Last week I moseyed down to a mixer at my apartment complex, enticed to take a break by the promise of libations and snacks. While there, I struck up a conversation with a couple, and we exchanged standard pleasantries. One of the guys was a botanist and the other a civil engineer. I introduced myself as a historian. They asked what, specifically, I studied, and I shared with them that I work on rural internationalism and religion in the nineteenth century. “You mean to tell me that people in rural America were actually paying attention?” one of them asked with Read more