Meet the Historian! Christine Heyrman and Doomed Romance

Annette finally meets Bancroft Prizewinning Historian Dr. Christine Heyrman, and is shocked to discover she's a lovely person

Note from Annette

Thanks to everyone who let me know how much you enjoyed Recovery, the series riffing on Martyrs, by journalist Roger Hutchinson, about the Native people of a Scottish village who, having seen neighbors deported, led an island-wide revolt against high rents and the theft of their land in the 1880s. Fascinating stuff, indeed. And it was fun to make all those Gilbert and Sullivan references. 😀

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My confidence is not a given, so I always have to steel myself when I meet dauntingly clever historians I’ve never met before. Will they get my sense of humor, which remains the unexportable cheeky British sort despite my absurdly long residence in the US, or will they realize figure out think me a bit of an idiot? Will they be so intimidating, I will dissolve into a puddle of pitiful self-doubt?

Look, I know what typically happens the first time I meet someone super-impressive: I get rattled and suffer a major confidence malfunction that results in hyper-babbling. I once turned down the chance to have dinner with former President Jimmy Carter in Plains, on the grounds that I would likely panic, and start explaining to him how he should have handled the Iran hostage crisis.

But eminent historian Dr. Christine Heyrman, Author of Doomed Romance, winner of the super-important Bancroft Prize (historians’ Oscar) for Southern Cross?

She’s different! I mean, we’d practically met already! I have heard legendary and awesome Heyrman stories since I was in my mid-20s! I have watched YouTube videos of her conference appearances! I was actually present at a historians’ conference panel in about 1998 or so—laughing and wincing, yet deeply impressed—as Christine (as she prefers to be called) demolished a paper written by a senior male historian in her comments. He sat glowering next to her, arms crossed in a hopeless attempt at self-defense, as Christine cheerfully asked the audience “Has Professor [cough]’s brain been kidnapped by space aliens?”

Ooh, I thought, watching with other impressed and delighted young scholars in the audience, Christine Heyrman shares my wicked sense of humor and my lack of deference! How unexpected! How great! As a Brit, I was also certain I knew what she was: Okay, yeah, okay, she’s American, but I know a magnificent British dragon when I see one! I must introduce myself to her!

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Annette's Aside: Dragon? Hey, that's a massive compliment from me. I’m a dragon (not always convincingly, but I do my best). I love dragons! As I made plain in my recent post on the subject, which explains:

Britain: The Dragon Years (1915-2000), An Introduction

From my early teens, it was my ambition to be a dragon by the time I reached fifty. My former students are no doubt muttering that I was well on my way in my early thirties, but don’t listen to them, silly callow youths that they all still are.*

*Sadly, because so many of my college students in Georgia were a supportive audience, I didn’t grasp for a long time that America is not a great place to be a British-style dragon. That, indeed, dragons—forthright, confident, kind, clever, and authoritative women— are rarely welcome, and that things have actually got worse in the last few years: Dragons are now “Karens” and targeted for misogynist abuse. Since I know no other way to be, I carry on dragoning, despite the consequences. It’s either that, or go home to the UK—not as good as it used to be for dragons, either—or join a convent, which might be tricky, since Hoosen probably wouldn’t be allowed to accompany me.

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Impressed though I was at that historians’ conference in the late 90s, I wimped out of introducing myself to Dr. Christine Heyrman.

I knew that I would no doubt babble at her. And, I imagined, with that overactive imagination of mine, she might then dryly ask me if I even had a brain worth being kidnapped by space aliens? No. I wasn’t ready for that possibility. I figured I would wait until I was pretty sure my confidence was more finely honed before taking up her time.

Well, it took more than thirty years, but that day arrived! I even had the gall to write an outrageous double-entendre interpretation (UK readers: Inspired by Carry On films, what else?) of the early chapters of Doomed Romance, Christine Heyrman’s latest book:

Historian's Doomed Romance 💔

I was indeed, I thought, finally ready to meet Christine!

Anyway. I will now ruin Christine’s reputation (although not in the sense that young Martha Parker’s reputation was ruined in Dr. Heyrman’s brilliant book, Doomed Romance):

Christine Heyrman is lovely.

