Looking at Religion, Politics, and COVID-19

This week in North Philly Notes, Paul Djupe and Amanda Friesen, coeditors of An Epidemic among My People, write about the impact of COVID-19 on collective action in religious communities.

If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people; If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. —II Chronicles 7:13–14 (King James Version)

A pandemic, unprecedented in nearly all of living human lifetimes, swept across continents starting in late 2019. By February 2021, total cases topped 100 million worldwide, with deaths numbering over 1.3 million. Understanding, explaining, and responding to this (preventable?) catastrophe has pitted science against ideology, pushed tensions among people of faith, and drawn sharp lines between people and their governments struggling to respond in reasonable ways with lives on the line. As social scientists interested in studying religion and society, we’ve been thinking and gathering data about the implications of the pandemic for our social institutions and individual behaviors as well as the reverse—how our social institutions shape responses to the pandemic. We see the pandemic response as a massive collective action problem—individuals need to cooperate with others and their governments at a time when the individual costs appear high in terms of restricted behavior, and the benefits are distant and collective.

Thinking about the pandemic in terms of collective action highlights core concerns in the social sciences regarding trust in others and in government, compliance with laws that are otherwise difficult to enforce, the availability and spread of accurate information, and the civil society forces that make or break effective governance. Though 1000s of articles have been published about the social science of COVID-19, we thought that a book-length treatment was necessary to mark this substantial moment in time. We were uniquely positioned to address these questions as many Americanist social scientists had secured funding, ethics approval, and organized plans to collect original survey data in a consequential presidential election year. Pivoting to ask about the pandemic in addition to religious and political inquiries provided a nimble responsiveness to events typically not available on the average academic budget. Yet, to fully understand the depth and breadth of these relationships, we needed experts across the social sciences of religion to tell the full story. One particularly rich data collection by the editors conducted in late March 2020 and then October 2020 was made available to our recruited authors who may not have access or funding to run their own studies. In this way, we were able to expand the number of voices interpreting our empirical results.

One of the values of this collection is the breadth and scope of how social scientists approach questions about religion and the COVID-19 pandemic. To keep the individual chapters in conversation with one another, we organized the chapters around three major themes. In the first part, we investigate the reaction of religious communities to pandemic public policies. Numerous churches, well covered in the media, defied state government public health orders, but how common was defiance in the broader population? What religious forces drove defiance?  Part II shifts gears to the courts and court of public opinion, exploring arguments of religious freedom versus public safety. Part III reverses the causal arrow to examine how the pandemic (and pandemic politics) affected group and individual religious choices, behavior, and beliefs.

Throughout, our contributors find a variety of novel insights that have not been aired elsewhere. Here is a sample. Much of the resistance to shut-down orders was linked to prosperity gospel beliefs, in which fervent belief recruited God’s protection from illness. And many religious adherents were more likely to adopt COVID conspiracy theories. Another finding is how Christian nationalists had little regard for protecting the vulnerable at the expense of liberty and the economy.

We looked for racial differences in congregational and clergy reactions given the frequent assertion that racial minority communities were hit harder than white communities. Surprisingly, we largely did not find disparate reactions organized by racial groups, and defiance to public health orders grew as people attended worship more across racial groups. We also saw that racial groups equally trust their clergy with their health, but African-Americans had less trust of medical professionals early in the pandemic.

Despite strong partisan lines drawn over restrictive public health orders, the public’s willingness to save people largely did not follow that pattern, though Trump remained a polarizing figure in related religious freedom cases. This is no surprise, in part due to his own rhetoric, but also because Christian Right organizations found common cause with Trump in the pandemic due to a connection to their historic commitments to law and order and against foreign threats.

An Epidemic among My People expands upon these findings, digging deeper into sources of pandemic information, the impact of the pandemic on religious behaviors, discussion of the legal battles, and more. Our goal was to provide a nearly comprehensive discussion of religion in public life.

Our Contributors: Daniel Bennett, Kraig Beyerlein, Cammie Jo Bolin, Ryan P. Burge, Angel Saavedra Cisneros, Ryon J. Cobb, Melissa Deckman, Joshua B. Grubbs, Don Haider-Markel, Ian Huff, Natalie Jackson, Jason Klocek, Benjamin Knoll, Andrew R. Lewis, Jianing Li, Natasha Altema McNeel, Matthew R. Miles, Shayla F. Olson, Diana Orcés, Samuel L. Perry, Jenna Reinbold, Kelly Rolfes-Haase, Stella M. Rouse, Justin A. Tucker, Dilara K. Üsküp, Abigail Vegter, Michael W. Wagner, Andrew L. Whitehead, Angelia R. Wilson, and the editors: Amanda Friesen and Paul Djupe, who also contributed chapters.

Amanda Friesen is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario and Canada Research Chair in Political Psychology (Tier 2).

