HOMEWARD BOUND: A Journalist Chronicles Hip Domesticity

Record: Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).

Matchar is a freelance journalist who has written for many prominent publications.  This is her first book.

Summary:

Matchar’s book is a lively look at several trends among mostly middle class, white, politically progressive young women in the United States.  These trends, which range from cooking from scratch with local, organic food, to handicrafts, to at-home businesses, to homeschooling, are all illustrative of a larger movement among these young women toward what Matchar calls “the New Domesticity.”

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Gunn on how the Cold War created a new American Religion

This post reviews T. Jeremy Gunn, Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009).

Gunn, director of the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief (among many other assignments), here constructs a fascinating if flawed argument that the Cold War led to the unique blend of Christianity, militarism, and capitalism that is now the dominant religion in the United States.  First I’ll lay out his argument and then say why I think it’s flawed.  What does all of this have to do with homeschooling?  I think conservative Christian homeschoolers are perhaps the purest expression of the sort of religion Gunn is chronicling here–fiercely committed to the idea that the United States is (or was and should be again) a Christian and capitalist nation, and strongly pro-military.  Why are so many conservative homeschoolers like this?  Here’s Gunn’s explanation:

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My review of Hartman, Education and the Cold War

The U.S. Intellectual History blog has just web-published my review of Andrew Hartman’s Education and the Cold War.  Click here for the entire review.

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