# Jamie L. Brummitt, "Protestant Relics in Early America" (Oxford UP, 2025) Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748/jamie-l-brummitt-protestant-relics-in-early-america-oxford-up-2025 Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748/jamie-l-brummitt-protestant-relics-in-early-america-oxford-up-2025.md Podcast: [New Books in American Studies](https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748) Published: 2026-08-27T08:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK3684675254.mp3 Audio file: https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK3684675254.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748/episodes/jamie-l-brummitt-protestant-relics-in-early-america-oxford-up-2025 Duration seconds: 2594 ## Resource Edward Blum interviews Dr. Jamie L. Brummitt on how new book Protestant Relics in Early America. In Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford UP, 2025), Jamie L. Brummitt upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. Brummitt chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered around collecting supernatural memory objects associated with dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends. These objects materialized the real physical presences of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth.As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life--including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people--sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington's Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, post-mortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from young women's education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife.In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, Brummitt demonstrates how material practi… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748/episodes/jamie-l-brummitt-protestant-relics-in-early-america-oxford-up-2025/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748/jamie-l-brummitt-protestant-relics-in-early-america-oxford-up-2025.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.