I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis
Why Write Here?
- Community: I see this website as a way to be a fuller participant in the community of scholars. Most obviously by sharing content and methods with other researchers whose interests and approaches overlap with my own. Most hopefully, to receive advice and resources from other researchers whose interests and approaches overlap with my own.
- Personal: This website will be a highly visible list of my accomplishments and progress-- a small light in the dark scholarly night of dissertation writing. And a sense of progress towards a goal is good for the soul. This website will also provide me with invaluable practice articulating my ideas to a larger audience.
- Public: I am fully committed the ideal of the public intellectual. I believe that researchers and academics have a duty to share there work as freely and widely as is feasible--process and all.
The Question:
Why/How/When did the conservative coalition that rose to peak national prominence in the 1980s come into existence? Why did Evangelical Christians and the GOP form such a powerful political alliance?
Many excellent books have been written in the last decade deconstructing the historiographically intuitive answer to the above question. My dissertation seeks to contribute to this conversation by arguing that the important mixture of factors which produced the conservative political coalition between fundamentally-inclined evangelical Christians and the GOP happened in Southern California, specifically Los Angeles in the 1920s as a response to a variety of factors such as internal-migration, early suburbanization, Hollywood, the influence of the "Progressives" on state politics and widespread openness to spiritual experimentation.
Disclaimer:
This website is essentially my public research notebook. As such, the work presented here will be by definition in progress meaning at times things will be overlooked, mistakes will be made, and I might even occasionally be flat out wrong. If you have a constructive critique in the spirit of peer review or would like to point me in the direction of materials or authors I may have overlooked please drop me a line.