Religious Intolerance in America: A History of Cultural Forgetting

FAIN: FA-51543-05

John Corrigan
Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL 32306-0001)

I seek funding to complete a book on the history of religious intolerance in America, with particular attention to the manner in which official national memory has disenvisioned that part of the American past. The scale of religious harmony in America has been historically significant, grounded in realities of toleration and freedom. In public imagination, those realities loom even larger. Americans have idealized them and inflated their meanings in such a way as to veil the national record of religious intolerance. Accordingly, the history of religious intolerance in America is one of a dynamic and shifting relationship between a profound ideological investment in religious harmony and the fact of religious discrimination and violence.