Meet the Faculty

Edward T. Linenthal

• Professor, Department of History, and editor, Journal of American History
• Adjunct Professor, Department of Religious Studies

Education

• Ph.D. at University of California, Santa Barbara, 1979

Contact Information

Background

My graduate student years at UC Santa Barbara started me on an interesting professional path, one that I never envisioned while working on a dissertation examining the warrior as a religious figure in America. I went directly from Santa Barbara to the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, where I spent 25 years in the department of religious studies. I never cared much, however, for disciplinary boundaries, nor for the academic jargon that each discipline seems to prize too much. I was interested in investigating and writing for a larger public about the less examined, that which did not, at first glance, seem “religious.” So, for example, in 1987-88 I was a Sloan Research Fellow in the Arms Control and Defense Policy Program at MIT, where I did the research for my book SYMBOLIC DEFENSE: THE CULTURAL SIGIFICANCE OF THE STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE, which examined how supporters and opponents of the so-called “Star Wars” missile defense system mobilized powerful American myths and symbols to make their case. At this same time, I also joined Ira Chernus in co-editing A SHUDDERING DAWN: RELIGIOUS STUDIES IN THE NUCLEAR AGE. Throughout the 1980s, I was also at work on a larger project, which eventually became my next book, SACRED GROUND: AMERICANS AND THEIR BATTLEFIELDS, which examined processes of veneration, defilement, and redefinition at five sites: Lexington and Concord, the Alamo, Gettysburg, the Little Bighorn and Pearl Harbor. This project also began, happily, an ongoing relationship with the National Park Service. I worked for NPS at the 50th anniversary ceremonies at Pearl Harbor, and delivered the commemorative address at the memorial in 1994. I have also been a long-time consultant to NPS on interpretation of controversial historic sites, and from 2003-2005, I was a half-time Visiting Scholar in NPS’s Civic Engagement and Public History program.

Research Interests

• public history
• war, genocide and memory
• contemporary American religion
• Holocaust studies

Courses Recently Taught

• Introduction to American Religion and Culture
• The Holocaust and American Memory
• Vietnam and American Memory
• the Bomb and American Memory
• Memory of Catastrophe
• American Sacred Space
• Religion and War in American Culture
  

Publication Highlights

Books

The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001.

History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.
New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1996. (Co-edited with Tom Engelhardt).

Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum.
New York: Viking, 1995, Penguin Books 1997. (2nd edition, Columbia
University Press, 2001).

American Sacred Space. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
(Co-edited with David Chidester).

Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1991. (2nd edition, 1993).

Symbolic Defense: The Cultural Significance of the Strategic Defense
Initiative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

A Shuddering Dawn: Religious Studies and the Nuclear Age, co-edited
with Ira Chernus. Albany: SUNY Press, 1989.