Research Guides: RELG 305: Race, Religion, and American Multiculturalism: Getting Started

Introduction

This guide for RELG 305: Race, Religion, and American Multiculturalism is meant to help you with your final writing assignment for the course. Please look at each of the tabs on the top of the page and take your time exploring the resources available in the library.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X before press conference, March 26, 1964

Where are all the books?

Where are all the books located?

The books that were housed in Magill were moved to a huge warehouse; approximately 22,000 volumes are available in the Locker Building.

If you request books from the Warehouse, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, or EZ Borrow/ILL, pick up is in the Science Library. Drop off location is in the Science Library, Founders, and the Music Library.
If you see a book is located in Locker, you need to go to the Locker building and find it yourself. Checkout is through a self-check out kiosk. Locker is open 24/7 with One card access.
New books (published 2017-2018) that were added to the collection are in the Science Library.

Browsing ONLINE while the Library is being rebuilt

Let's say you find a book on Tripod and you really think it is relevant to your interests or research project. One way to physically browse books on Haverford's campus is to head to the Locker Building (near VCAM) which has approximately 22,000 volumes for you to browse and a self-check out kiosk if you find materials you want to check out.

But if you want to digitally browse, you can do that too. Take the call number of the book you liked (copy paste it from the online record). Head back to Tripod. Click on the Books and More tab. Underneath the search box is a link "Browse". At the bottom of the page there is a drop down menu, select "By Call Number." Paste the call number from the book you liked into the field. Hit enter or click "search." This will provide you with a massive list of the books at all three schools and you can browse the shelves digitally!

Getting Started - Books on Reserve

Below are your required books, on reserve in Founders. Please note that the records below are to the copies we have in our main collection, not the specific copy in Founders. For access to the reserves, all you need to do is go to Founders and locate the books on our hold shelf, organized by subject.

Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration During World War II by Anne M. Blankenship
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ISBN: 9781469629209
Publication Date: 2016-11-07
Anne M. Blankenship's study of Christianity in the infamous camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II yields insights both far-reaching and timely. While most Japanese Americans maintained their traditional identities as Buddhists, a sizeable minority identified as Christian, and a number of church leaders sought to minister to them in the camps. Blankenship shows how church leaders were forced to assess the ethics and pragmatism of fighting against or acquiescing to what they clearly perceived, even in the midst of a national crisis, as an unjust social system. These religious activists became acutely aware of the impact of government, as well as church, policies that targeted ordinary Americans of diverse ethnicities. Going through the doors of the camp churches and delving deeply into the religious experiences of the incarcerated and the faithful who aided them, Blankenship argues that the incarceration period introduced new social and legal approaches for Christians of all stripes to challenge the constitutionality of government policies on race and civil rights. She also shows how the camp experience nourished the roots of an Asian American liberation theology that sprouted in the sixties and seventies.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X (As told to)
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ISBN: 0345376714
Publication Date: 1992-01-15
In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement. His fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as the definitive statement of a movement and a man whose work was never completed but whose message is timeless. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand America. Praise for The Autobiography of Malcolm X "Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will."--Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father "Extraordinary . . . a brilliant, painful, important book."--The New York Times "A great book . . . Its dead level honesty, its passion, its exalted purpose, will make it stand as a monument to the most painful truth."--The Nation "The most important book I'll ever read, it changed the way I thought, it changed the way I acted. It has given me courage I didn't know I had inside me. I'm one of hundreds of thousands whose lives were changed for the better."--Spike Lee "This book will have a permanent place in the literature of the Afro-American struggle."--I. F. Stone
Ambivalent Embrace by Rachel Kranson
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ISBN: 9781469635439
Publication Date: 2017-11-06
This new cultural history of Jewish life and identity in the United States after World War II focuses on the process of upward mobility. Rachel Kranson challenges the common notion that most American Jews unambivalently celebrated their generally strong growth in economic status and social acceptance during the booming postwar era. In fact, a significant number of Jewish religious, artistic, and intellectual leaders worried about the ascent of large numbers of Jews into the American middle class. Kranson reveals that many Jews were deeply concerned that their lives--affected by rapidly changing political pressures, gender roles, and religious practices--were becoming dangerously disconnected from authentic Jewish values. She uncovers how Jewish leaders delivered jeremiads that warned affluent Jews of hypocrisy and associated "good" Jews with poverty, even at times romanticizing life in America's immigrant slums and Europe's impoverished shtetls. Jewish leaders, while not trying to hinder economic development, thus cemented an ongoing identification with the Jewish heritage of poverty and marginality as a crucial element in an American Jewish ethos.
Enlisting Faith by Ronit Y. Stahl
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ISBN: 9780674981300
Publication Date: 2017-11-06
Ronit Stahl traces the ways the U.S. military struggled with, encouraged, and regulated religious pluralism and scrambled to handle the nation's deep religious, racial, and political complexity. Just as the state relied on religion to sanction combat missions and sanctify war deaths, so too did religious groups seek validation as American faiths.
New World A-Coming by Judith Weisenfeld
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ISBN: 9781479888801
Publication Date: 2017-02-07
Demonstrates that the efforts to contest conventional racial categorization contributed to broader discussions in black America that still resonate today. When Joseph Nathaniel Beckles registered for the draft in the 1942, he rejected the racial categories presented to him and persuaded the registrar to cross out the check mark she had placed next to Negro and substitute "Ethiopian Hebrew." "God did not make us Negroes," declared religious leaders in black communities of the early twentieth-century urban North. They insisted that so-called Negroes are, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or raceless children of God. Rejecting conventional American racial classification, many black southern migrants and immigrants from the Caribbean embraced these alternative visions of black history, racial identity, and collective future, thereby reshaping the black religious and racial landscape. Focusing on the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, and a number of congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews, Judith Weisenfeld argues that the appeal of these groups lay not only in the new religious opportunities membership provided, but also in the novel ways they formulated a religio-racial identity. Arguing that members of these groups understood their religious and racial identities as divinely-ordained and inseparable, the book examines how this sense of self shapedtheir conceptions of their bodies, families, religious and social communities, space and place, and political sensibilities. Weisenfeld draws on extensive archival research and incorporates a rich array of sources to highlight the experiences of average members. The book demonstrates that the efforts by members of these movements to contest conventional racial categorization contributed to broader discussions in black America about the nature of racial identity and the collective future of black people that still resonate today.
Religious Freedom by Tisa Wenger
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ISBN: 9781469634623
Publication Date: 2017-10-02
Religious freedom is so often presented as a timeless American ideal and an inalienable right, appearing fully formed at the founding of the United States. That is simply not so, Tisa Wenger contends in this sweeping and brilliantly argued book. Instead, American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse--Wenger calls it "religious freedom talk--that cannot possibly be separated from the evolving politics of race and empire. More often than not, Wenger demonstrates, religious freedom talk worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population. At the same time, a diverse array of minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal to defend themselves and their ways of life. In so doing they posed sharp challenges to the racial and religious exclusions of American life. People of almost every religious stripe have argued, debated, negotiated, and brought into being an ideal called American religious freedom, subtly transforming their own identities and traditions in the process. In a post-9/11 world, Wenger reflects, public attention to religious freedom and its implications is as consequential as it has ever been.