When I defended my prospectus, several of my professors remained a bit skeptical about studying the Lost Cause, which for them evoked older, outdated ideas of the noble white southern past. However, more research suggested that the religious leaders of mainstream southern denominations did indeed say a good deal about the Confederacy, from the end of the war to World War I. One of them caught my eye, “Attitudes of Religious Fundamentalists toward the Civil War.” This topic caught my emerging interest in southern religious history, but a quick survey of possible materials suggested that fundamentalists in the early twentieth century did not, in fact, think about the Civil War that much. Long ago, when I was considering a dissertation topic for the study that would become the book Baptized in Blood, I looked at a long list of potential dissertation topics from my supervising professor at the University of Texas at Austin, William Goetzman.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |