Dedication

Douglas Firth Anderson, Ph.D., and Douglas Carlson, Ph.D., my history professors at Northwestern College, Orange City, Iowa, where my history education included, among other courses and projects, a yearlong course in Civil War and Reconstruction, an introduction to historiography, and a visit to a Union camp reenactment. Additionally, I want to note that I appreciated the historical contextuality brought to the American literature courses that I took and that were taught by my academic advisor Beth Maclay Doriani, an Emily Dickinson scholar.

R. Guy Erwin, M.Div., Ph.D., lecturer at Yale Divinity School, where history entered into literally every course I took—Old and New Testament classes, a cinema and theology course, a Western sacred art course, a yearlong Dante course taught by my academic adviser (and pillar of personal support, too) Peter S. Hawkins, etc.—but primarily and most significantly Guy's yearlong ecclesiastical history course. It is the course that made me realize that I probably should have majored in history instead of English as an undergraduate. Guy is now president of the United Lutheran Seminary in Philadelphia and Gettysburg, and formerly bishop of the Southwest California Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (E.L.C.A.).

Harlan Skaar and Jerry Yocum, my high school history teachers. Jerry now curates the Camp Algona P.O.W. Museum in Algona, Iowa.