Paul A. Djupe directs the Data for Political Research program at Denison University, is an affiliated scholar with PRRI, the series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple), and co-creator of religioninpublic.blog. Further information about his work can be found at his website and on Twitter.

An Epidemic among My People is available open access or for purchase

Searching for missing Temple University Press books

This week in North Philly Notes, Will Forrest, the Press’s Editorial Assistant and Rights and Contracts Coordinator, blogs about finding the titles missing from the Press library.

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When I first interviewed for the rights and contracts intern position at the Press during my senior year at Temple, I was struck by the shelves of books that lined the conference room walls. Ashley Petrucci, my then supervisor, explained it was a library of the Press’s titles. I asked if it contained every book the Press had published and was told that we were missing a few from our early years of existence. This surprised me, and occasionally I would think of those gaps, wondering just what might be missing.

One year later, I found myself in the same role that Ashley held then, and the library gaps were still there. I asked our director, Mary Rose Muccie, if I could try to track down and obtain copies of the  missing backlist titles, and she gave me the thumbs up.  I was then faced with determining how many, and what, books were missing. Since these books were primarily published in the 1970s, there are fewer digital records and means of searching for lost books. So, I got creative.

I searched the Library of Congress’s website for a listing of all the Temple books they had a record of. I searched WorldCat, a resource for finding books hosted in libraries worldwide, and I also looked through our author contract files to see which projects were signed during the period. I ran all of this against the actual books that we had in our library, and over time began to develop a master list.

Until I did the research, no one knew how many books were missing. My initial estimate was approximately fifteen. Most of us didn’t think it would be higher than twenty. It turned out, not counting the few titles that we had digitized and made available  open access through an NEH grant, we were missing thirty-eight titles! This was significantly higher than any of us expected. I began to search for them on used-book sites and was able to find reasonably priced copies in good condition to add to our shelves.

There are still one or two books that I have yet to track down, but I now know what they are. It felt great to finally complete the Temple University Press library.   Together the physical books covey our history, who we are, and what we do as a university press.

Here is a small selection of titles that we added to our library.

From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900-1940, by Mark S. Foster (1981): This is a forty-year-old book that we could put out this year and it wouldn’t look out of place on our current urban studies list. From Streetcar to Superhighway looks at urban planning at the dawn of the 20th century, when passenger rail and trolley systems were booming and the automobile had just been invented, and the challenges that planners faced along with growing car ownership. A recent Temple book that comes to mind is Amy Finstein’s Modern Mobility Aloft, exploring how the building of early highways in cities changed their architectural as well as social and material landscapes.

Broadcasting and Democracy in West Germany, by Arthur Williams (1976): This is one of the titles I was most excited to find. It is part of our International and Comparative Broadcasting series of the 1970s, a series unlike any other at the time, which examined radio and television all across the globe, as well as its intersections with politics and society. The book is a fascinating look at Cold War-era broadcasting and an early work of the then-new field of media studies.

Every Need Supplied: Mutual Aid and Christian Community in the Free Churches, 1525-1675, edited by Donald F. Durnbaugh (1974): This is one of the most striking early books we received (with a great dustjacket). Collecting primary documents from the communities of Free Churches that were part of the Radical Reformation during the Renaissance era, this was part of an early Temple series devoted entirely to study of the Free Church of this period. Temple has always had strong religious studies titles, but this book’s focus on community and mutual aid has more currency than one might expect from one of its age.

Genocide in Paraguay, edited by Richard Arens (1976): This pioneering look at the then ongoing genocide of the Aché people in Paraguay was one of Temple’s first books in Latin American studies as well as genocide studies. It collects essays by anthropologists and scholars about both Paraguay and the topic of genocide at large. It also includes one of the most widely recognizable contributors to a Temple book: Elie Wiesel, who compares the events in Paraguay to his own experiences with the Nazi Holocaust.

Black Testimony: Voices of Britain’s West Indians, by Thomas J. Cottle (1978): This book is one of Temple’s first ethnographies as well as an early book in Latin American and postcolonial studies. Drawing on interviews from more than twenty Black Britons, the book describes the hardships and obstacles that immigrants from Jamacia and other West Indian colonies faced after emigrating to Britain.

Street Names of Philadelphia, by Robert I. Alotta (1975): This might be my favorite of the missing books, and the title I was the most surprised to find was missing. Street Names of Philadelphia is an alphabetical reference guide to nearly every named street in Philadelphia and a description of why the street is named as such. It’s to the best of my knowledge the only book of its kind and a classic example of a Press Philadelphia regional title. Also, it may have inspired Bruce Springsteen’s famous song (as of yet unconfirmed).

