Below you'll find a collection of Kenaston's past blog posts. You can also use the navigation bar to learn more about Kenaston, his research, and his pedagogy.
10 Jun 2026
I recently returned from co-leading a Global Scholars trip to Morocco. It was a great trip!
We traveled across much of the country, and I was in awe by the variety of the landscapes, from Atlantic beaches and rocky coasts to the dunes of the Sahara and the snow-peaked Atlas mountains. The lack of humidity made it clear we were no longer in Virginia!
The food was incredible. I really enjoyed eating tagine and traditional bread (especially after watching Michael Pollan’s Cooked on the plane), and I managed to drink mint tea almost every day.
The meal that left the deepest impression on me was the traditional Friday couscous. It was SO good! Typically served communally after Friday prayers, the dish featured steamed vegetables and ridiculously tasty chicken alongside caramelized onions, almonds, raisins, and chickpeas. But what really surprised me was the couscous itself. It was nothing like the flavorless instant couscous I had learned to hate as a child. It reminded me of the first time I had fresh pasta and it blew my mind how much better it was.
As is often the case when I travel, the most meaningful experience was meeting people. I enjoyed the opportunity to get to know our twelve students on the trip. Randolph is truly full of smart and kind students!
Most of all, I was moved by the hospitality of the Moroccans we met. The first time I had couscous, for instance, was in the home of one of our guides. Rather than taking us to a restaurant as planned, he surprised everyone by bringing us to his house, where his family had spent hours lovingly preparing the meal. It was a beautiful (and tasty) surprise, and one that I expect will stick with me for a long time.
15 May 2026
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776
Though I was trained primarily as a historian of the US, departmental needs mean that I have pushed myself to focus more on Atlantic and transnational history.
This past spring, I decided to teach a course on the Age of Revolutions. While such a course is far outside my temporal and geographic scope, it seemed like a fitting course for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And of course, it was another great opportunity for me to dig into the Haitian Revolution and listen to Boukman Esperyans!
In preparing to teach the course, I leaned especially on Rafe Blaufarb’s The Revolutionary Atlantic (Oxford, 2017), Ben Marsh and Mike Rapport’s Understanding and Teaching the Age of Revolutions (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s The Age of Revolutions (Basic Books, 2024), and Laurent Dubois’s Avengers of the New World (Harvard, 2005).
A few highlights from the course:
- Virtual lecture about Hamilton and “founders chic” by Dr. Shira Lurie, author of The American Liberty Pole: Popular Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in the Early Republic (UVA Press, 2023)
- Two-day interactive role-playing game using John Patrick Coby’s Raising the Eleventh Pillar: The Ratification Debate of 1788 (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021). This was my first time using a “Reacting to the Past” game in class, and students responded really well to it.
- Thayer Lecture with Dr. Jane Kamensky, CEO of Monticello and author of A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley (Norton, 2016).
- Class trip to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, including vault tour and panel with museum employees.
- Graphic history novel by Charles F. Walker, Witness to the Age of Revolution: The Odyssey of Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru (Oxford, 2020). Another first–I’ve personally really enjoyed reading Oxford’s Graphic History series but hadn’t assigned one until this year. It worked well!
- Weekly “think aloud” assignments where students recorded themselves talking about the week’s reading and what it has to do with them. In addition to avoiding AI use, I found the assignment helpful for honing students’ verbal and synthesizing skills
- Research paper assignment. I worked to scaffold this assignment – including two guided library work session. One student paper about loyalists in the American Revolution even won Randolph College’s 2025/26 Best Writing in the Arts & Letters Division!
Image below: Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot (1802). Original illustration by Auguste Raffet, engraving by Ernst Hébert. Courtesy of Library of Wikimedia Commons.
01 May 2026
This past spring, I was selected to serve as one of two faculty on the Global Scholars trip to Morocco. While I was not especially familiar with the country’s history and culture, I saw it as an opportunity to expand my teaching in Atlantic history.
