Columbus the Catholic

By Kate Moran

Landing of Columbus, oil on canvas by John Vanderlyn, 1846.  In the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.  Source: http://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/historic-rotunda-paintings/landing-columbus.

This week many Americans will celebrate, as a founding hero, a man who is also widely believed to be a Roman Catholic.[1] This hardly seems shocking these days: we are, after all, moving quickly towards a Presidential election in which perhaps the only certainty is that we will elect a Catholic Vice President. Yet if present realities tempt us to forget the long and powerful history of anti-Catholicism in the United States, we risk missing one of the more interesting things about the history of Columbus Day: not just that a Catholic was included in the pantheon of American founding heroes during an anti-Catholic age, but that he was not the only one.

In the past few decades, the annual arrival of Columbus Day (or, in many parts of the country, Indigenous People’s Day) has raised important questions about how we define heroism and discovery, how we approach tragedy and violence in history, and from whose perspective history should be told. I’d like to add another thread to that discussion, one that links the American celebration of Columbus to the history of religion, nationalism, and the U.S. West.

Columbus, of course, was not initially celebrated in the United States for being Catholic. In fact, in Washington Irving’s popular 1829 biography, he is given a bit of a proto-Protestant gloss. Here is Irving’s (apocryphal) portrait of Columbus pressing his case in front of a tribunal of scholars and priests:

The hall of the old convent presented a striking spectacle. A simple mariner standing forth in the midst of an imposing array of clerical and collegiate sages; maintaining his theory with natural eloquence, and, as it were, pleading the cause of the new world. . . . Columbus was assailed with citations from the Bible, and the works of the early fathers of the church, which were thought incompatible with his theory: doctrinal points were mixed up with philosophical discussions, and even a mathematical demonstration was allowed no truth, if it appeared to clash with a text of scripture, or a commentary of one of the fathers.[2]

At this dramatic turning point in Columbus’s story, Columbus is cast as holding his own against the forces of received knowledge and tradition, hierarchy and authority. In this iteration, the story of Columbus becomes the story of an enlightened individual challenging a stereotypically “medieval” mindset: a quasi-Catholic hero for an anti-Catholic United States.

Yet as the nineteenth century unfolded, America’s Columbus became increasingly Catholic. A great deal of this change can be traced to American Catholics themselves, to their appropriation of Columbus as a hero who could tie them to the nation’s mythic past. Beginning in the 1860s, Italian Catholic immigrants celebrated the anniversary of Columbus’s landing, and gave the celebration a religious flavor: in 1869 in San Francisco, their celebration of “Discovery Day” began with a Catholic mass and involved a procession with a statue of Columbus, similar to a saint’s day festa.[3] Irish Catholic immigrants founded the Knights of Columbus in 1882, and they joined other immigrant societies and the Catholic press in lobbying for the creation of an official, federal Columbus Day.

Jacques Marquette, statue in marble, by Gaetano Trentanove. Presented by Wisconsin to the U.S. Capitol, 1896. Part of the National Statuary Hall collection. Source: http://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/national-statuary-hall-collection/jacques-marquette.

But the emergence of a Catholic Columbus can also be understood as part of a larger trend, particularly apparent in the American West. Take Jacques Marquette. In the late nineteenth century, during the era of the Italian-American “Discovery Days,” Catholics and Protestants near Lake Michigan began to celebrate the life of the French Jesuit missionary who had helped found missions at Sault Sainte Marie and at St. Ignace and who had accompanied Louis Joliet on a 1673 expedition down the Mississippi river. Nineteenth-century promoters cast Marquette as a regional and national founding figure, frequently referring to him as the “first white man” to see the area. In the 1890s, Wisconsinites waged a successful battle against the anti-Catholic American Protective Association to place a statue of Marquette in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C., as one of the two statues representing their state. (The A.P.A., for its part, worried that the statue of a Jesuit in the Capitol would acclimate Americans to Catholic images in government buildings, enabling a smooth transition to Catholic rule when the Pope’s forces inevitably marched on Washington.)[4] Chicagoans, too, embraced the missionary as a city founder. In the boom decades after the Great Fire, Marquette became a useful spiritual symbol for a city often derided as a godless chaos of commerce. In 1924, President Coolidge would declare, “Of the men who laid the foundations of our country, he [Marquette] deserves his place among the foremost.”[5]

Junípero Serra, statue in bronze, by Ettore Cadorin. Presented by California to the U.S. Capitol, 1931. Part of the National Statuary Hall collection. Source:
http://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/national-statuary-hall-collection/father-junipero-serra.

