BASIC FACTS
Teaching Position: Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University, 2004 – Present
Area of Research: Early American Religious History, German Immigration, Transatlantic Pietism, Backcountry
Education: Ph.D., American History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003
Major Publications: Carté Engel is the author of Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), the 2010 Dale W. Brown Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, awarded by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. 
Carté Engel is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
“Religion and the Economy: New Methods for an Old Problem,” Early American Studies 8(3), Fall 2010, 482-514;
“The Evolution of the Bethlehem Pilgergemeine,” in Jonathan Strom and James Melton, eds., Pietism in Two Worlds (New York: Ashgate, 2009), 163-181; With Jeffrey A. Engel, “On Writing the Local within Diplomatic History: Trends, Historiography, Purpose,” in Jeffrey A. Engel, ed. Lives and Consequences: the Local Impact of the Cold War (Palo Alto and Washington, DC: Stanford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007) 1-32; “‘Commerce that the Lord Could Sanctify and Bless’: Moravian Participation in Transatlantic Trade, 1740-1760″ in Michele Gillespie and Robert Beachy, eds., Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 113-126; “Bridging the Gap: Religious Community and Declension in Eighteenth-century Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,” 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 11 (2005), 407-442; “The Strangers’ Store: Moral Capitalism in Moravian Bethlehem, 1753-1775,” Early American Studies 1(1), January 2003, 90-126, Winner First Place, Colonial Society of Pennsylvania Article Prize, 2003.
Awards: Carté Engel is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:
2010 Dale W. Brown Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, awarded by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies;
ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship, 2009-2010 Competition Year;
SHEAR Research Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia-Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2010;
American Philosophical Society, Franklin Research Grant, 2009;
Pew Young Scholars in American Religion, Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, 2007-2009;
McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Barra Postdoctoral Fellow, 2004-2005;
First Place, Colonial Society of Pennsylvania Article Prize, 2003;
Yale University, Center for Religion in American Life Dissertation Fellow, 2002-2003;
Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Research Fellow, 2001;
Program in Early American Economy and Society-Library Company of Philadelphia Dissertation Fellow, 2000-2001;
DAAD Sprachkursstipendium, Goethe Institute, Iserlohn, Germany, 1999.
Additional Info:
Formerly Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, Camden Campus, 2003-2004.
PERSONAL ANECDOTE
When I talk about my first project, Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America, I am often asked if I’m a Moravian. For me this moment always crystallizes the challenges of using a case study to prove a broader point. Despite the denomination’s pivotal importance to the rise of evangelicalism in the eighteenth century, its relatively small size today has meant that most people assume only an insider would choose to devote so much time to its history. I’m not a Moravian; I came to the study Bethlehem, Pennsylvania’s early history as a graduate student interested in the social history of religion in the diverse middle colonies, in how religion interwove with and was shaped by the market economy, in transatlantic religious community. To look at these big issues in the close way I wanted to, I needed examine a single cohesive community, and the Moravians fit the bill.
My first trip to the Moravian Church Archives in Bethlehem came in 1996, when I started working my dissertation proposal. The archivist at the time, Rev. Vernon Nelson, was cautiously welcoming. He inquired if I spoke German. I didn’t. He steered me towards some account books which had been kept in English, and he probably expected I’d never be back. A few weeks later I defended my dissertation proposal. One of the committee members asked if I spoke German, and I glibly responded that I would learn it. That glibness evaporated when I had to get down to work, however. I relocated to Germany and, when I came back, I got a little apartment in Bethlehem, just in time to take the old German Script course offered annually by the Moravian Archives. Then I became a fixture in the archives, working at what seemed to me to be a snail’s pace through a mountain of eighteenth-century documents.
At first this seemed profoundly isolating. I was hundreds of miles from my grad program, and I knew no one well. But here I found the unexpected benefits of doing a close study. The archives supported its own particular community. A grandmotherly office manager. Two Moravian ministers with children older than me. A septuagenarian philanthropist with boundless passion for the maps of eighteenth-century Bethlehem. A former Catholic priest who fled the Nazis in his native Germany. In a fit of silliness, I dyed my hair red to see if anyone would comment. No. As soon as I let them, however, I was taken in by this warm, caring, and intellectually lively community of folks whose love for Bethlehem’s past was a graduate student’s dream. Life improved again when another woman started a major research project, and she brought boundless good humor to the mix.
