Robert S. McElvaine

Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters and Chair of the Department of History at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, where he has taught for thirty years. He is the author of ten books:

*"" (1983)
*"" (1984)
*"" (1987)
*"" (1988)
*"" (1996)
*"" (2000)
*"" (2001)
*"Franklin Delano Roosevelt" (2002)
*"The Encyclopedia of the Great Depression" (2004)
*"" (2008)

His essay, "One Depression, Two Remedies," serves as the introduction to the chapter on the 1930s in Life: Our Century in Pictures (Little-Brown, 1999). His first two books on the Depression era have become standards in the field, acclaimed by historians and general readers alike. The Great Depression, which came out in a new edition in 1993, has been called "the best one-volume overview of the Great Depression." Two of his books have been named among the "Notable Books of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review, and three have been listed among the Editor's Choice "Bear in Mind" books in that publication.

McElvaine's articles and opinion pieces appear frequently in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times Book Review, Newsweek and The Nation. More than 60 of his articles have been published, some 40 of them in major national publications. He has been a guest on approximately 60 television and radio programs, including NBC's "Today", ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, NBC Nightly News, National Public Radio's All Things Considered and Morning Edition, BBC television and radio, and the Studs Terkel Show.

Professor McElvaine has served as historical consultant for several television programs, including the seven-episode PBS series The Great Depression. He has received many awards for his teaching, including a silver medal in the national Professor of the Year program of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and being named Millsaps College's Distinguished Professor in 2001 and won the Carnegie Endowment Professor of the Year Award in Mississippi in 2002.

McElvaine spent more than ten years developing a new expertise in several fields, including anthropology, human evolution, ancient history, and women's history, in order to put himself in a position to offer a reinterpretation of the significance of sex in the unfolding of human history. In addition to reading widely in these fields, he has for the past decade been teaching a course, "Sex, Religion, and Prehistory," on the subject. The course has been one of the most popular at Millsaps College. He has lectured to enthusiastic audiences around the United States and Europe on his ideas about the central influence on human history of various misconceptions and metaphors about sex that form the basis of Eve's Seed. The book has received glowing comments from general readers and academics alike, including a starred review in Publishers' Weekly. Joyce Appleby's review in the Los Angeles Times Book Review begins: "Eve's Seed is a bestseller waiting to be discovered: a package of sex, science and species' vanity nicely wrapped in sparkling prose." His ideas were also featured in a feature article in the Arts & Ideas section of the New York Times.

McElvaine’s latest book, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, is a humorous frontal assault on those he considers to be Jesus Thieves: people who call themselves “Christians” and say they take the Bible literally, but pay no attention to anything Jesus said, such as loving your enemies, turning the other cheek, and helping the poor. They say they oppose abortion, but they have aborted Jesus from their religion. He says this religion is the equivalent of a plan to lose weight without diet or exercise and so he calls it “ChristianityLite.”
Grand Theft Jesus was published by Crown in March 2008.

McElvaine is also a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post.

External links

* [http://home.millsaps.edu/~mcelvrs/ Robert S. McElvaine's Homepage]
* [http://grandtheftjesus.com Grand Theft Jesus]
* [http://evesseed.net The Official Website for Eve's Seed]