Better City Government: Innovation in American Urban Politics, 1850-1937, by Kenneth Fox (1977): This is another title that we could put out next season and nobody would bat an eye. Better City Government looks at urban political development from the 1850s to the New Deal era and draws lessons about the limitations of reform-minded individuals and the most effective ways to enact change. This book would be right at home alongside our Political Lessons from American Cities series edited by Richardson Dilworth.

Gritty Cities, edited by Mary Procter and Bill Matuszeski (1978): I had to talk about this one. Aside from the fact that it  has the word “gritty” in the title decades before the Philadelphia Flyers debuted their beloved mascot, this is a fascinating look at twelve mid-sized industrial Rust Belt towns and their architecture right as manufacturing was beginning to fade away in the Northeast. It combines history with walking-tour commentary and great photographs. It is very much a time capsule of its era, and a great book for those interested in the last gasp of manufacturing in the United States.

Cincinnati: Crucible of Nineteenth-Century Religious Pluralism

This week in North Philly Notes, Matthew Smith, author of The Spires Still Point to Heaven: Cincinnati’s Religious Landscape, 1788-1873, writes about the Queen City as a hub for religious and cultural life in the nineteenth century.

This book is the first monograph on the religious landscape of pre-Civil War Cincinnati, which was in many ways the representative city of antebellum America. Mark Twain infamously hoped to find himself there when the world ended, it being “always twenty years behind the times.” In its heyday, however, the Queen City was a hotspot in the development of the nation, embracing the future rather than awaiting the apocalypse. Before St. Louis and Chicago eclipsed it as the leading city of the Midwest, Cincinnati was a vibrant metropolis attracting curious travelers and utopian idealists from across the world in the wake of booming trade and economic migration. Although Cincinnati was first and foremost a commercial hub on the Ohio River, itinerant preachers, domestic missionaries, and social reformers shaped the cultural life of the city as much as the pork merchants, steamboat manufacturers, and artisans who founded its economy. Just as twenty-first century urbanists emphasize the “liveability” of modern cities, so too nineteenth-century boosters obsessed over the character of their communities, and religion was a big part of that obsession. One writer boasted in 1841, “that within one hundred years … Cincinnati will be the greatest city in America; and by the year of our lord two thousand, the greatest city in the world.”

Cincinnati never quite realized the full ambitions of its boosters, but nor was it the Midwestern backwater Mark Twain so slyly deprecated. Situated in the heart of the Ohio Valley, the Queen City drew heavily from its rich agricultural hinterlands, as well as the booming infrastructure of the Market Revolution, connecting it by road and canal to the great cities of the east. Such connections also brought religious influences, beginning with evangelical Protestant connections during the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century. In consequence, Cincinnati flourished as the western hub of the so-called “Benevolent Empire.” This network of voluntary religious societies sought to reform society by marshalling the energies of lay worshipers—men and women—as well as the more traditional leadership of the ordained clergy. The Queen City was soon home to societies promoting both foreign and domestic missions, the distribution of Bibles and religious tracts, the founding of Sunday Schools, promotion of temperance, and, of course, the abolition of slavery. Perhaps the central figure in this movement was New England preacher Lyman Beecher, who came to Cincinnati in 1832. Remembered today as the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lyman Beecher was president of Lane Theological Seminary, a bastion for educating clergy to sow the gospel through the western frontier. The very prosperity that made Cincinnati a magnet for evangelical institutions, however, was also its Achilles’ heel. “We must educate! We must educate!” warned Beecher, “or we must perish by our own prosperity.”

The cultural dominance of Presbyterian evangelicals was ultimately short-lived. Cincinnati benefited tremendously from the arrival of Catholic immigrants from Germany and Ireland in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, though immigration stirred the darkest fears of local nativists, steeped in generations of anti-Catholicism. Beecher’s notorious 1835 polemic, A Plea for the West, warned against “floods of pauper emigrants” arriving from Europe. Many Cincinnatians shared Beecher’s concerns, while bloody outbursts of violent nativism occurred during the Know-Nothing nadir of the 1850s. But the story of Cincinnati contains seeds of hope as well as moments of despair, and dialogue shaped sectarian relations as much as conflict. Much of this dialogue was pragmatic and institutional, but no less valuable in helping Cincinnatians figure out their way to religious pluralism. Protestant philanthropy helped endow the city’s first Catholic churches, for example, encouraging valuable economic migration in the process. Many of Cincinnati’s Catholic schools educated generations of Protestant children, despite fierce competition between the public and parochial schools systems. And Cincinnati was also home to other forms of cultural and religious expression besides Christianity, including Reform Judaism, a progressive tradition that reflected Cincinnati’s diverse religious landscape.

These themes are further explicated in The Spires Still Point to Heaven, showing how nineteenth-century Cincinnati tested the boundaries of nativism, toleration, and freedom.