Any historian who’s encountered the Moravians knows that they kept unparalleled records, filled with the tiny details a social historian loves, yet always with an eye to the wider world. You can ask nearly any question of these sources, big or small, and find some version of an answer. Just as important for me, however, was the help I received from their modern custodians. They never appeared to tire of my tiny finds. They let me spread enormous account books across long rows of tables, and then leave them there for weeks. They spent hours tracking down random bits of evidence I might want to see. They helped me sort out cramped and difficult handwriting. They brought me along for lunch at the local diner, which, since I’m disinclined to spend more than a nanosecond in the kitchen, kept me from giving all my money to the local convenience store. Most important, they were deeply supportive of scholarship. They never attempted to influence how I or any other visitor interpreted the materials in the archives. Much has changed at the Moravian archives since I did the bulk of my research – new leadership and exciting new projects-but the Moravian historical community’s most important gift to scholars has not changed. It continues to be a place that supports intellectual exploration of all kinds.
I’m now working on a very different project, a study of how the American Revolution changed the idea and the practice of international Protestantism. It requires work in more than a dozen different archives, using a wide variety of sources. While I came to this project in much the same way as I did my work on the Moravians, and I find this set of questions about religion and politics as compelling as I did the last set about religion and the economy, I will miss the chance to get to know a single community so closely.
QUOTES
By Katherine Carté Engel
The Moravians’ experience points to the fundamental problem created by examining the question of religion and economic life in isolation from the rest of life, be it politics, immigration, race, gender, war, or (literally) the price of tea in China. When mundane transactions are the terrain under examination, the scholars’ lens is focused in very tightly. Yet such an approach also places the story on a much wider stage, for those transactions were part of an economy and political system that circled the Atlantic, encompassing four continents and many peoples. Bethlehem declined, but the insidious rise of acquisitiveness within the hearts of its residents was not to blame. For the Moravians, the pivot point came from another quarter entirely. The community’s ties to a church hierarchy in Germany connected it to events and developments in far distant quarters. The Unity’s circum-Atlantic presence created opportunities for it, such as the Commercial Society, that drew on the Caribbean and South American plantation economies. Likewise, the multiple pressures of the Seven Years’ War, financial and, closer to Bethlehem, racial, sharply curtailed the Moravians’ religious choices. The result was ineluctable: a renegotiation of the role of religion in Bethlehem’s economy. The individualized economic ethic that characterized Bethlehem’s religious life in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was fully Moravian, but it was fundamentally different from what came before. — Katherine Carté Engel in “Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America”About Katherine Carté Engel
He is presently at work on a second book, forthcoming with Oxford University Press and tentatively entitled Race War: World War II and the Crisis of American Democracy. Guglielmo is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
Immigrating to the United States, Italians, like all others arriving on America’s shores, were made to fill out a standardized immigration form. In the box for race, they faced several choices: Italian, Southern Italian, Mediterranean, or Silician. On the line requesting information on color, they wrote simply “”white.”” This identification had profound implications for Italians, as Thomas A. Guglielmo demonstrates in this prize- winning book. While many suffered from racial prejudice and discrimination, they were nonetheless viewed as white on arrival in the corridors of American power–from judges to journalists, from organized labor to politicians, from race scientists to realtors. Taking the mass Italian immigration of the late 19th century as his starting point, Guglielmo focuses on how perceptions of Italians’ race and color were shaped in one of America’s great centers of immigration and labor, Chicago. His account skillfully weaves the major events of Chicago immigrant history–the Chicago Color Riot of 1919, the rise of Italian organized crime, the rise of fascism, and the Italian-Ethiopian War of 1935-36–into the story of how Italians approached, learned, and lived race. By tracking their evolving position in the city’s racial hierarchy, Guglielmo reveals the impact of racial classification–both formal and social–on immigrants’ abilities to acquire homes and jobs, start families, and gain opportunities in America. Carefully drawing the distinction between race and color, Guglielmo argues that whiteness proved Italians’ most valuable asset for making it in America. Even so, Italians were reluctant to identify themselves explicitly as white until World War II. By separating examples of discrimination against Italians from the economic and social advantages they accrued from their acceptance as whites, Guglielmo counters the claims of many ethnic Americans that hard work alone enabled their extraordinary success, especially when compared to non-white groups whose upward mobility languished. A compelling story, White on Arrival contains profound implications for our understanding of race and ethnic acculturation in the United States, as well as of the rich and nuanced relationship between immigration and urban history. — About “White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945″