Or take Junípero Serra. As the Marquette commemorations were beginning in Wisconsin, Anglo Protestant boosters and prominent Catholics in Southern California began to celebrate California’s Catholic mission past. They worked to preserve and protect the ruins of the eighteenth-century mission buildings, arguing that these buildings were the equals of European cathedrals in beauty, romance, historical importance, and cash value. Indeed, the missions inspired a massive tourist industry that included, by the beginning of the twentieth century, pageants and plays, railroad and automobile tours, and even a spectacular theme hotel in Riverside called the Mission Inn, which once hosted President Taft. In the process, Junípero Serra, the Franciscan friar who led the mission effort, emerged as a popular historical figure. In poetry and prose, much of it published nationally, Serra was heralded as California’s own founding father—a West Coast corollary to the East Coast’s Puritan heritage. Protestant boosters often collaborated with prominent Catholics to celebrate Serra’s legacy, and both sides remarked with pride (if perhaps an excess of optimism) that these celebrations helped break down religious prejudice in California. In 1931, Serra joined Marquette in the National Statuary Hall, as one of California’s two representatives.

At least some of the people celebrating Marquette and Serra saw an explicit connection to Columbus. During the fight to place the statue of Marquette in the Capitol in the 1890s, Marquette supporters argued that if the country could rally behind Columbus, why couldn’t it rally behind Marquette? The Chicago Daily Tribune warned: “If these resolutions [objecting to the Marquette statue] were to be adopted, they would be followed by others demanding the removal of that of Columbus from the Capitol, because he was a Spaniard and a fervent Catholic.”[6] Such an outcome, the paper implied, would be ridiculous. The existence of one Catholic as a founding hero implied the possibility of including more. Tourist literature in California invoked Columbus as well. Take, for example, promotional material put out by the Automobile Club of Southern California in 1915: “What Columbus, Washington and Lincoln have been to the United States of America,” the club proclaimed, “Father Junípero Serra . . . has been to California.”[7]

What, then, can we make of this emergence of Catholic founding figures? To promoters of Marquette and Serra, it often meant the inclusion of their regions’ histories in the national story, a story that they complained (with justification) had too long been dominated by Puritans, Pilgrims, and the East Coast. To many Catholics, and to their non-Catholic allies, it meant a more inclusive, cross-confessional group of national heroes, potentially powerful symbols of Catholic national belonging in a society marked by anti-Catholicism. Finally, it meant that in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, many American Catholics and Protestants were united by their embrace of heroic interpretations of European exploration and empire, Christian evangelization and territorial acquisition. While they challenged exclusively Protestant notions of the nation’s origins and identity, they reinforced the idea that the United States was—from coast to coast—an essentially Christian nation born out of a Christianizing, civilizing project. At the dawn of the American century, this too was a legacy of Columbus Day.

[1]There are interesting theories that Columbus might have been Jewish, but since my subject is the myth rather than the man, those theories will be left for others to explore.

[2]Washington Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, abridged ed. (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1829), 41-42.

[3]Gerald McKevitt, “Christopher Columbus as a Civic Saint: Angelo Noce and Italian American Assimilation,” California History 71, no. 4 (January 1992): 518.

[4]K. Gerald Marsden, “Father Marquette and the A.P.A.: An Incident in American Nativism,” The Catholic Historical Review 46, no. 1 (April 1960): 8.

[5]“Text of Coolidge Speech Before Commerce Club,” Chicago Evening Post, 4 December 1924.

[6]“The Marquette Statue,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 2 March 1896.

[7]Automobile Club of Southern California, California’s Mission Tour (Los Angeles: Geo. Rice & Sons, 1915).

Book of the Month:

Gastón Espinosa and Mario T. García, eds., Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture.

Review by Brett Hendrickson

Most of the American West used to be Mexico, and Mexican Americans and other Latinos comprise the largest minority group in every continental state west of Kansas City except the Dakotas, Oklahoma, and Montana. It would be an exaggeration to say that the history of Mexican Americans is the history of the American West, but it is impossible to understand the region without considering Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Naturally, Mexican American religions have a tremendous influence on Mexican Americans’ cultural output, sense of self and community, and negotiation of identity in the United States.

