journal of American History, Mark Padoongpatt’s observations on the pertinence of “the debate over whether food is valuable because it serves as an ‘entrée’ into more important themes in American history or if it is inherently valuable” intrigued me. The roundtable…