She is curently working on Domestic Workers Unite!: Household Workers’ Organizations in the Post-War U.S. ;
By the 1960s the welfare system was dominated by myths and stereotypes. Perceptions about black women’s sexuality and notions of the black family and the black work ethic justified cutbacks in assistance and provided grounds for work requirements. Ideology shaped public policy and, in this case, bolstered popular support for more punitive and repressive policies. Countering some of the stereotypes of AFDC, women in the welfare rights movement demanded that their work as mothers be recognized and insisted that single motherhood was not a social pathology. They sought to increase their monthly benefits through pressure tactics, and to make a moral claim for assistance as mothers. Their analysis demonstrates how gender is mediated by race and class and the way in which race, gender, and class all shape the welfare system. — Premilla Nadasen in “Welfare Warriors”About Premilla Nadasen
Engerman is the co-editor and contributor of Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War. University of Massachusetts Press, 2003, and The God That Failed: Six Studies of Communism. Columbia University Press, 2001. (Wrote foreword).
especially wide range of scholars and because its founders conceived of their aims very broadly. Scholars-cum- consultants innocently but fervently believed that the various parts of their job fit together seamlessly. They worked with government officials at the same time that they produced their own scholarship and trained their academic progeny. Seams strained and innocence ended in the 1960s, leading some later scholars to denigrate the field solely on the basis of its ties to government. Amid the dual crises of the late 1960s, pioneers … hoped to reinvigorate Soviet Studies by returning to interdisciplinary and applied research that had driven top-notch work in the field’s first decade. Yet the successes of Soviet Studies came thanks to unrepeatable historical circumstances: the intellectual mobilization during World War II, the postwar university boom, and the emergence of new sources of funding. These broad forces permitted Soviet Studies to serve both Mars and Minerva, or at least to try. There [is] no way … to go back to the future. There was no way, after the divisions of the 1960s, to recapture the innocence of the postwar years, the notion that government agencies could only support, not distort, intellectual life. Coming from the small and isolated policy-oriented sector of Soviet Studies, secretaries [Robert] Gates and [Condoleezza] Rice celebrated themselves in claiming that new [government] initiatives incorporated the lessons of Soviet Studies. But new enemies, in new times, require new solutions. — David Engerman in “Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts”
Delay is the co-author with James West Davidson, William E. Gienapp, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark H. Lytle, and Michael B. Stoff, Experience History: Interpreting America’s Past [Formerly Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic], McGraw-Hill (2010). Concise Edition: US/A History (2009).
Mexicans since the late eighteenth century. Men from these Indian communities began attacking Mexican ranches and towns, killing and capturing the people they found there and stealing or destroying the Mexicans’ animals and property. When able, Mexicans responded by doing the same to their indigenous enemies. The conflicts intensified through the 1830s and 1840s, until much of the northern third of Mexico had been transformed into a vast theater of hatred, terror, and staggering loss for independent Indians and Mexicans alike. By the eve of the U.S. invasion these varied conflicts spanned all or parts of ten states. They had claimed thousands of Mexican and Indian lives, made tens of thousands more painful and often wretched, ruined northern Mexico’s economy, stalled its demographic growth, and depopulated much of its countryside. The consequences were far-reaching. I argue that the bloody interethnic violence that preceded and continued throughout the U.S.-Mexican War influenced the course and outcome of that war and, by extension, helped precipitate its manifold long-term consequences for all the continent’s peoples — Brian Delay in “War of a Thousand Deserts Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War”
Lowery is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others:
American people, we must also understand the Native peoples whose nations share the land. For Native history is linked in the most intimate ways with that of America-the land, the people, and the nation. They are linked by kinship, culture, and economy, but also by race, class, gender, and inequality. Whether the inequalities tied to citizenship in the American nation can be rectified depends largely on how we know ourselves and each other. Do we wrestle with categories of knowledge that are different from our own, and assign them equal standing with our own categories? Or do we decide that some categories are more real, truthful, or scientific than others?” — Malinda Maynor Lowery in “Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation”
Snyder is also the author of scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: “Conquered Enemies, Adopted Kin, and Owned People: The Creek Indians and Their Captives,” Journal of Southern History 73 (2007), 255-288; “The Lady of Cofitachequi: Gender and Political Power among Native Southerners” in South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, ed. Joan Johnson, Valinda Littlefield, and Marjorie Spruill. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.
