Edward Linenthal

• Editor, Journal of American History
• Professor, Department of History

Education

• Ph.D. at University of California, Santa Barbara, 1979

Contact Information

Ballantine Hall 808

(812) 855-4051

Background

My graduate student years at UC Santa Barbara started me on an interesting professional path, one that I never envisioned while working on a dissertation examining the warrior as a religious figure in America. I went directly from Santa Barbara to the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, where I spent 25 years in the department of religious studies. I never cared much, however, for disciplinary boundaries, nor for the academic jargon that each discipline seems to prize too much. I was interested in investigating and writing for a larger public about the less examined, that which did not, at first glance, seem “religious.” So, for example, in 1987-88 I was a Research Fellow in the Arms Control and Defense Policy Program at MIT, where I did the research for my book Symbolic Defense: The Cultural Significance of the Strategic Defense Initiative, which examined how supporters and opponents of the so-called “Star Wars” missile defense system mobilized powerful American myths and symbols to make their case. At this same time, I also joined Ira Chernus in co-editing A Shuddering Dawn: Religious Studies and the Nuclear Age. Throughout the 1980s, I was also at work on a larger project, which eventually became my next book, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields, which examined processes of veneration, defilement, and redefinition at five sites: Lexington and Concord, the Alamo, Gettysburg, the Little Bighorn and Pearl Harbor. This project also began, happily, an ongoing relationship with the National Park Service. I worked for NPS at the 50th anniversary ceremonies at Pearl Harbor, and delivered the commemorative address at the memorial in 1994. I have also been a long-time consultant to NPS on interpretation of controversial historic sites, and from 2003-2005, I was a half-time Visiting Scholar in NPS’s Civic Engagement and Public History program. I now serve as a member of the federal advisory commission for the memorial to the passengers and crew of United Flight 93 that crashed.

Selected Awards

• Visiting Fellow, Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life, University of California, Santa Barbara (Spring 2004)
• Visiting Scholar, Civic Engagement and Public History, National Park Service (2003-2005)
• Leonard E. Greenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Trinity University (March 2002)
• College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Achievement Award, Western Michigan University (2002)
• Faculty, Salzburg Seminar (March 2001)
• Edward M. Penson Endowed Chair, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh (1999-2003)
• Research Fellow, The Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin Madison (1998-1999)
• John McN Rosebush University Professor, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh (1989-1990)
• Research Fellow, Defense and Arms Control Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1986-1987)
• Distinguished Teaching Award, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh (1984-1985)

Research Interests

• Public history
• War, genocide, and memory
• American religious history
• Holocaust studies

Courses Recently Taught

• Memory of Catastrophe
• The Senses in History

Publication Highlights

Books

The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Co-edited with Tom Engelhardt, History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996. (Selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the 10 most significant non-fiction books of 1996, and recipient of an “Award of Merit” from the American Association for State and Local History.

Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. 2nd edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Co-edited with David Chidester, American Sacred Space. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Articles

“Epilogue: Reflections,” in James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. New York: New Press, pp. 213-224.