This relatively recent volume (2008) adds to a growing wave of scholarship in what one might call “Mexican American lived religions” in that it avoids explicit normative and theological viewpoints as well as religious institutional histories. The editors explain in the introduction that this collection, instead, focuses on “religious sentiments in [Mexican American] literature, art, politics, and pop culture” (4). As a result, most of the essays in the book are extremely fun to read: they are topical, full of illustrations and personal stories, make playful use of theory, and would work easily in an undergraduate seminar.

To say that the essays are fun is not to say that they aren’t serious. An ongoing theme in all scholarly work on Mexican American religion is that religion, for the most part, has aided Mexican Americans in their struggle against prejudice, exclusion, poverty, and marginalization. The most important essay in the volume, “Pious Colonialism: Assessing a Church Paradigm for Chicano Identity” by Anthony Stevens-Arroyo complicates this picture of Mexican American religion and shows that Chicano religious institutions and customs have also had their role in promoting subjugation. However, more typical is the excellent chapter about feminist appropriations of Guadalupe by Socorro Castañeda-Liles, which displays some of the creative and empowering relationships that many Mexican American women have shared with the Virgin.

Indeed, women are everywhere in the book. A chapter by Kay Turner profiles altaristas, women who maintain elaborate home altars (in writing so tender that I teared up at times). Other chapters consider women’s roles in community-based faith dramas, in literature, in art, and in traditional folk medicine. The final chapter in the book, by Gastón Espinosa, is a suggestive exploration of how the murdered pop singer, Selena, is now functioning like a subcultural redemptive force. Another chapter, co-authored by Roberto Lint Sagarena and Davíd Carrasco, is a paean to the poet and activist Gloria Anzaldúa. The editors, without saying a word about it, have demonstrated with their chapter selection and organization that Mexican American women are central actors in Mexican American religion and culture.

What could be better? There are two good chapters on Mexican American Pentecostals, but there could be more here. Likewise, there is no discussion of how Mexican American Catholics and Protestants do or do not relate to each other in public life. A few of the chapters have appeared almost verbatim elsewhere. A couple of the authors probably overstate the ability of religion, art, or literature to overthrow centuries of economic oppression and second-class citizenship (but wouldn’t it be nice to think that what we study has that kind of power?).

But, all in all, this is a strong collection of essays. Like many edited collections, it doesn’t have a clear argumentative arc and therefore could never be used as a stand-alone text in a course on Mexican American religion, much less religion in the American West, but it would be a terrific supplementary reader. And even if you aren’t thinking of using the book as a teaching tool, it is still a great read that will help you fill out your own understanding of the diversity of religion in the American West.

Editor’s note: Have you read this book? What do you think about it? Join the conversation and leave your thoughts in the comments! If you have a suggestion for a future book of the month, or if you would like to review a book for the book of the month series, please contact us. Next month, Susanna Morrill reviews Patricia O'Connell Killen and Mark Silk, eds., Religion and Public Life in the Northwest: The None Zone (Altamira Press, 2004).

The New York Times Gets Religion—in the American West

By James B. Bennett

Last Wednesday morning I nearly choked on my coffee as I read the New York Times Op-Ed page. Whatever ongoing angst we in the Religion in the American West seminar may be feeling about the relevance and promise of our subject, The New York Times has gotten religion—religion in the American West, that is.

Image by Olimpia Zagnoli, in NYTimes.com

It was a wonderful moment, the kind that we historians live for, when the events of the past can shed light on current controversies. In her "Nuns on the Frontier," Anne M. Butler, professor emerita of history at Utah State, notes that conflict between Roman Catholic sisters and their bishops has a long history in the United States. One need only look at the American West to see antecedents for the current tensions. While the male clergy were often reluctant to endure the hardships of mission and ministry in the nineteenth-century West, sisters answered the call to serve in the West. Women religious were the first Catholic presence in many western communities, establishing the often unacknowledged foundation on which male clergy were all too happy to step—a foundation built in the hardship of Western life and a foundation that, both literally and figuratively, enabled the male hierarchy to keep the mud and dust off their vestments.