Images from the recent American Political Science Association meeting

This week in North Philly Notes we showcase the authors who stopped by the Temple University Booth at the recent American Political Science Association meeting to pose with their books.

Temple University Press’s booth

Sara Rinfret, editor of Who Really Makes Environmental Policy?: Creating and Implementing Environmental Rules and Regulations. This book provides a clear understanding of regulatory policy and rulemaking processes, and their centrality in U.S. environmental policymaking.

Shamira Gelbman, author of The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction. This book investigates how minority group, labor, religious, and other organizations worked together to lobby for civil rights reform during the 1950s and ’60s.

Luis Felipe Mantilla, author of How Political Parties Mobilize Religion: Lessons from Mexico and Turkey, which analyzes the evolution of Catholic and Sunni Muslim parties to study religious political mobilization in comparative perspective.

Rachel Bernhard (left) and Mirya Holman (right), coeditors of Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy, which examines how and why women run for office.

Paul Djupe, coeditor of The Evangelical Crackup?: The Future of the Evangelical-Republican Coalition, which explains evangelicalism’s relationship to the party system.

Djupe is also the editor of the Press’ Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics series.

Amanda Friesen and Paul Djupe, are coeditors of the forthcoming An Epidemic among My People: Religion, Politics, and COVID-19 in the United States, which asks, Did religion make the pandemic worse or help keep it contained?

Richardson Dilworth, author of the forthcoming Reforming Philadelphia, 1682-2022, a short but comprehensive political history of the city, from its founding in 1682 to the present day. Dilworth is also the editor of the Press’ Political Lessons from American Cities series.

Celebrating Women’s History Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate Women’s History Month. Use promo code TWHM22 for 30% off all our Women’s Studies titles. Sale ends March 31, 2022.

New Titles

Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration, by Rachel Schreiber, recounts the remarkable story of a Jewish activist who joined her incarcerated Japanese American husband and son in an American concentration camp.

Are You Two Sisters: The Journey of a Lesbian Couple, by Susan Krieger, authored by one of the most respected figures in the field of personal ethnographic narrative, this book serves as both a memoir and a sociological study, telling the story of one lesbian couple’s lifelong journey together.

From our Backlist:

Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern, by Shirley Jennifer Lim, shows how Anna May Wong’s work shaped racial modernity and made her one of the most significant actresses of the twentieth century.

The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap, by Yasemin Besen-Cassino, traces the origins of the gender wage gap to part-time teenage work, which sets up a dynamic that persists into adulthood.

Feminist Post-Liberalism, by Judith Baer, reconciles liberalism and feminist theory.

Feminist Reflections on Childhood: A History and Call to Action, by Penny A. Weiss, recovers a history of feminist thought and activism that demands greater voice and respect for young people.

Good Reasons to Run: Women and Political Candidacy, edited by Shauna L. Shames, Rachel I. Bernhard, Mirya R. Holman, and Dawn Langan Teele, how and why women run for office.

Gross Misbehavior and Wickedness: A Notorious Divorce in Early Twentieth-Century America, by Jean Elson, a fascinating story of the troubled marriage and acrimonious divorce of Nina and James Walker elucidates early twentieth-century gender and family mores.

Motherlands: How States Push Mothers Out of Employment, by Leah Ruppanner challenges preconceived notions of the states that support working mothers.

Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara, edited by Linda Janet Holmes and Cheryl A. Wall, an anthology that celebrates the life and work of a major African American writer.

Their Day in the Sun: Women in the Manhattan Project, by Ruth H. Howes and Caroline C. Herzenberg, tells the hidden story of the contribution of women in the effort to develop the atomic bomb.

Undermining Intersectionality: The Perils of Powerblind Feminism, by Barbara Tomlinson, a sustained critique of the ways in which scholars have engaged with and deployed intersectionality.

Women Take Their Place in State Legislature: The Creation of Women’s Caucuses, by Anna Mitchell Mahoney, investigates the opportunities, resources, and frames that women utilize to create legislative caucuses.

Women’s Empowerment and Disempowerment in Brazil: The Rise and Fall of President Dilma Rousseff, by Pedro A.G. dos Santos and Farida Jalalzai, explains what the rise and fall of Brazil’s first and only female president can teach us about women’s empowerment.

Religion and politics mix – what matters is how they mix

This week in North Philly Notes, L. Felipe Mantilla, author of How Political Parties Mobilize Religion, writes about the rise of religious political parties.

A glance at global headlines suggests that religion is playing an ever-growing role in electoral politics. Islamist parties have become fixtures in Muslim-majority countries from Morocco to Indonesia, conservative Catholics are entrenched in Poland, Evangelicals flex their political muscles in Brazil, and Hindu nationalists are dominant across much of India. In all these settings, secularists often express fear that the political success of religious groups will threaten democratic institutions and endanger minorities.

