 |
CHARLES
R. WILSON |
Charles Reagan Wilson is the Kelly Gene Cook, Sr. Chair of History and Professor of Southern Studies and the University of Mississippi, where he has taught since 1981. He has worked extensively with graduate students and served as Director of the Southern Studies academic program from 1991 to 1998. Wilson received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso and earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin. He taught at the University of Wurzburg, Germany, the University of Texas at El Paso, and Texas Tech University before coming to Oxford.Wilson is th e author of Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (1980), a study of the memory of the Confederacy in the post-Civil War South, and Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (1995), which studies popular religion as a part of the culture of the modern South. He is also coeditor (with Bill Ferris) of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), which received the Dartmouth Prize from the American Library Association as best reference book of the year. He is editor or coeditor of Religion and the American Civil War (1998), The New Regionalism (1996), and Religion in the South (1985).
Professor Wilson
Office hours: M, W 10:00-12:00 and by appointment
Bishop 316
915-1338
crwilson@olemiss.edu
Fall 2009
Charles Reagan Wilson Office: Bishop Hall 316
History 337 Office Hours: M, W 10:00-12:00
Fall 2009
HISTORY OF RELIGION IN THE SOUTH
This class will trace the development of religion in the American South. It will begin with the colonial era, examine the rise of evangelicalism and how that tradition became the dominant one in the South, trace the emergence of the sectional conflict between North and South and the role of religion in it, discuss the religious meanings of the Civil War and its aftermath, examine the expansion of evangelical churches after the war, consider the role of Catholics and Jews in the South, study developments in the early twentieth century, and conclude with religion’s role in the civil rights movement and the rise of the Religious Right. The course will also look at religion’s role in such creative expressions as music, literature, and films.
Four books, listed below, are required reading. We will discuss each book in class and there will be a short quiz on each. There will be a midterm exam and a final exam. A final five to seven page, doubled-spaced paper is required, on one of two topics. One is to prepare a religious autobiography of yourself and your family. The other is to study the religious life of your hometown community.
Grading will be based on the following:
Midterm: 20%
Final Exam: 40%
Quizzes: 20%
Paper: 20%
Learning Objectives: to develop analytical skills, research abilities, writing abilities
Required Texts: Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South
Eli Evan, The Provincials
Will Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly
Schedule:
August 25 Introduction
August 27 Southern Religious Culture
September 1 Colonial Religion: Anglicans and Dissenters
September 3 Spiritual Life of the Southern Indians
September 8 Great Awakening and the Enlightenment
September 10 Rise of Evangelicalism
September 15 Film: Revival!
September 17 Quiz and Discussion: O’Connor, Wise Blood
September 22 Biblical Defense of Slavery
September 24 Emergence of the Solid Religious South
September 29 Armageddon in the South: Religion and the Civil War
October 1 Film: Chase the Devil
October 6 Midterm Exam
October 8 Religious Reconstruction: The Segregation of Southern Spiritual Life
October 13 At Ease in Zion: White Evangelicals and the Southern
Way of Life
October 15 Quiz and Discussion: Harvey, Redeeming the South
October 20 Populist Religion: The Rebellion of the Dispossessed
October 22 The Fundamentalist Movement: Confrontation with
Modernism
October 27 A Rock in a Weary Land: The Black Church
October 29 Quiz and Discussion: Evans, The Provincials
November 3 Living in the Protestant Shadow: Catholics and Jews
November 5 Living in the Protestant Shadow: Catholics and Jews
November 10 Singing the Praises: Religious Music
November 12 Spreading the Word: Religion and Southern Literature
November 17 Quiz and Discussion: Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly
November 19 The Civil Rights Movement: Religion and Social Change
November 24-26 Thanksgiving Holidays
December 1 Moral Crusading: Prohibition to the Moral Majority
December 3 Religion and Globalization in the South