She really is. I mean, I would say I’m disappointed, but actually, I’m not. Relieved, tbh. Yet a bit, well, surprised.

Having seen Christine in other contexts, she does an impressive dragon turn, I’ll give her that. She had me convinced. But, like me, she’s a bit of a fraud as a dragon.

OK, I’ll come clean: If I had listened less selectively to Christine Heyrman stories over the years, I would have known this from the start. But no. I foolishly had filed this very much postwar, very American woman with all those dragonly British women of previous generations.

I'm talking women like actress Maggie Smith*, of whose death I just learned while writing this note. Dame Maggie once admitted in a BBC interview with Graham Norton that when an awestruck little boy in the supermarket queue (yes, she did her own grocery shopping) asked her whether she could really turn herself into a cat, as in the Harry Potter films, she heard herself saying, “Pull yourself together!” That’s British dragonism.

*Christine, where but at Non-Boring History would you find yourself mentioned in the same piece as Maggie Smith? You won’t get that at the Journal of American History!

After I got over my shock at the sheer niceness of our encounter, I realized I like Christine Heyrman! In the video below, do note my delight on camera when Dr. Heyrman admits to hating math (YES! Celebrate, us math-averse women who are profoundly fed up of semi-literate math nerds harping on that we would love math if we only gave it a chance, yeah, right, like we didn’t suffer through years of it! Bugger off, math dweebs! Go read a book! If you can.)

And especially note my unrestrained double-take amazement when Dr. Heyrman also claims to lack originality and imagination. Ye Gods, woman, if you’re not brilliant (psst: you are), where does that leave the rest of us? In the spirit of bloody cheek, and to quote the late Maggie Smith: Pull yourself together! Um, I rush to add, sorry for the bald-faced audacity, but I’ll try to do the same.

I reckon NBH readers will enjoy this fun chat, especially if you enjoy seeing Laing gobsmacked in the presence of a daunting intellect who also happens to be a kind, decent, and self-effacing woman, but for those of you who prefer to read, a transcript is below. Yeah, I even edited out some of the bits where—of course— I babbled. 🙄

Now go get yourself a copy of Christine Leigh Heyrman's Doomed Romance. Why?

Because this terrific history shows the need for dragons, and efforts to suppress dragon development, when an ambitious but vulnerable young evangelical in early 19th century New England, on her way to being an amazing woman, finds herself trapped in a web. It's spun by the sort of men who feel threatened by women like her, who want to make an example of her, and to destroy her life and reputation for daring to want an excellent life.

Doomed Romance shows the value of dragons, whether the 19th century dragons Christine writes about, or the sometime dragons some of us are. It shows why many American women began to be steered away from becoming proper adults, much less dragons.

It shows that we can learn from this American history. It changes how we see the world. Doomed Romance is also a hidden gem: It came out in 2021, not a good year for authors doing book tours.

Doomed Romance is compelling, thoughtful, and witty (without resorting to double-entendre . . . much) It awaits your discovery, and you spreading the word.

TRANSCRIPTION edited for clarity

ANNETTE LAING Hi, this is Annette Laing with Non-Boring History. I'm delighted to be here today with Professor Christine Heyrman. And also slightly terrified, as you guys have probably figured out because I have talked about this.

Christine was my PhD advisor's PhD advisor, which in academic genealogical terms means that she's my grandmother. Anyways, I'm glad to have her here. She is a product of Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she got her BA. She has a PhD from Yale, and I think we all know where that is, on Mount Olympus somewhere. And she's currently the Robert W and Shirley Grimble Professor of American History at the University of Delaware. Christine is the author of five books [including] Commerce and Culture, the Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt about how the South became evangelical, because honestly, it didn't start out like that. And that's the biggie, because she won the Bancroft prize for that, which  is like an Oscar for historians, only much, much more so. Christine could you show off your Bancroft to us?

CHRISTINE HEYRMAN: Oh, no, I don't want to bore your your audience and I don't want to put myself to shame trying to get this off my wall. It's just a certificate. It's not like the Oscar. 