As Butler notes, while the sisters adapted and accepted their work and suffering, they were not silent in their criticisms of the male hierarchy, whose expectations were often  unrealistic and whose intolerance for dissent was unrivaled. For any who would argue that the current tensions between American sisters and their bishops are a new phenomenon, the history of American West shows otherwise.

Much like Tisa Wenger noted in her review of Kathleen Holscher's Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico, which likewise notes the role of Catholic sisters at the center of controversy, Anne Butler makes clear how events grounded in very particular places in the West—from the wilds of Montana to the impoverished frontiers in Texas—do not remain in their specificity, but also come to shed light on and speak to larger issues of national significance.

Once again, and this time on the pages of the national press rather than in academic monographs, we see how stories of religion in the American West open us to new understandings of the past, further complicating our understandings of many aspects of the American religious experience, especially its gendered dimensions. But the promise does not stop there, as Butler points to ways that the past informs and complicates the rhetoric surrounding contemporary events.

I look forward to Anne Butler's forthcoming book Across God's Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920, a study that promises to enrich our conversation about religion in the American West. Butler's Op-Ed piece reminds us that the significance of our work and the contributions of our conversations are greater than internal academic conversations. We also have stories to tell and insights to offer as public intellectuals speaking to contemporary issues. What stories can you tell?

OAH 2012 in Milwaukee: lots of labor history, not so much on religion or the West

by Tisa Wenger, April 27, 2012

I don’t always make it to the OAH (Organization of American Historians), but this year I’d been asked to respond to a panel titled “In the Aftermath of Contact with ‘Others’: The Reformulation of Religious and Racial Identity on the Frontier”—with three papers very much of interest to readers of this blog—so I made my way to Milwaukee for the conference last weekend. Actually I headed to Madison first, where I fit in four days of research at the fantastic Wisconsin Historical Society.  (They have impressive holdings that go far beyond Wisconsin history, so check it out if you ever have the chance. I spent most of my time there immersed in the papers of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, Wisconsin Civil Liberties Union, and related collections.)

At the conference I roomed with an old friend, Colleen O’Neill, author of an excellent book on Navajo labor history, Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century. I bring this up because Colleen also happens to be the associate editor of the Western Historical Quarterly, based at Utah State University, and she mentioned to me that the WHQ is always interested in articles on religion in the American west. So if any of you are working on essays that might fit in that venue, send them her way!

To some extent the OAH program reflected the interests of this year’s president, Alice Kessler-Harris, who is a leading labor historian and gave a very interesting presidential address titled “Capitalism, Democracy, and the Emancipation of Belief.” So there were a few more sessions than usual related to labor and economic history, important topics to be sure, but not really speaking to my interests. And there were correspondingly few either on the American West or in religious history, let alone the two in combination. I noticed one panel on the Joseph Smith papers, but that happened while I was still in Madison. Another session, “Catholic Lay Women and Mid-Century Public Life,” included 1) Mary Henold on Catholic lay women’s responses to Vatican II, raising important questions about methods and sources for studying the “average” lay women, 2) Karen Johnson on Catholic women and interracial activism in mid-century Chicago, and 3) Tim Lacy on the relationship between political position and conversion to Catholicism in the life of Clare Booth Luce. Great stuff, but unless we place Chicago in the West, not really within the scope of this blog.

These exclusions, of course, reflect something of the blind spots of all these fields: mirroring the traditional lack of attention to class, labor, or the West among historians of American religion, labor historians have only relatively recently started to work on the west, and only a handful have found religious history relevant to their concerns. Exceptions to these lines of division on the program included a roundtable panel on “Religion, Corporate Capitalism, and Democracy in the Twentieth Century,” featuring the star-studded lineup of Kate Bowler, Darren Dochuk, Darren Grem, Kathryn Lofton, and Bethany Moreton, and another roundtable on “Religion, Democracy, and the Working Class in Capitalist America, Gilded Age to the Present.” I couldn’t attend either of these panels—one was on Thursday while I was still in Madison, and the other was on Sunday when I was already on my way back home—but they bode well for the developing conversation between religious history and the histories of class and labor.

