Over at the Atlantic, the great Emma Green (who, along with Peggy Fletcher Stack, are the best religion beat writers working today), profiled Race and the Making of the Mormon People. So many recent events in American life have been a call for the country to grapple with its legacy of racism and white supremacy, including the violence in [...]
Author: maxperrymueller
Nebraska Today: Book of Mormon among religious texts that outline racial divides
I'm honored to have Race and the Making of the Mormon People featured in the September 13 edition of Nebraska Today. Where did the notion of race arise? Historians and social scientists have long sought to answer this question, identifying ebbs and flows in its cultural significance, yet never reaching agreement on how it began. After spending [...]
Book Launch on 9/11
Yesterday, my book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, ***officially*** dropped. Of course, I've been looking forward to this day for months, years even. And though the book has been shipping from the University of North Carolina Press (and from that "everything store" on the Internet) for more than a month now, it [...]
Religion Dispatches: What the History of Mormonism Reveals about the Origins of “Race”
I participated in RD's now canonical "10 Questions" series on new books. Other recent contributors include Wendy Doniger, Jason Josephson Storm, and Haroon Moghul. What inspired you to write Race and the Making of the Mormon People? Let me be a bit confessional. I’m not a Mormon, but Mormon culture has probably formed me more than any [...]
Thank yous, and lineage
I've just finished writing inscriptions of thanks into copies of the book, which I'm sending out to my many mentors, advisors, critics, cheerleaders, and readers. I hope that now I can also call them colleagues. This exercise got me thinking about lineages. "Lineage," more than the category of "race," is the more accurate term for [...]
Max Perry Mueller 