America’s Public Bible is an interactive scholarly work that uncovers the history of the Bible in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Using computational methods, this project has found biblical quotations in two large corpora of historical American newspapers. By identifying, visualizing, and studying quotations in American newspapers, the site offers a commentary on how the Bible was used in public life over one century of American history.

Winner of the 2016 National Endowment for the Humanities Chronicling America Data Challenge

The United States has a long history of religious pluralism, and yet Americans have often thought that people’s faith determines their eternal destinies. The result is that Americans switch religions more often than any other nation. The Chance of Salvation traces the history of the distinctively American idea that religion is a matter of individual choice.

Winner of the American Academy of Religion’s 2018 prize for Best First Book in the History of Religions: “Mullen takes a common trope about American religions—that they are about conversion and choice—and deploys it in astonishingly illuminating ways across the breadth of religious traditions. … Mullen clearly and convincingly demonstrates how pressures to convert changed the foundations of American religions. … This book is innovative, accessible, highly teachable, wise and mature.”

The American Religious Ecologies project is creating new datasets from historical sources and new ways of visualizing them so that we can better understand the history of American religion.

We are currently digitizing the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies. At the start of the twentieth century, the U.S. Census Bureau surveyed the nation’s “religious bodies.” These congregation-level schedules—some 232,154 of them—are a treasure trove of congregation- and place-specific data.

We are also transcribing the 1926 census into a dataset, and mapping and visualizing the data. These efforts contribute to a fuller and more vivid depiction of the religious landscape of the early twentieth-century United States.

Generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, this podcast is under development at R2 Studios.

The podcast will explore antisemitism in U.S. history through narration, primary sources, and expert interviews. These stories will discuss how antisemitism developed alongside other forms of bigotry and hatred in the United States. Our themes are that antisemitism is a deep-rooted American problem, that it spans the political and religious spectrum of the United States, that it is intertwined with the history of race in America, and that understanding the history of American antisemitism makes it easier to oppose it in the present.

Law and legal practice modernized in the nineteenth-century United States. The textual record of legal modernization is vast. Hundreds of volumes of regulations were formulated, copied, and re-formulated by legislatures. Millions of case reports became the authoritative building blocks for the thousands of treatises from which modern American law was constructed.

We are studying and visualizing the history of the modernization of American law through computational methods.