Finally, back to the session that took me to the conference in the first place, which proved a fruitful exploration of the construction of racial and religious identities within various sites of encounter in the American west. Kristine Gunnell’s paper, “The Daughters of Charity as Cultural Intermediaries,” examined the motivations and racial dynamics of the work of this Catholic order in early twentieth-century Los Angeles, a time of extensive Mexican immigration into Southern California. In “Texas Jews and other Others: Race, Masculinity, and American Identity,” Sarah Imhoff interrogated the interest among some Jews in early twentieth-century Texas in claiming kinship to Native Americans, or somewhat later in “playing Mexican,” as ways of asserting both whiteness and masculinity. For Imhoff these practices reflected an impulse distinct from but parallel to the contemporaneous Zionist movement—one that similarly sought to assert Jewish identity and masculinity, but in this case placing themselves at home in the American West. And finally, in “William McCrary’s Racial Ventriloquism during the Mormon Exodus, 1846-1847,” Max Mueller mined the few available sources in an effort to recover the perspective of McCrary, a racially ambiguous “Negro-Indian” Mormon convert who left the Saints after Mormon leaders refused to accept his claims to prophetic authority. I am looking forward to seeing all three of these pieces in publication.

So that was my experience of the OAH this year. The take-home for me, as it has been so many times before, was—why so little in our field on the program? And one answer to that question is that if we want to see sessions on religion in the American west, then we need to propose them. Kudos to Kristine, Sarah, and Max for doing just that at this year’s conference, and I’d encourage all of you to do the same in future years!

"Building Up What Needs to be Destroyed"

by Sara M. Patterson

One of my favorite comments from the Religion and the American West seminar at this year’s AAR—and, mind you, there were many comments worthy of quotation—was in response to a question posed by a first timer to the seminar: “What makes the West really distinct?”  In asking that question, our visitor tapped into the discussions that we’ve been having for the past four years: what really makes the West distinct?  The first response came from Greg Johnson, this year’s respondent.  He argued that the emphasis shouldn’t be on the really, rather that the West need only be sufficiently different to sustain interesting and on-going conversations.  A second response to the question came from Jim Bennett, co-chair of RAW.  He said that as a group we knew that our regionalism skirted on exceptionalism but that we still felt there was value to focusing our attention on religion in the American West: “We are building up what we know needs to be destroyed; we’re doing both simultaneously.”  I appreciated how well those comments seemed to epitomize much of what the seminar and its participants have tried to do.
   
Because all four of the papers presented can be found by following the instructions here, I will not attempt to summarize each author’s argument.  Rather, I will try to tease out several themes (or several manifestations of one theme) that I saw surface in this year’s discussion.  I hope that others will respond and explore the themes that stood out to them because this is in no way a comprehensive list. I am encouraged here by the comments given by Greg Johnson, whose response can be found here.  Johnson suggested that the panelists explore secondary order arguments that would promote comparison and cross-talk, while recognizing that comparisons in the past (and today) often function in a bullying fashion, forcing peoples and their spiritual identities into categories that they might not recognize themselves.  Nonetheless, Johnson argued for a cautious exploration of the larger relevance of each of the specific papers’ arguments.
   
The first theme that stood out to me was the role of “the West” in nation formation.  Several of our panelists noted that “the west” was not always geographically west of wherever the United States was, and yet “the West” was the space on which Americans played out their futuristic, often millennial, hopes for the nation.  As one participant noted, it was in the American imagination what America “ought to be.” This desire to create the ideal “American” (read also Protestant Christian) space, led to some very serious revisionist histories that “disappeared” indigenous peoples and wildernesses (and Muslims and animists in the Philippines), that flat out rejected whatever was deemed “non-Christian” (ie. Groups like Mormons), and re-read, in order to claim, certain histories (such as California’s Spanish, Catholic past).  All of these strategies were part and parcel of the formation of an idealized American identity.  Brandi Denison offered an important caution to our discussion of ‘disappearances,’ one later echoed by John-Charles Duffy: that in talking about disappearances and constructing these activities as the act of disappearing, we may well be participating in our own forms of romanticization.
   
The second theme that emerged in the papers was the theme of different groups—in these papers Mormons and Jews—claiming an American Indian past in order to foster a particular group identity.  This process stood out most clearly in Sarah Imhoff’s work which analyzed the reasons why supporters of the Galveston movement—a movement to place newly immigrated Jews in the American West—might be interested in the argument that Jews were somehow tied to American Indian ancestry, an argument that had been made since the colonial settlement of the Americas. 
   