My new book, How Political Parties Mobilize Religion: Lessons from Mexico and Turkey, aims to bring some nuance to the debates prompted by the rise of religious political parties. One of its main arguments is that religion often enters the electoral arena, but that it can do so in strikingly different ways. Religious mobilization by political parties is not monolithic, and secular laws and religious leaders can have a great deal of influence on how religious parties behave in practice.

In the United States, for example, the idea of a clear separation between church and state is embedded in American political tradition. Yet religion and partisanship are clearly intertwined. Candidates often speak publicly about faith, craft appeal to religious voters, and place their personal beliefs on public display. While churches risk losing their tax-exempt status if they engage in explicitly partisan activities, these restrictions are widely disregarded in practice. Given electoral laws that favor a two-party system, religious activists operate within broader coalitions rather than form their own party organizations. As a result, both Democrats and Republicans engage in religious mobilization.

Still, there is a great deal of diversity in how political parties engage with religion. Consider the contrast between the religious services attended by Donald Trump and Joseph Biden on the eve of the 2020 election. Biden sat at a pew in St. Joseph on the Brandywine Catholic Church and was treated like a regular parishioner; his presence was not mentioned in the sermon. Trump, attending an evangelical congregation in Las Vegas, was repeatedly praised and blessed, declared to be “lighting a bright light for God and for all those who believe in a good America, a noble America, a righteous America,” and was invited to speak to the congregation.

In my book, I argue that much of this difference can be explained by the contrasting patterns of religious organization among Evangelicals and Catholics. Individual leaders of Evangelical churches can benefit from the fervor and national visibility that brazen partisanship brings, even if their stances alienate most Americans and potentially antagonize elected officials. In contrast, the contemporary Catholic Church is a hierarchical, transnational organization, and as such is more wary of the potential costs of partisanship. Gaining a thousand devout converts by antagonizing millions is fine, perhaps even smart, if you are running a local church but makes little sense if you are leading a world religion.

These differences are not unique to the United States. In Peru’s recent elections, the absence of effective legal restrictions on religious partisanship created an opening for religious political mobilization. In that Catholic-majority country, it led some lay Catholics to launch campaigns based on appeals to religious values and identities. However, Catholic leaders largely withheld their blessing, preferring to make broad statements about the importance of electoral participation. In contrast, many clerics linked with Peru’s rapidly growing Evangelical minority engaged in openly partisan activities, such as praying with specific candidates and organizing events on their behalf.

My book also shows that changes in the rules and regulations governing elections can affect the mobilizing strategies used by religious parties. In 1950s Mexico, electoral rules that disadvantaged opposition parties drove away all but the most committed activists, many of whom were devout Catholics. This left opposition parties dependent on religious activists. As legal reforms gradually made it easier for challengers to gain seats, they began to attract more diverse supporters and the relative influence of religious activists waned. In Turkey in the 1970s, electoral laws gave a competitive edge to small parties. Religious activists took note and formed specialized organizations that catered exclusively to devout voters. However, when constitutional reforms made it harder for these organizations to gain seats in parliament, religious politicians reorganized and moderated their policy proposals to appeal to more mainstream voters. In both cases, religious activists responded strategically to incentives created by electoral laws.

In other words, it makes little sense to support or condemn religious political engagement in general. In democratic settings, religion and political parties are bound to interact. What matters is how political parties engage with religion, and that is something that can be shaped by legal reforms and religious leadership.

Announcing Temple University Press’ Fall Catalog

This week in North Philly Notes we showcase the titles forthcoming this Fall from Temple University Press

“Beyond the Law”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain, by Charles Upchurch, provides a major reexamination of the earliest British parliamentary efforts to abolish capital punishment for consensual sex acts between men.

Are You Two Sisters?: The Journey of a Lesbian Couple, by Susan Krieger, authored by one of the most respected figures in the field of personal ethnographic narrative, this book serves as both a memoir and a sociological study, telling the story of one lesbian couple’s lifelong journey together.

Asian American Connective Action in the Age of Social Media: Civic Engagement, Contested Issues, and Emerging Identities, by James S. Lai, examines how social media has changed the way Asian Americans participate in politics.

The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction, by Shamira Gelbman, investigates how minority group, labor, religious, and other organizations worked together to lobby for civil rights reform during the 1950s and ’60s.

Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration, by Rachel Schreiber, tells the remarkable story of a Jewish activist who joined her imprisoned Japanese American husband and son in an American concentration camp.

Fitting the Facts of Crime: An Invitation to Biopsychosocial Criminology, by Chad Posick, Michael Rocque, and J.C. Barnes, presents a biopsychosocial perspective to explain the most common findings in criminology—and to guide future research and public policy.