ANNETTE: Well, that's pathetic. I mean, they couldn't do you a statue? A plaque even?

CHRISTINE: Alas, no.

ANNETTE Well, I beat you anyway. I got a second PhD. Yeah, I did. Look. Mustardology from the Mustard Museum in Wisconsin. I'm a professor of Dijon, and it was only 10 bucks. And I bet that's a lot less than you had to pay Harvard. Or Yale. Oh, yeah, you went to Yale. Sorry.  I think it's actually probably bigger than your Bancroft, so there you are. 

So Christine Heyrman’s career absolutely did not just stop with the Bancroft Prize for the truly astonishing Southern Cross, which is especially astonishing because it's one of the most readable books in academic history, and that's something I could babble on about. But I shan't. Christine Heyrman can write, and you guys know that that's not the norm in academic history.

She is also the author of American Apostles, which is about 19th century American Evangelical missionaries who find themselves in the Middle East tackling Islam, which must win some kind of award for chutzpah to do that,  and now Doomed Romance, A Story  of Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in 19th century America. I've written about at Non-Boring History, kind of, in my post, Historian's Doomed Romance in which I rewrote the first couple of chapters as a smutty romance novel, which I'm now going to apologize to Dr. Heyrman for because actually her book is not . . . Or maybe I should say, her book is a smutty, romance novel! Buy copies, people! 

Historian's Doomed Romance 💔

No, it's not [a smutty romance novel] It actually had me sobbing at the end, and you'll be relieved to know, I don't plan to sob again today. Those of you who know me know that I am a sensitive little Scot, and I cry a lot at everything, from FDR's hat to whatever, but Doomed Romance did make me sob. And I want to talk a little bit about how the book that I shamelessly sent up as a romance novel, actually is much, much more than that.  Christine Heyrman, we've never actually met before, so hello Christine!

CHRISTINE (laughs) Hi!

ANNETTE Thank you, Christine.  I want to start by asking perhaps an unexpected question. I gather that you're from Milwaukee. Is that right? 

CHRISTINE That's right. I grew up in a Brookfield, Wisconsin, in one of the WOW counties [ Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties, all adjacent to Milwaukee] It was referred  to in my youth as Birchwood because it was so solidly conservative, you know after the John Birch Society [Right-wing national political association founded in 1958]

ANNETTE Oh, wow.

CHRISTINE Yeah, I think it has since become more mixed in terms of its political sentiments. But my folks moved there. My folks are both originally from Green Bay [Wisconsin] and I grew up in the Midwest. And we moved to Milwaukee when I was in the sixth grade.

ANNETTE So you're from suburban Milwaukee, rather than from the city. Oh, how disappointing. Everybody knows that Laverne and Shirley and the Fonz are from Milwaukee, but I don't think I've ever heard of a historian from Milwaukee. I mean I'm kind of curious. Did you ever work in a beer factory?

CHRISTINE: No,  I never worked in a beer factory. I did work in a bank in Milwaukee, very briefly. My most distinguished moment at the bank was they had me down in the vault, counting money, and I was sent upstairs for some reason, and I ran straight into the navel of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  [Annette laughing]. He looked at me, you know [laughter] I apologized all over, but. …Yes, that was my one brush with greatness.

ANNETTE I ran into John Lithgow in Century City, literally, once and I had the same experience because I'm 5 foot 2, and he's not. So yeah, it's kind of awkward to then extend a dinner invitation after that. [laughter] So you did end up being a historian, despite being from Milwaukee? You know, I live in Madison,  I'm just teasing Wisconsin right now, I absolutely love it here. But did you tell people you were really from Boston?

CHRISTINE Well, I was born in Boston.

ANNETTE Noooo!  Oh, that's cheating. Oh, you're kidding.

CHRISTINE No, that part  was not a lie.  I was born in Boston, and I was there for the first two years of my life, but my parents are born and bred Midwesterners. I certainly think of myself as a Midwesterner, but I do have, you know, these these shady origins in New England. 

