Paul Harvey
Paul Harvey is Distinguished Professor of history and a Presidential Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. His research interests focus on American religious history, the history of the American South, African American history, and American cultural history. He is the author of several books on American religious history, including The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012), cowritten with Edward J. Blum, Howard Thurman and the Disinherited: A Religious Biography (2020), and, most recently, Martin Luther King: A Religious Life (2021.) He is also the creator of the blog Religion in American History.
NEW IN 2021: Martin Luther King: A Religious Life (Rowan & Littlefield)
OAH Lectures by Paul Harvey
In this new biography, distinguished historian Paul Harvey examines Martin Luther King’s life through his complex, emerging religious lives. Harvey introduces many readers, perhaps for the first or only time, to the King of diverse religious and intellectual influences, of an increasingly radical cast of thought, and of a mélange of intellectual influences that he aligned in becoming the spokesperson for the most important social movement of twentieth-century American history. Not only does Harvey chronicle King’s metamorphosis and its impact on American and African American life, but he seeks to explain his “afterlives”—how in American culture King became transformed into a mainstream civil saint, shorn of his radical religious critique of how power functioned in America. Harvey’s concise biography will allow readers to see King anew in the context of his time and today.
A lecture on the life, thought, and work of Howard Thurman, one of the most significant but unknown figures of twentieth-century American religious history and African American history.