From Improvement to City Planning: Spatial Management in Cincinnati from the Early Republic through the Civil War Decade, by Henry C. Binford, offers a “pre-history” of urban planning in the United States.

Gangs on Trial: Challenging Stereotypes and Demonization in the Courts, by John M. Hagedorn, exposes biases in trials when the defendant is a gang member.

Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins, by Alex Tizon, now in paperback, an anthology of richly reported and beautifully written stories about marginalized people.

Islam, Justice, and Democracy, by Sabri Ciftci, explores the connection between Muslim conceptions of justice and democratic orientations.

The Italian Legacy in Philadelphia: History, Culture, People, and Ideas, edited by Andrea Canepari and Judith Goode, provides essays and images showcasing the rich contribution of Italians and Italian Americans to Global Philadelphia.

Making a Scene: Urban Landscapes, Gentrification, and Social Movements in Sweden, by Kimberly A. Creasap, examines how autonomous social movements respond to gentrification by creating their own cultural landscape in cities and suburbs.

Making Their Days Happen: Paid Personal Assistance Services Supporting People with Disability Living in Their Homes and Communities, by Lisa I. Iezzoni, explores the complexities of the interpersonal dynamics and policy implications affecting personal assistance service consumers and providers.

The Many Futures of Work: Rethinking Expectations and Breaking Molds, edited by Peter A. Creticos, Larry Bennett, Laura Owen, Costas Spirou, and Maxine Morphis-Riesbeck, reframes the conversation about contemporary workplace experience by providing both “top down” and “bottom up” analyses.

On Gangs, by Scott H. Decker, David C. Pyrooz, and James A. Densley, a comprehensive review of what is known about gangs—from their origins through their evolution and outcomes.

Pack the Court!: A Defense of Supreme Court Expansion, by Stephen M. Feldman, provides a historical and analytical argument for court-packing.

Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities, by erin Khuê Ninh, considers how it feels to be model minority—and why would that drive one to live a lie?

Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority, by James Kyung-Jin Lee, asks what happens when illness betrays Asian American fantasies of indefinite progress?

Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania, by Beverly C. Tomek, highlights the complexities of emancipation and the “First Reconstruction” in the antebellum North.

Vehicles of Decolonization: Public Transit in the Palestinian West Bank, by Maryam S. Griffin, considers collective Palestinian movement via public transportation as a site of social struggle.

Who Really Makes Environmental Policy?: Creating and Implementing Environmental Rules and Regulations, edited by Sara R. Rinfret, provides a clear understanding of regulatory policy and rulemaking processes, and their centrality in U.S. environmental policymaking.

Examining our fraught relationship with food

This week in North Philly Notes, Jeffrey Haydu, author of Upsetting Food, writes about how food is ethically identified—and why that matters.

On May 28, 2021, the New York Times reported a lawsuit against Vital Farms. Plaintiffs charged that Vital Farms misled consumers by advertising its eggs as, “‘delicious, ethical food you don’t have to question.'” Three years earlier, a leading proponent of alternative agriculture, The Cornucopia Institute, rounded up different egg labels (ranging from “All Natural” to “Omega-3”). Of eleven examined, the Institute found five to be meaningless, misleading or “seriously flawed.”

These disputes testify to our fraught relationship with food. Concerns about the safety, nutritional value, and ethical virtues of what we eat are pervasive. Increasingly, consumers rely on third-party programs to certify a food as “good,” whether for body or soul, local community or planet. Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protest in the United States, shows that such doubts about commercial food date back to the early 19th century. But the ways in which conscientious consumers sought to resolve those doubts have changed. Consumers have looked to quite different markers of trustworthy food from one era to another.

In the 1830s, Sylvester Graham warned his followers of the dangers of meat, commercial bread, and spices. What were the hallmarks of trustworthy foods? Those sanctified by the Bible, but also those prepared at home with the loving hands of wives and mothers. Such food, wrapped in piety, family, and tradition, was good for the body. It also met ethical goals by quieting men’s and women’s baser impulses.

Food reformers of the 1890s and 1900s voiced some similar concerns over suspect bread, contaminated meat, “unnatural” preservatives, and adulterated beverages. In this era, however, consumers were told to trust food that had been vetted by the federal government; that conformed to the new science of nutrition; and that had been prepared in modern, “hygienic” factories. Here too, more than health was at stake. The new regulatory and educational regime would restore honesty to markets and expertise to tradition-bound homemakers.

In the 1960s, some additional concerns emerged: “artificial” foods and pesticides joined fluffy white bread and preservatives on the list of anxieties. But now, food untainted by modern technology and nutritional science—”natural” food—represented the gold standard. And food acquired through alternative institutions like small farms, natural food stores, and neighborhood co-ops was deemed more reliable. By patronizing these alternatives, moreover, consumers were joining a virtuous conspiracy against Big Ag, corporate capital, and a servile state.

