Jonathan H. Ebel (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) will offer a public lecture, “From Dust They Came: Migration, Sanitation, and Missionary Modernity in New Deal California.”
This event, cosponsored by the Center for Social Concerns and the Departments of American Studies and History, is free and open to all.
About the speaker
Jonathan H. Ebel studies religion and war, religion and violence, and lay theologies of economic hardship all within the American context. His most recent book, From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California (NYU, 2023) examines the federal migratory farm labor camp system established in California during the Great Depression, as a site of missionary interaction between New Deal reformers and Dust Bowl migrants. He is also the author of G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion (Yale, 2015), Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton, 2010), and the co-editor of From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America (California, 2012). He is currently at work on a religious history of American warfare in five weapons. Ebel is past president of the American Society of Church History and a past Guggenheim Fellow.