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Pre 2007 Juneteenth flag. Image by flickr user Office Holidays used under a Creative Commons By Attribution
What is Freedom?: On Juneteenth and Guns
June 11, 2022
We look at two expressions of freedom in the United States: Juneteenth, or Emancipation Day and the right to bear arms.
Annette Gordon Reed. Photograph courtesy Harvard University
History is an Art: On Juneteenth and Black Texas June 11, 2022

Award-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed is no stranger to diving into the areas that make readers uncomfortable.  In her 2021 book, On Juneteenth, Gordon-Reed offers a hybrid history and memoir that gets personal and is timely as Texas lawmakers battle over voting rights.  Gordon-Reed speaks to the current controversy through a wider lens and suggests many Americans have a hard time seeing the Lone Star state fully because of the mythology of West Texas that dominates popular culture.  Arguing that by only seeing the cowboy and oilman, we are missing a character that may be even more important to understanding the story in Texas -- the plantation owner

Annette Gordon-Reed, Law professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. She is currently the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University, where she is also the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a professor of history in the university’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences. Author, most recently of On Juneteenth from Liveright/W. H. Norton.

 

On Juneteenth. Liveright/W.H. Norton
On Juneteenth
Liveright/W. H. Norton

Ryan Burge. Photograph courtesy Ryan Burge
The Echo Chamber: On God and Guns in American Christianity June 11, 2022
Ryan Burge is a political scientist who studies American evangelicals. His data shows that the two most likely predictors of gun ownership in America are religion – evangelical Christianity, in particular – and political affiliation – Republicans own more guns than Democrats. Put the two together and you get a sizable portion of American Christians who will not discuss gun control of any kind. What is the theology behind God and guns? Can gun-loving Christians be brought into the discussion about so-called “common sense” gun laws?

Ryan Burge, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Political Science and Graduate Coordinator at Eastern Illinois University. His research focuses on the interaction of religiosity and political behavior in the American context.
 

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