Laura Yares, Jewish Sunday Schools: Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Abstract

text is thus a poignant act of accountability to Whittlesey's haunting call. 3 Scholars have explained how thoroughly archival work can reproduce dominant interpretations through processes deemed "neutral," a pattern that highlights the value of Mountz and Williams' queer reading practices.Researchers adopting default assumptions of heteronormativity in archival readings can overlook contextual details or coded language that others reading with more expansive gendered and sexuality frames can interpret otherwise.Scholars' skeptical question to the authors, "Were Whittlesey and Kemp really a couple?" after living, working, and traveling together across four decades, demonstrates the exact heteronormative readings that can suppress such histories.The archive's power to both enable and foreclose LGBTQ+ educational histories is also evidenced in Harvard's only recent release of the sealed archival resources that enabled analysis. 4The authors' related conceptualizing of the archive as affective, agential, spatial, personal, and political is a strength of the book.The book's layered and circular style, woven with social theory, photographs, and personal processing, challenges readers to engage slowly to track diverse threads.As a work of epistemic justice and tribute, Let Geography Die refuses the charge to do so, narratively sustaining the program's history and rendering visible the lives of geographers who cultivated meaningful queer networks within institutions often ignorant of or outright hostile to their existence.The book intervenes in accounts that blamed Bowman or Whittlesey for insufficient advocacy to keep the program open, which the authors argued prompted closures nationwide because of Harvard's prestige.It exposes consequential institutional politics that shaped fields and faculty lives.It also leaves readers with the haunting awareness of the gendered and sexualized forces affecting all educational institutions, both then and now.