ANNETTE It's just so disappointing because whenever I meet historians, I hear [pompous voice] "I'm from New York." And I'm like, I've never been to New York City. I've actually made a point of saying that now just to torture them {Christine laughing} What the hell? What does New York have that London doesn't? I mean except a lot more dirt and rats as far as I can tell.

So you decided to do early American history, and your mentor at Yale was Edmund S. Morgan. And Morgan, of course, was the author of the gobsmacking American Slavery, American Freedom. He was not only, I'm just going to say it, the best historian, at least in our field, of the 20th century, but lived a long, long time, so he could keep demonstrating that this was true. What was it like to work with Morgan? What kind of impact did he have on you?

CHRISTINE What can I say? All of his students, myself right at the head of the line, just regarded him as the most inspiring presence. And you thought about, not just what kind of an historian you wanted to be, somebody who could write for a wider public than a bunch of academics,  but the kind of person that you  wanted to be. He was just this humane guy. You know, if anybody had a reason to be full of himself, it would have been Ed Morgan, but he would just have none of it, you know, this totally self-effacing, self-mocking, kind of guy. And, you know, me and all of my fellow students, we just adored him. There's nothing else to say.

ANNETTE  Ah, that's great. So, Ed Morgan wrote the first book I ever read in early American history, The Puritan Dilemma. I didn't even want to do early American history as is well known among my readers. I wanted to do British or 20th century US, but I fell in love with that book. And it wasn't just with the book, it was with the whole idea of a history that was about people.

I know you got interested in social and cultural history, and you realized that you were doing that at a time when quantitative history was all the rage. I wonder if you could explain to my folks, what was the problem, and how were you rescued from becoming a quantitative historian? You arrived in doing social and cultural history at the time when it was dominated by people using social science methods and writing history essentially as a series of reports and, you know, so did you find that a challenge? Was it a problem that you didn't want to do history like that?

CHRISTINE I have been through a few incarnations. I was actually trained as an intellectual historian. My doctoral dissertation was about attitudes toward poverty and charity in provincial New England, and it was very much focused on theology. And I did a whole lot with sociology of religion. It was old-fashioned intellectual history. When I went to the University of California, Irvine, which was my first job, all of the really exciting young folks were doing social and cultural history and some of the social historians were very quantitatively oriented. I'm terrible at math.

ANNETTE Oh, yay!!

CHRISTINE: I was terrified that I wasn't going to get tenure. I mean, this was a point in time when there were not a whole lot of women in the academy,  and I didn't want to get fired, I wanted to get tenure. So that was what sent me into not publishing my dissertation, but doing a whole separate first book, these twin community studies,  of these two seaport towns in New England, Commerce and Culture, and so, I mean, the answer is desperation.  I couldn't count. And if I published my dissertation, which was this, you know, quite traditional intellectual history, that I might get fired.

ANNETTE Wow. Wow . . . I'm gobsmacked. . . So you know, just that I picked UC Riverside [for my PhD] for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was the money they offered me, and I got there and it was in the thick of quantitative history and I'm horrible at math.

When you talked with me earlier about your dissertation, I was wondering, why didn't I know about this? You didn't publish it. I think there are times when probably people shouldn't, they should just go on to something else entirely, and you did and, wow, that's very cool. 

So you wrote Commerce and Culture on early American history and in New England, no less, and then, shockingly, you defected to the 19th century, the early national period, and, worse, you ran off to the South and started writing about evangelicals and won a Bancroft for it, while leaving the rest of us trying to say something new about the Puritans, like, I don't know, [Puritan minister] Cotton Mather's hobbies and favorite colors or something. So how did it come to this, Christine? Why did you desert us, leaving us back there in the 18th century?

CHRISTINE Well, there are really two reasons. First of all, I'm terrible at math, so I'm not a quantitative historian and I'm also just not very original or imaginative as a thinker. [Annette reacts with amazement] And so I figured my strategy had to be to move around [in research subject], you know, not to go back to New England because I'd never get a new idea about New England. And so, that was the first reason that I went someplace else.

