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Faculty Profiles

Christopher Joseph Beneke
cbeneke@bentley.edu          website
AAC 245
781/891-2813
Associate Professor of History
Director, Valente Center for Arts and Sciences

PhD, Northwestern University, 2001
Research Interests:

American Religious History

American Intellectual History

Colonial North America

History of Integration in the United States

History of Religious Pluralism in the United States

History of Education in the United States
Teaching Interests:

The American Revolution

American Thought

The American Religious Experience

The Early Republic

Colonial North America
Christopher Joseph Beneke
Selected Publications and presentations:

Journal articles
Beneke, Chris. "America's Whiggish Religious Revolution: An Instance in the Progress of History," Historically Speaking, vol. 10, no. 3, 31-35, 2009.

Chris Beneke. "The Critical Turn: Jonathan Mayhew, the British Empire, and the Idea of Resistance in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Boston," Massachusetts Historical Review, 2008.

Chris Beneke. ""Mingle with Us": Religious Integration in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century American Education," American Educational History Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, 29-37, 2006.

Books
Chris Beneke, Christopher S. Grenda. The First Prejudice: Tolerance and Intolerance in the Making of America, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2010.

Chris Beneke. Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism, Oxford University Press, New York, 2006.

Book chapters
Chris Beneke. "The Idea of Integration in the Age of Horace Mann," in Inequity in Education: A Historical Perspective, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, 2009

Book reviews
Chris Beneke. Review of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (Chicago 2006); Religion in American Politics (Princeton, 2008) by Brooke Allen, Frank Lambert. for Journal of Southern History, vol. 75, no. 3, 2, 2009.

Chris Beneke. Review of Preaching Politics: The Religious Rhetoric of George Whitefield and the Founding of a New Nation (Baylor 2007) by Jerome Dean Mahaffey. for Politics and Religion, vol. 2, 135-137, 2009.

Chris Beneke. Review of Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic by Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, David Waldstreicher. for Reviews in American History, vol. 33 (2005), no. 3, 314-324, 2005.

Chris Beneke. Review of The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America by Frank Lambert. for Reviews in American History, vol. 31, no. 4, 528-537, 2003.

Chris Beneke. Review of Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of America by James Axtell. for Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2002.

Chris Beneke. Review of The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture by Brown, Gillian. for Reviews in American History, vol. 29, no. 3, 338-345, 2001.

Professional Memberships:
Historical Society
American Historical Association
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
The Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
American Society of Church History
Organization of American Historians

Scholarly Work in Progress:
Common School: Early Struggles over Integration, Segregation, and Equality in American Public Education .

The Business of Churches and States: Finding the Right Analogy to Describe Church-State Relations in Early America.

The First Prejudice: Religious Intolerance and Religious Tolerance in the Making of America (Under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press).
Developing with Christopher Grenda, Bronx Community College

Other Activities:
Board of Governors, The Historical Society Member of Editorial Board, The Journal of the Historical Society

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Primary interests include revolutionary and early national America, intellectual and religious history. Author of Beyond Toleration: The Religous Origins of American Pluralism (New York: Oxford UP, 2006). Current research focuses on the controversies over public education in 19th-century America.