were African Americans. Captivity, not slavery, belonged to Indian tribes, and they targeted white women. But bondage cannot be so neatly confined. In 1725, near what is now Natchez, Mississippi, Tattooed Serpent’s nameless Indian servant died not merely because he was loyal, but because he was a slave. In life, the head servant contributed labor and prestige to his master’s household; in death, he confirmed the social order that privileged elites like Tattooed Serpent. Captivity and its most exploitive form-slavery-was indigenous to North America, it was widespread, and it took many forms. From Tattooed Serpent’s slave to indentured servants in colonial Philadelphia to Apache women sold in the mission of San Antonio, the unfree were everywhere.” — Christina Snyder in “Slavery in Indian Country The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America”
Burns is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: “O Libertarian, Where is Thy Sting?” Journal of Policy History, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2007: 453-471; “Liberalism and The Conservative Imagination,” in Liberalism for a New Century, Eds. Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson (University of California Press, 2007); “In Retrospect: George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945,” Reviews in American History, 32 (September 2004): 447-462; “Godless Capitalism: Ayn Rand and the Conservative Movement,” Modern Intellectual History, 1, 3 (November 2004): 1-27. Reprinted in American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in Twentieth Century America, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
the heart of an intellectual mystery story. Though Rand’s legend was well established among both her fans and enemies, there was little scholarly work about her life and career. I was the first historian to work in her personal papers, and thus it was essential to document her life with archival evidence. Then came the challenge of fitting Rand into the evolving ideological landscape of the American right, which historians were just beginning to chart. The final step was crafting an analytic narrative that would demystify Rand yet retain the tension and sense of discovery that animated my years of detective work. — Jennifer Burns about “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right”
He is currently writing a book on the religious influence on American war and diplomacy from the colonial era to the present, to be published by Knopf in 2012.
a difficult war in pursuit of murky aims, but they also did not want to risk the domestic and international consequences that seemed likely to follow disengagement. At this point Bundy and the NSC staff enter the story, and it is the president’s uncertainty that makes them so important. Unlike their chief executive, they were rarely unsure. Their strong advice, their skill in promoting it, their bureaucratic dexterity, and their professional intimacy with the president enabled them to skew the internal debate over Vietnam in their favor. This book, then, is both a bureaucratic history of the changes in presidential decision making and a diplomatic history of the origins of the Vietnam War. It is a story with two inseparable themes: the acquisition and consolidation of power, and how that power was then used. — Andrew Preston in “The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)
2009 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize, The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; 2009 Colorado Book Award, History Category; 2009 Spence Award, Mining History Association; Honorable Mention, 2009 Hundley Prize, The Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association; Finalist, 2009 Clements Prize, Southwest History category, Clements Center at SMU; Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics, Industrial Relations Section of Princeton Firestone Library; 2009 Caroline Bancroft History Prize, Denver Public Library.