The other reason is that all of these bright young social historians at UC Irvine, not all, but most, had kind of a soft Marxist orientation. And, of course, they all knew that I was really super-interested in religion, which to a Marxist, of course, is epiphenomenal [secondary to the big ideas]. You know, I mean, like, why should we take this seriously? And so, I felt like I was a little intellectually on the defensive, you know, between the intellectual history background, the interest in religious history, and again, I was terrified about not getting tenure. And then Jimmy Carter got elected. And this is during my first few years at Irvine, and all of my soft Marxist, very smart, social history colleagues turned up and asked me out to lunch and said, like, how did this happen? I mean, what's up with the evangelicals and Jimmy Carter?

And I had, all of a sudden, new street cred and in, you know, in this kind of natural, not very bright way,  I started thinking, well, gee, you know how did the South become the Bible belt? You know, where did these evangelicals come from? Because it used to be just a bunch of Anglicans. And that's how I started working on the South.

One of my very smart colleagues, Michael Johnson,  a great historian of the Antebellum South, he was wonderful to me, and gave me all sorts of ideas. He introduced me to a whole bunch of people in Southern history. He kind of took me under the wing and, you know, just wonderful intellectual generosity. So, that  sort of eased me into this.

ANNETTE I was looking at Southern Cross, I'll just show you. It's here. [Holds up copy] And I got this in 1998 and I thought to myself, my God, that was a really bad year for me personally. So that's why I'm going to confess to you, what I promised I wouldn't do, which is I never finished it, not because it wasn't a terrific book, but because I was in the South, I was in Georgia, and these struggles that evangelicals have in your book [were just too much for me then—what I meant to say—since the book was so vivid.

I'd like to get you back and talk about Southern Cross properly, now, I've made my horrible revelation, which is a bit like being a scholar of English, and admitting not to have read Hamlet. But you show how torturous [the early evangelical experience] it is, how you have this guy who is a Scotsman in the South who literally thinks, he's seeing the Devil, and he's then locked away. I mean, he's having this complete nervous breakdown. [I found it painful thinking of] people choosing this instead of what seems to me a perfectly pleasant normal happy life as Anglicans, and revealing my prejudice, not as an Anglican,  I'm actually not one, but as a cultural Anglican raised in England in the 70s, my thought was, who the hell would choose this? I understood with [18th century transatlantic minister] George Whitefield because he was exciting, and it's great when he says you're all going to hell, [his audience is] like "Yay!" But this [19th century evangelicalism in the South] just seemed to be incredibly internal. How did you find your way into these people's minds? That's the thing that I think is striking me now.

CHRISTINE The evidentiary basis for Southern Cross, most of the stuff that I read, were the memoirs, both published and unpublished, of Baptist and Methodist ministers. These, you know, are the two principal denominations that are taking over the loyalties of a majority of Southern churchgoers. And, you know, if you're interested in history from the bottom up,  kind of a worm's eye view of history, which is one of one of the things that really intrigues me, these memoirs are fascinating, because most of these folks have no formal theological training, you know, they're autodidacts. They're really self-taught. They are people who are just kind of coming up from the ordinary people of the South, and reflecting on their experience in a way that is uncluttered by much learning. And so you really do get a sense of the milieu that they are in, that they're rising from. Very different from reading the memoirs of New England clergymen, I mean, starting in the 17th century, and going right up through the Civil War. I'm not sure I'm answering your question.

ANNETTE You are. You're talking about digging into the text and trying to sort of mind-meld with them, like Mr. Spock .  . . wouldn't it be great if we could . . . I never watched Star Trek except when my dad made me and now nobody believes that ever.

I know that you were not raised evangelical, you've said so in public,  that you were  a Catholic schoolgirl in Milwaukee.

CHRISTINE That's right.

ANNETTE And there's such a fundamentally different mindset in the South at this time. I'm not sure about now, having lived in the South,  I wondered how much of evangelicalism--oh, I'm going to get myself in trouble again-- how much of evangelicalism that I encountered seemed very performative. But in that period [the early 19th century], people are really taking this seriously. It's dividing people from their families, it's dividing neighbors from neighbors, it's driving people a little crazy. And I've had to put Southern Cross down, and I think this is what happened in 1998, because it was just too close. You really are getting  at how traumatic this transition was, from the South as this Anglican place, to the South that's this evangelical Bible Belt.

