Eric Millin
Ph.D. Student
emillin@nc.rr.com
Major Field: U. S. History
Other Fields: U.S. South; Religious, Intellectual, and Cultural History
Advisor: Donald G. Mathews
Research Interests: My dissertation will extend the work I began in my M.A. thesis (see below), though it will focus less on violence. I'm interested in the relationship between religion and reform in the postbellum South, particularly in how evangelical language was used to frame the rhetoric of "progress." Rather than approaching religion as the province of denominations, ministers, and the innerlives of believers, I study the diffusion of religious language in arenas typically considered secular: my research explores editorials rather than sermons, expositions rather than revivals, lynchings rather than heresy trials. In doing so, I hope to call the seemingly natural opposition of the religious and the secular into question, demonstrating that such a distinction is often arbitrary and counterproductive.
"Defending the Sacred Hearth: Religion, Politics, and Racial Violence in Georgia, 1904-1906" (M.A. Thesis, University of Georgia, 2002)
This thesis argues that the religious rhetoric of white Georgians created an environment in which violence against African Americans was not just an option, but a sacred duty. In 1904, a mob in Statesboro, Georgia lynched two black men who had been repeatedly described as "black devils" and "demons." A year later, Thomas Dixon accompanied his play "The Clansman" to Atlanta. His stage production and his best selling novels celebrated racial violence as a component of progressive religion. Meanwhile, soon-to-be-elected Hoke Smith ran a religiously-charged gubernatorial campaign that included black disenfranchisement among his central objectives. "Holy Hoke," as some called him, promised to secure white supremacy with violence, if need be. In the months preceding the 1906 Atlanta riot, Atlanta's newspapers drew on religious language familiar to all of these events, particularly that violence was justified in defense of sacred white "womanhood" and the sanctity of the white home.