Global History of the American Culture Wars

My second book project investigates how conservative evangelicals and Catholics exported their polarizing politics across the world from the 1960s to the present. Tentatively titled Culture Warriors Abroad: A Global History of the American Culture Wars, this new project follows American culture warriors as they went overseas, taking with them their battles about race, gender, secularism, Islam, and globalization. As religious conservatives in post-1960s America felt their own country’s politics and culture slipping from their grasp, they sought to transform foreign nations in the image of what they wanted America to be—an act Edward Said describes as “projection.” They enlisted local allies—from the Russian Orthodox Church to anticommunist militias in Mozambique—in their struggle. By highlighting the international dimension of the US culture wars, the project will challenge the mistaken assumption that the culture wars were a distinctly American phenomenon, an event sui generis. The works on the culture wars typically focus on Supreme Court bans on school prayer and Bible reading, the legalization of abortion, and the fallout of the Civil Rights movement. Contrary to a literature that depicts the culture wars as evidence of American religious and cultural parochialism, I show how the polarizing politics we are so familiar with today were deeply intertwined with major global transformations, such as decolonization, the advent of human rights, and the end of the Cold War. What Republican presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan described as a “war for the soul of America” was also a war for the soul of the world.

I am looking for research assistants to help gather and interpret information on specific parts of this project. Assigned work could include finding primary and secondary sources, creating bibliographies, writing brief summaries of primary and secondary sources, inputting information into bibliographic or database software, and (for more advanced students with a background in history) writing brief interpretive papers. You should apply to this position if you're interested in historical research, organizing large research projects, and interpreting historical documents. Although this is not required, I am also happy to help students find conferences where they can present their research.

The goal of this project is the production of a book on the global history of the US culture wars.

Please watch each of the videos on library research: https://research.lib.buffalo.edu/onestopguide

History; Historical Research; American History; US History