So I want to skip now to Doomed Romance, the story of Martha Parker, who's a clever educated young woman. She's an evangelical, so she has to keep putting yourself down. That's a requirement for men as well as women. She desperately wants to get the heck out of boring New England when she marries, which of course she expects to do. in the early 19th century. She's been reading all these amazing accounts from evangelical missionaries. And at least she wants to have a less boring life. And so she accepts the proposal of a guy going to the Middle East, as a missionary, only to find herself attacked and vilified.

I wrote about it very flippantly because I just thought I don't want to translate this when you've done such a great job of writing for the public, I don't want to imply that I need to do this, but I wanted to write about it. So I do apologize. But the reason I ended up sobbing was partly that you showed a sexual double standard among evangelicals in the early 19th century. Well, no shock there.

But it goes deeper, and it's about how a group of men felt threatened by clever young women just being themselves, and worked very hard to scapegoat and destroy one of them. And yet, you also showed us, and I'm sorry to tell you about your book, I'm just sort of summarizing, you also showed us good guys. Real men being supportive. Although not all of them stayed the course. And I'm just wondering about this because I actually didn't expect you to do that, and I thought it was quite lovely. What was it you found particularly intriguing about these men? Let's start with that and then we'll talk some more about the women.

CHRISTINE: To me, what's really interesting about the tale of Martha Parker, who is the principal character of Doomed Romance, who aspires to become a missionary, what’s really interesting about this story is the way in which evangelicalism as it played out in the New England of that time did so much both to empower women and to offer them opportunities outside of their traditional roles, and to offer them really first-rate educations for the time.

And then,  they we’re afraid of what they were calling into being among those talented young women to whom they were offering all these opportunities, and ended up taking, in most cases, a very conservative position.  I think at the end of the book, I invoke Lydia Maria Child where she's basically saying what we have here is a case of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, where evangelicalism calls into being all of these brooms washing away, and [conservative men] are horrified at what they have created. 

ANNETTE You have the president of Dartmouth College [Bennet Tyler] who is the villain, and I know we don't set out to write villains, but sometimes they really assert themselves. So he's  pushing these young men to accuse [Martha] of being this awful floozy who leads men along and then gets engaged to somebody else. And you know that  didn't surprise me. I thought what I particularly liked, and, I'm sorry,  it's been long time since I majored in journalism, I'm not the greatest interviewer, but was somebody like Jeremiah Evarts, who's much more ambiguous. Tell us a little bit about him, and his role in what happens.

CHRISTINE:  Jeremiah Evarts is a lawyer by training. He's a very pious evangelical, and he ends up being the impresario of the American Foreign Missions movement. He is the person who is recruiting missionaries, who is training missionaries. When they are sent abroad, he's the one who is corresponding with them, and he's also this world-class fundraiser. Jeremiah Evarts invents the direct mail campaign still going on today.

Evarts is someone who looks at a gal like Martha Parker, our protagonist, and he sees great publicity. You know, here is this pretty, smart, pious young woman, and she wants to marry a missionary who is headed to the Middle East, and her sister is already there and Jeremiah Evarts just sees a dream team of publicity at so many levels.

And then there is this sexual scandal that comes to shroud Martha Parker, who he thinks is going to do great things for the missionary movement. He's just a fascinating character because, on the one hand, he's interested in female empowerment, and authentically so, because it serves his purposes. On the other, this sexual scandal could bring down the whole show, and it's happening at the same time as a scandal over Native Americans who are attending a school in Western Massachusetts, and who are marrying the daughters of local white farmers. So there's more kind of obloquy [disgrace] that's looming up there.

And he confronts, of course, in Dartmouth's president, yet another threat. He becomes very much aware of very conservative evangelicals who don't want women to exert any more power than they already do in the evangelical movement. So Evarts,  I came away thinking, Evarts started out with all of these great intentions, but he was defeated, unable to act on those intentions because of the sort of backlash that he confronted.

ANNETTE Leaving Martha hanging out to dry . . .