These differences among the three eras mostly reflect the larger movement cultures in which food reformers moved. Graham applied to diet a more general evangelical template for social uplift, one already in use to address the problems of slavery, intemperance, and “fallen women.” Proponents of pure food legislation and nutritional science applied to food the standard Progressive playbook: modern science can identify solutions for social ills, and government regulation can implement those solutions. Early organic advocates shared with a wider counterculture a deep suspicion of organized politics and modern technology. They shared, too, its belief that by living our lives differently we could bit by bit build a better society. Nowadays, many activists retain doubts about government as a lever for change. And partly for that reason, we have more faith in our ability to achieve social justice through concerted consumer choices. For a better food system, vote with your fork!

But there is more to the story than that. Upsetting Food also shows how reformers’ ideals of trustworthy food built on—or deliberately repudiated—the efforts of their predecessors. Progressive reformers were deeply skeptical of religion and tradition as guides to social practices, whether in managing factories or cooking food. Early organic advocates, in turn, explicitly rejected modern science and government—the Progressive stalwarts—for being little more than shills for big business. And contemporary food reformers are often guided by the perceived failures of the organic movement. Its eventual embrace of minimalist government standards and its cooptation by large food companies, we hear, doomed organic as a genuinely alternative food system. Hence the appeal both of labels less easily coopted by global corporations (“local”) and of third-party certifiers (Non-GMO Project, Certified C.L.E.A.N.) who, we hope, can themselves be trusted. And thus the outrage (channeled through legal action) when the virtues proclaimed by labels (“delicious, ethical food”) prove illusory.

Books that honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This week, in North Philly Notes, in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we focus our attention on our books, new and old, that speak to a dedication to civil rights and human struggles.

The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction, by Shamira Gelbman, investigates how minority group, labor, religious, and other organizations worked together to lobby for civil rights reform during the 1950s and ’60s. Shamira Gelbman explains how the diversity of this interest group coalition both hindered and enabled lobbyists to generate broad-based support for reforms that often seemed risky to legislators. They coordinated their efforts by identifying common ground among member organizations, developing coalitional positions on substantive and strategic questions, and exhorting organizations to mobilize professional and grassroots lobbying resources accordingly. The result was to “speak with one booming voice” to ultimately help secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Black Identity Viewed from a Barber’s Chair: Nigrescence and Eudaimonia, by William E. Cross, Jr., revisits his ground-breaking model on Black identity awakening known as Nigrescence. Cross connects W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of double consciousness to an analysis of how Black identity is performed in everyday life, and traces the origins of the deficit perspective on Black culture to scholarship, dating back to the 1930s. He follows with a critique showing such deficit and Black self-hatred tropes were always based on extremely weak evidence. His book sets out to disrupt and agitate as Cross attempts to more accurately capture the humanity of Black people that has been overlooked in previous research.

Philadelphia Freedoms: Black American Trauma, Memory, and Culture after King, by Michael Awkward captures the disputes over the meanings of racial politics and black identity during the post-King era in the City of Brotherly Love. Looking closely at four cultural moments, he shows how racial trauma and his native city’s history have been entwined. Awkward introduces each of these moments with poignant personal memories of the decade in focus, chronicling the representation of African American freedom and oppression from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion by Bettye Collier-Thomas, is a groundbreaking book that provides a remarkable account of the religious faith, social and political activism, and the extraordinary resilience of Black women during the centuries of American growth and change. As co-creators of churches, women were a central factor in their development and as Collier-Thomas skillfully shows, Black church women created national organizations to fight for civil rights and combat discrimination.

God Is Change: Religious Practices and Ideologies in the Works of Octavia Butler, edited by Aparajita Nanda and Shelby L. Crosby (forthcoming in June) examines Octavia Butler’s religious imagination and its potential for healing and liberation. In her work, Butler explored, critiqued, and created religious ideology. But religion, for Butler, need not be a restricting force. The editors of and contributors to God Is Change heighten our appreciation for the range and depth of Butler’s thinking about spirituality and religion, as well as how Butler’s work—especially her Parable and Xenogenesis series—offers resources for healing and community building.

The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America, by David Howard-Pitney, shows that Black leaders have employed the jeremiad, a verbal tradition of protest and social prophecy, in a way that is specifically African American. David Howard-Pitney examines the jeremiads of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, as well as more contemporary figures such as Jesse Jackson and Alan Keyes. This revised and expanded edition demonstrates that the African American jeremiad is still vibrant, serving as a barometer of faith in America’s perfectibility and hope for social justice.

Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years after the Kerner Report, edited by Fred Harris and Alan Curtis examines inequality in America. The 1968 Kerner Commission concluded that America was heading toward “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” In Healing Our Divided Society, Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, along with Eisenhower Foundation CEO Alan Curtis, re-examine fifty years later the work still necessary towards the goals set forth in The Kerner Report. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work—and not work.