to achieve basic freedoms. Even though the miners suffered a crushing defeat, the blood sacrifices of Ludlow’s martyrs prompted Rockefeller and his fellow capitalists to mend their ways and set American business on the path toward today’s more enlightened labor relations. A Works Project Administration guidebook summarized this interpretation. Ludlow, New Deal authors argued, “aroused public opinion and brought about improvement of working conditions and civil liberties in the coal camps.” Like most tales of the bad old days, such stories chart a narrative of progress. From this starting point, it becomes simply a matter of emphasis and tone to elicit either complacence or alarm or lest we go back to the dark ages when big business reigned supreme and government forces served as the mailed fist of concentrated capital. — Thomas Andrews in “Killing for Coal America’s Deadliest Labor War”
Sargent is an editor of Shock of the Global: The 1970s In Perspective, co-edited with Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
attention away from the familiar narrative and instead places the decade in a new perspective that allows us to evaluate longer-term trends, including the evolution of global society, the dynamics of the international economy, the breakup of colonial empires, the impact of popular culture, and the declining realm for autonomous national choices. This superb work will be greeted with enthusiasm.” — Melvyn P. Leffler, author of “For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War”
helped shape American-led globalization itself. The postindustrial society grew from a specific regional history an the heritage of Populism. It was built in the aisles and break rooms of Southern discount stores, in small-group Bible study and vast Sunday-morning worship services. It spread through the marketing classes and mission trips of Christian colleges, through student business clubs and service projects. Although free-market economic theories captured the hearts and minds of elite policymakers in the later twentieth century, the animatig spirit of Christian free enterprise shaped the outcome. The Wal-Mart Moms understood better than their critics: Family values are an indispensable element of the global service economy, not a distraction from it.” — Bethany Moreton in “To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)
Furstenberg is an editor with Carolyn Fick, La construction de la nation haïtienne après la Révolution. Under contract with CIDIHCA Press, 2010, and the upcoming George Washington and the American Nation: A Brief History with Documents. The Bedford Series in History and Culture. Under Contract with Bedford/ St. Martin’s Press, for publication in 2011.
Martha ultimately took it upon herself to free her husband’s slaves early: some two years before her own death. But it was not humanitarian reasons that drove this early emancipation, the existing evidence suggests she disapproved of freeing slaves, nor was it from the expense or difficulty involved in supporting² the slaves. It was out of fear. It was found necessary, reported Martha¹s grandson, to free the slaves for prudential reasons. Hidden in this circumlocution was the fact that George;s deathbed emancipation had put Martha¹s life in jeopardy. As she and the slaves all recognized, the longer she lived, the longer their bondage extended. “In the state in which they were left by the General,” wrote Adams, “she did not feel as tho her Life was safe in their Hands, may of the [the slaves] would be told that it was [in] their interest to get rid of her.” She therefore was advised to set them free at the close of the year.
Bancroft Prize, Merle Curti Award, Caughey Western History Association Prize, Norris and Carol Hundley Award, William P. Clements Prize, Great Plains Distinguished Book Award, Philosophical Society of Texas Award of Merit, and Kate Broocks Bates Award. ForeWord Magazine’s History Book of the Year. An alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Book-of-the-Month Club 2, History Book Club, and Military Book Club. El imperio comanche. Translation of The Comanche Empire by Ricardo García. Peninsula Press, forthcoming 2010. He is currently working on The Shapes of Power: Frontiers, Borderlands, Middle Grounds, and Empires of North America, 1600-1900. Under contract with Yale University Press.
their dominance. Their overwhelming military force, so evident in their terror-inspiring mounted guerrilla attacks, would have allowed them to destroy many New Mexico and Texas settlements and drive most of the colonists out of their borders. Yet they never adopted such a policy of expulsion, preferring instead to have their borders lined with formally autonomous but economically subservient and dependent outposts that served as economic access points into the vast resources of the Spanish empire.
Engel is the editor of Rethinking Leadership and “Whole of Government” National Security Reform, with Joseph R. Cerami, (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2010).” Authored the chapter: “Change is Hard… But Even Small Steps Matter,” 187-208;
Communist leaders in China and the Soviet Union held power. Their American counterparts, skeptical of the sincerity of recent calls for change throughout the Communist world, prepared for a reinvigorated Cold War of unknown duration and ferocity. Europe prepared for another year divided along fault lines imposed by conquering armies nearly a half-century before.
battles fought by British and American officials over the proper maintenance of the international system following the horrors of World War II, and ultimately of their contest to see which nation would lead the Western crusade against global Communism during the ensuing Cold War. The contest would determine which nation was best equipped to lead the world in its long search for stability, peace, and prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century. The competitors were not always in conflict. Rarely have two allies worked more closely than the United States and the United Kingdom, bonded by a common language, political tradition, and the burdens of combating common enemies. Yet with a fervor rarely appreciated owing to their frequent and public displays of intimacy, behind closed doors they fought bitterly-not only for their different visions of their “Special Relationship,” in which the two nations famously operated as a tighter partnership than either capital enjoyed with any other nation, but more dramatically for their different visions of the future.” — Jeffrey Engel in “Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy” (Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 1.