You brought out these wonderful . . . in Britain we call them dragons.  Not dragon ladies, there is no such thing as male dragons in Britain. There are only dragons, you brought up these incredible women I had never heard of, being an early Americanist who basically lost interest when the British left. You talked briefly about Fanny Wright, who was Scottish, and does this speaking tour of America and kicks ass and tells people how it is, and Southerner Anne Royall, not an evangelical, and takes no prisoners. But best of all is Ann Parker Bird, Martha's sister, who is so wonderfully documented Tell us a little bit about . . . sell us on Ann Parker Bird, what her role is in this?

CHRISTINE Well, Ann Parker Bird is one of the older Parker sisters, she is older than than Martha, she has married Isaac Bird, and they go off to the Middle East together. And Ann Parker Bird just hates this guy, Thomas Tenney, who is trying to ruin her sister Martha's reputation. Ann Parker Bird  steps to the fore to defend her sister and to offer aid and comfort to Elnathan Gridley, the guy who Martha has been forced to give up. In my mind, Ann Parker Bird represents  what evangelical liberality has been able to achieve, and also what conservative evangelicals are absolutely terrified of: A super-smart, super-self-possessed woman who knows exactly how to marshal allies for her cause.

ANNETTE And it's that confidence that just astonished me.  I'm reading currently a book that you did not write, and it's on the history of education, Bill Reese's book on American public schools. I'm realizing how much evangelicalism played a role in [the rise of public schooling]. I mean, I think it would have happened anyway, but how evangelicalism played a role in shaping what public education is, which I think would come as a shock to a lot of people and me included.

To see these evangelicals being on the good side of so many things, including women's education, and then this comes along and we see it sort of slipping from our grasp. It really was lovely to see [Ann Parker Bird] fighting the good fight, taking no prisoners, writing these angry letters with her husband or through intermediaries or just [herself] this early, and coming to this fierce defense of her sister, of herself, of women, years before the Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. So thank you for bringing her to light. I don't want to give away the ending of the book, although you do. You do it in the title, Christine, you [shouldn’t] do that but you did, so oh, well. You don't see Americans--oh,  fighting words!--Americans destroying ambitious women as a problem of the past, do you?

CHRISTINE No. I would say, I would say not. We are living with this in the present.

ANNETTE I think often people assume that historians think in terms of steady progress, and of course, technically, we don't. Technically, we think more like the Chinese about history. We think it's cyclical, and we think it takes unexpected turns. But I have to say that despite that, I'm still fascinated by how astonished we are when things don't just keep moving in a direction that we'd like to see. I think here of Mary Beard, the British historian of ancient Rome, who was astonished when she was attacked on Twitter. Just gobsmacked. One of the things that I've started writing about because I've reached 60—everybody knows that I am quite thrilled about it— is I don't give a damn anymore. And I've started to write about the whole thing about Karens.

And so I want to thank you for this book, this magnificent book, and for everything you've done for history, and I shan't get more sentimental because it could end badly. So thank you Christine Heyrman. Thank you so much and it's so delightful to meet you.

CHRISTINE HEYRMAN Thank you.

Non-Boring History

is the work of Dr. Annette Laing, Brit in America, and renegade academic historian, who told her university to shove its tenured professorship in 2008. Since then, she has devoted herself to reaching all sorts of unlikely audiences (like people who don’t like history) through all sorts of unorthodox methods.

Her work includes enjoyable historical time-travel novels for young readers — and adult readers who pretend they’re above such reading, but aren't. She also has a long and unexpected history of giving college lectures to elementary and middle school kids in (mostly) rural schools in the Deep South, to show that kids are just too smart for worksheets and factoids.

And now, at Non-Boring History, Annette explains academic history to adults like you, as well as museums, and all sorts of other historical stuff, while flaunting her shameless sense of humor.

Non-Boring History is one historian’s bizarre attempt to help save good academic history by luring in the unsuspecting public, and it depends absolutely on the support of readers like you who believe in history and historians, and recognize the massive amount of work NBH posts represent. Likeminded? Please become a paying supporter today.