Who Will Speak for America? edited by Stephanie Feldman and Nathaniel Popkin, collects passionate and justifiably angry voices providing a literary response to today’s political crisis. Inspired by and drawing from the work of writers who participated in nationwide Writers Resist events in January 2017, this volume provides a collection of poems, stories, essays, and cartoons that wrestle with the meaning of America and American identity. Who Will Speak for America? inspires readers by emphasizing the power of patience, organizing, resilience and community. These moving works advance the conversation the American colonists began, and that generations of activists, in their efforts to perfect our union, have elevated and amplified.

Temple University Press authors reflect on making PBS’s Asian Americans

This week in North Philly Notes, Shirley Jennifer Lim, author of Anna May Wong, and Winifred C. Chin, author of Paper Son, recount their experiences making the 5-part PBS documentary series Asian Americans.

Anna May Wong is having a moment, by Shirley Jennifer Lim

Anna May Wong is having a moment. In 2020 she has been featured in numerous documentaries, television shows (Netflix’s Hollywood), and, as a Google doodle. The landmark PBS documentary series, Asian Americans, tells Wong’s story at the end of Episode 1. Wong epitomizes someone who fought racial stereotypes and sought to improve the lot of Asian Americans.

One of the pleasures of the Asian Americans Episode 1 is that it contains rare archival footage of Wong’s performances. On screen, her expressive talents shine. When you watch the documentary, compare Luise Rainer’s flat affect as she says “I am with child” (The Good Earth) with Wong’s face when she says “Perhaps the white girl had better be looking out!” (One likes to think this is a not so hidden message to all of the white actresses who won Asian roles instead of her). There is almost no need to hear her words for her face says it all. Or the clip of Wong saying “No love now. No jealousy. Just merciless vengeance.” Her intonation is priceless and makes the viewer almost believe that words can kill. Rainer, as the documentary makes clear, won the leading role in the Good Earth over Wong and an Academy Award for playing the role (in yellowface). Never daunted, after The Good Earth casting rejection, Wong hired her own cinematographer and made her own film about China. Although Asian Americans does not have time to discuss Wong’s self-directed and produced film, but moments from the film are on screen at the end of the segment. (For my discussion of this film read Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern Chapter 5 and Epilogue). You see footage of Wong holding the camera up to her eye as she films Chinese street scenes. It would be wonderful if this interest in Wong translated into more of her films being made widely available.

Paper Son in the filming of Asian Americans, by Winifred C. Chin

When I was first approached by the PBS Asian Americans research team, I did not anticipate the key role that Paper Son, One Man’s Story would have in Episode 3: “Good Americans,” in which Asian Americans are heralded as the “model minority” while simultaneously living as “perpetual foreigners.”

Paper Son is the story of how my father, Tung Pok Chin, entered the United States in 1934 with false papers that declared him the “son of [a] native.” Due to restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943) this method was the only way he and others could escape dire poverty in China and come to the U.S. But China had turned to communism by 1949, and Tung Pok Chin was writing for a Chinese newspaper that the FBI branded as pro-communist. Our family soon came under federal investigation with the McCarthy Era.

Episode 3 is entitled “Good Americans” for a reason. Living in the United States, Tung Pok Chin gave his best to assimilate into American society; he learned English and served in the U.S. Navy during WWII; after the war he married and raised a family; he became a member in good standing at True Light Lutheran Church; and he wrote poetry to record his sentiments about the Chinese homeland — all while working in a laundry to support his family. In spite of all this, Tung Pok Chin remained the “perpetual foreigner” due to his status as a paper son and his writings in a newspaper that did not sit well with the U.S. Government.

Swearing into U.S. Navy

Chin with his children

Chin with his pastor

Chin working in a laundry

In working with my father on Paper Son our aspiration for the text was simple: that the previously unknown “paper” method of entry into the United States and the effects of McCarthyism on the Chinese American community would be recognized and studied as a part of American history. Yet it was in filming Episode 3 that I started seeing Paper Son on a grander scale.

The questions that filmmaker S. Leo Chiang asked were thought-provoking and prodded me to dig into my own childhood to reflect on growing up Chinese in America. I soon realized that my experiences were not limited to myself, just as Paper Son is not limited to the experiences of Tung Pok Chin alone. Instead, my father’s experiences and those of my own speak for numerous other “paper sons” and for the generations of Chinese Americans and Asian Americans who rest precariously on the edge of a country where we try our best to be “Good Americans” yet can never fit in — because looking like the enemy in a time of crisis, be it during WWII, McCarthyism or the World Trade Center attack, will always arouse suspicion, distrust and hence rejection, no matter how “Good” we are.