Historical Spaghetti: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

In 1998, journalist and popular author Adam Hochschild published King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa . The book sold well and introduced the Congo Reform Movement to a broad audience. Hochschild outlined the story of King Leopold II of Belgium and his brutal colonization of the Congo River Basin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. over the course of Leopold reign from 1885-1908, millions of Congolese men, women, and children, were tortured, kidnapped, and massacred in pursuit of the region's precious commodities, ivory and rubber. He also introduced some of the players who discovered, protested, and sought to reform the administration of what Leopold II ironically named the Congo Free State. The reform movement involved an international organization based in Great Britain and the United States, the Congo Reform Association, that sought to alleviate the suffering of the Congolese under stifling European rule. Despite Hochsch...

Good graduate-level survey courses discuss how history should be taught at the undergraduate level. In one such recent conversation, the topic turned to the matter of religion’s role in the first half of the undergraduate American history survey usually covering from around 1500 to either the end of the Civil War or Reconstruction. The instructor posed the question: could one construct an entire survey of this period using religion as a primary focal lens? Even as a historian of religion, I squirmed. It sounded repellant; what student not already interested in the subject would want to sit through fifteen weeks of overtly religious history? Who would want to force a room full of uninterested students to talk about religion for three months? Only a scholar hopelessly obsessed with their own research would foist such a burden on a 100-level class. Yet my initial revulsion abated as I thought more on the idea. I allowed myself to consider how the lens of religion might impact a studen...