Jordan Watkins
Brigham Young University, Church History and Doctrine, Faculty Member
- American History, Intellectual History, Legal History, American Intellectual History, American Religious History, Antebellum American Literature, and 8 moreEuropean intellectual history, American Studies, History, History of Slavery, New Religious Movements, Constitutional Theory, Mormonism, and Abolition of Slaveryedit
- PhD, History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2014) MA, History, Claremont Graduate University (2009) BA, History, B... morePhD, History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2014)
MA, History, Claremont Graduate University (2009)
BA, History, Brigham Young University (2006)
I am interested in exploring the transatlantic development of American intellectual history, specifically in the realm of historical thought and religious, legal, and literary developments. My book, Slavery and Sacred Texts: The Bible, the Constitution, and Antebellum Historical Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2021), examines the ways in which antebellum biblical and constitutional debates over slavery brought awareness to the historical distances separating Americans from their hallowed biblical and Revolutionary pasts.
I currently teach courses in Church History at Brigham Young University.edit - David F. Hollandedit
In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts - the Bible and the Constitution - to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters'... more
In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts - the Bible and the Constitution - to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters' emphasis on historical readings of the sacred texts, and in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated nineteenth-century Americans from biblical and founding pasts. While many Americans continued to adhere to a belief in the Bible's timeless teachings and the Constitution's enduring principles, some antislavery readers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, used historical distance to reinterpret and use the sacred texts as antislavery documents. By using the debate over American slavery as a case study, Jordan T. Watkins traces the development of American historical consciousness in antebellum America, showing how a growing emphasis on historical readings of the Bible and the Constitution gave rise to a sense of historical distance.