The third theme that is intimately tied to the previous two was the way Catholics, Mormons and American Indians (particularly Utes, in our discussion), played a role in creating these visions of the past, present and future.  As Katherine Moran pointed out, Catholics played a key role in creating a romantic Catholic past in the pacific west, they were integral in portraying themselves as the predecessors of American Protestants.  In a similar vein, the Utes were not passive players in the creation of historical narratives that tied to the present day.  As an example Greg Johnson brought up the fact that the Utes currently own a tiny piece of the area surrounding Mesa Verde even though they have no blood connection to the ancient Pueblo who dwelt there.  Although there is no blood connection, the Utes have set up a hot dog stand where a tourist economy allows them the possibility of connecting with the esteemed and romanticized native past portrayed at Mesa Verde.
   
The final statement that caught my attention and may not be a ‘theme’ from the seminar this year, but is certainly worthy of note, was Johnson’s claim that Mormonism was “God’s gift to people who study religion.”  The argument behind this comment was simply that Mormon history is so rich and full of data about the founding of a new religious movement.  Johnson encouraged seminar participants to use their own approach to teaching Mormonism as a type of litmus test: If one can’t teach about Mormonism as a serious religious movement, then there “is something wrong with your methodology.”  I think this is an excellent reminder that I will use to end my comments about this year’s seminar. What stood out most to me was that we should be constantly questioning our methodologies while also continuing to explore, compare and make secondary-order arguments.  We should, indeed, continue the task of building up what we know needs to be destroyed.
  
Editors' note: Stay tuned for further conversation about our recent AAR session!  Did you go?  What did you think?  Leave your thoughts in the comments!  ALSO, coming up next week: Tisa Wenger kicks off our Book of the Month series with a review of Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (W.W. Norton, 2010).

Summer Reading and Traveling!

by Quincy Newell

Summer has come to the University of Wyoming, even though it doesn’t look like it. (Seriously: the National Weather Service is forecasting snow for later this week.) So in the grand blog tradition of summer list-making, I have two questions for you readers out there:

1. Reading: what books and articles related to religion in the American West are you looking forward to reading this summer? What would you recommend to other folks interested in the topic? Because it’s not fair to ask questions without answering them, here are my responses (in reverse order): I’m a perennial fan of Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s essay “Eastward Ho!” (in Retelling U.S. Religious History, edited by Thomas A. Tweed). I also really like Steven W. Hackel’s Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis, which examines the encounter between California Indians and Spanish Franciscans at Mission San Carlos Borromeo in California. But this summer I am gearing up for a class on Mormonism (to be taught next spring) and a project on Mormonism (already well underway), so I’m going to be reading mostly about – you guessed it – Mormonism. I’d love to hear your recommendations on that topic as well, but I don’t want this post to get too distracted. So stick to the “Religion in the American West” recommendations for now. If I have time, I’m also going to check out a couple titles I ran across in our library recently: Catholicism in the American West: A Rosary of Hidden Voices, edited by Roberto R. Treviño and Richard V. Francaviglia (University of Texas at Arlington, 2007); and Blake Allmendinger’s Imagining the African American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

2. Traveling: Summer is the season of travel for many of us. What sites do you think are most important to, most illustrative of, or just downright coolest when it comes to, religion in the American West? I have often lamented the fact that I became an Americanist – it’s tough to justify research trips to exotic locales (though Hawai’i might count), and the chances of leading study abroad trips or getting to go to conferences in cool places are pretty slim. But with Americans tightening their belts and staycations becoming standard fare, suddenly the American West is looking a lot better! I also have an ulterior motive here: I’ve pondered the possibility of a summer course incorporating a travel component, but I’ve not yet figured out a coherent set of sites to visit. So what would you suggest? For me, Devil’s Tower would certainly be on the list, and if my travel budget were unlimited, so would Jesus Mountain. We can’t forget Salt Lake City, of course, and if there are any LDS temples opening in the west, a temple tour would be de rigeur. (The LDS Church lists temple openings on their website – pretty handy.) Then there are the Spanish missions in California and the Southwest. I know the most about San Francisco de Asís (a.k.a. Dolores), so I would be tempted by that one – but the archaeology is probably better at Santa Barbara, and I could probably be persuaded to forgo California altogether in favor of Texas or another Southwestern state. But this is just me dreaming. Where would you recommend, and why?

Let’s hear it, people! Leave your top picks, wish lists, and idle speculations in the comments!