While researching at the Massachusetts Historical Society this week, I have been reading the “Simeon Crowell commonplace-book.” The document is not so much a proper commonplace book as a collection of Crowell’s poems and a few poems by other people, two lengthy narratives of his life, and some copies of letters. Included among these other materials is a “receipt,” or recipe, for the cure of asthma, which involved mixing various food and non-food substances together. Also included are these more curious “receipts”:¹

A Receipt for Stoping Blod.

Jesus was born in gallilee of the virgin
Mary on Friday, December 25th if this
Be true Blood stand Still as a Stone

A Receipt for Curing a Burn

Burn stand still neither Blue nor
too yellow in the Name of the Father the Son
And the holy gost and in three Days you will
Be well in the Name of the Lord God. Amen.

There are a few things to note about these recipes.

The historical demography of American religion is in a sorry state. I’ve been intending to write about the reasons and possible fixes for this historiographical quandary for some time. My draft blog post has grown to epic length because there are really several topics to address: (1) what attempts have been made at understanding the historical demographics of American religion, (2) what sources exist for recovering these demographics (spoiler: it’s pretty grim, but not as grim as you might think), (3) what historical and analytical techniques can we use to fill in the gaps, and (4) what digital humanities tools might help manage and analyze the data once recovered. Parts one through three must wait for more reading, but I want to offer some preliminary thoughts on digital humanities tools.

So what tools are available to historians who want to study historical demography?

In June of 1843, Clarence Walworth waded into the salty waters of the bay around New York City to be baptized for the second time. The Episcopalian minister who baptized him immersed Walworth three times while pronouncing the baptismal formula “in the Name of the FATHER and of the SON and of the HOLY GHOST.” Afterwards the minister put his hand to an certificate of baptism in the hand of the young Walworth, “heavily done in imitation of Old English lettering, ornamentally shaded with red.” The Episcopal church had not enjoined Walworth to be re-baptized, nor did it prescribe the “mode of ‘trine immersion’” in its prayer book. Why then did Walworth take pains to be baptized in an unusual way, and what did it mean?¹

For my work on the American Converts Database I’ve created an Omeka plugin that connects Omeka items to records in other catalogs. My database, and probably other databases as well, have people or items that are identified by Library of Congress subject headings. One could manually search other catalogs by the subject heading, but its easy enough to generate links that do the searching automatically. The plugin adds links to Archive Grid, the DPLA, Google Books, Google Scholar, the Hathi Trust, JSTOR, the Library of Congress, and WorldCat. The links work best if you use Omeka’s very good Library of Congress Suggest plugin to add your subject headings. So, for example, from this item for Warder Cresson in the Converts Database, you can click links to the Library of Congress to find books that Cresson wrote, to JSTOR to find articles about him, and to Google Books to search inside books for mentions of him.

I had written an earlier version of the plugin that basically hard wired the links so that a user had to modify the plugin itself to change which connections were made. This first public release of the plugin lets users decide which catalog links to display, and also to add their own custom links.

You can download the plugin from the Omeka site, see the code at GitHub, or let me know about any bugs.

[I’m glad to have joined the blog Religion in American History as a regular contributor, having earlier written one guest post. Here is my post that appeared at the blog on May 1, 2013.]

When I was in high school, I occasionally drove my grandfather, a Baptist pastor, to preach at other churches. Several times we visited a predominantly black Baptist congregation in Providence, Rhode Island. What surprised me most during the first visit were the decorations: where you might have expected a cross, a picture of Jesus, and a communion table, there was a Star of David and a menorah instead. The pastor told me after the service that the congregation rented the building on Sundays from another congregation that met on Saturdays because they were black Jews. The idea of black Jews challenged to my ill-informed adolescent categories. But even at that time Jacob Dorman was already doing the research for the book that would set me straight, Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (Oxford, 2013).

The first thing Dorman explains in his book is that the book is about “Black Israelites,” that is, black leaders and groups who believed that the ancient Israelites were black and that modern blacks are their descendants. Some of these groups practiced Judaism, but many were Christians. Dorman argues that these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century groups got their start not because African Americans were descended from the ancient Israelites, or because they had contact with white Jews in the United States, but because they read the Scriptures and tried to emulate the ancient Israelites in order to be more like the earliest Christians. Many of these groups, such as Prophet William Saunders Crowdy’s Church of God and Saints in Christ, borrowed ideas and practices from Holiness Christianity, and thus share ancestry with Pentecostal Christianity. The book deals primarily with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in Harlem, but it extends as far as South Africa and Ethiopia to follow people such as Rabbi Arnold Josiah Ford, who moved to Ethiopia and, among other things, played music in the court of Emperor Haile Selassie. The emperor was born Ras Tafari Makonnen, and the belief that he is divine animates the Rastafarians, who also figure in Dorman’s work.