My colleague Aaron Shreve and I led six pre-trip orientation sessions on Moroccan history and culture. Preparing for these sessions was challenging, as I had never visited Morocco and had spent relatively little time studying it. To assist me, I relied heavily on longtime Harvard historian Susan Gilson Miller’s A History of Modern Morocco (Cambridge, 2013). I also consulted the Encyclopedia of Africa (Oxford, 2010) and documentaries such as Africa’s Great Civilizations (PBS, 2017) and Lost Kingdoms of Africa (BBC, 2012).
One of my favorite orientation sessions centered on the screening of Casablanca Beats (2021). The Moroccan submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2021, the film hits a lot of very familiar “beats”; it felt like a Moroccan version of Footloose and Dead Poets Society. Yet, the change of setting made it feel fresh. It gave students an opportunity to think about transnationalism and how the experiences of Moroccan college students were both similar to and different from their own experiences at Randolph. It also helped students begin to think more about religion, region, and gender in Morocco. Made by Moroccan filmmakers, the film provided an excellent counterpoint to Hollywood’s standard depictions of Morocco. Throughout our travels (see below!), the group kept coming back to Casablanca Beats.
In addition to talking Moroccan films, history, and politics (and trip/packing logistics), we also spent a lot of time preparing students to think about how they could make the most of the trip. Role playing scenarios was a fun way to get them to do that. In our discussions afterward, I found myself frequently returning to what’s become my personal travel mantra: be present, patient, and flexible – and always look for the good.
02 Apr 2026
My peer-reviewed article in Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation is out!
“Coloring Sound: Religion, Race, and Music in Radio’s Network Era” focuses on the 1930s and 1940s, when radio was at the height of its national influence – think FDR’s Fireside Chats, Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, or the rise of crooners.
It was exceedingly difficult for racial and religious outsiders to make themselves heard on this powerful new medium. For instance, on national networks like NBC and CBS, which dominated the industry, listeners were far more likely to hear white comedians pretending to be Black (as on the hit program Amos ‘n’ Andy) than to hear Black performers themselves.
There were, however, crucial exceptions. My article reveals how Black Protestants and white Latter-day Saints used sacred music as a wedge to break into exclusive network programming lineups. Though largely sidelined by scholars, broadcasting’s so-called Sunday morning “religious ghetto” became home to network radio’s largest concentration of nonwhite performers prior to the 1950s.
To get on the air and to stay there, groups like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Wings over Jordan (pictured below) had to skillfully navigate the demands of white industry executives and multiracial audiences. The result was a set of flawed yet beloved programs that both challenged and reinforced the assumed whiteness of network radio and of the nation it purported to reflect.
We often think about race and religion as something we “see.” This article suggests that these exceptional programs shaped how Americans learned to “hear” them.
Ultimately, it’s a story about the promise and peril of cultural representation for underrepresented groups.
–
For my non-academic friends: this is a big deal! Academic publishing is slow and rigorous. Articles go through layers of peer review to ensure the article is quality. Because the anonymous reviewers are overworked professors, this process can take a while. For reference, I submitted the article before P was born, and she’s almost two. And that doesn’t even count the fact that I first started thinking about this article about eight years ago while working on my dissertation proposal. I’m hoping it’s like a good crockpot meal: very slow but worth the wait!
Finally, I wrote this primarily for other professional historians but hope to write a more public-oriented version in the future. So no pressure to read the whole thing!
-
Image below: Gordon Parks, Orlando, Florida. Wings over Jordan, a popular Sunday morning radio program broadcast by Columbia Broadcasting System from station WDBO. President James A. Colston of Bethune-Cookman college speaking to a nationwide audience, February 1943. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsa.8d13672.
10 Feb 2026
As part of my African American history class, I invited Dr. Adam McNeil to give a public lecture on his work about enslaved Afro-Virginian women during the Revolutionary War. It was a wonderful lecture and an honor to host him at Randolph. Special thanks to support from Randolph’s Campus Events Committee and the Intercultural Center for supporting the event.Here’s my introduction to Dr. McNeil’s talk:
_One hundred years ago – to the day – Americans were in the midst of celebrating the very first Black History Month, or as it was known then, “Negro History Week.” Designed by historian Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Negro History Week was created to help remedy the systematic erasure of Black Americans from American history. Dr. Woodson did not envision Negro History Week as the only time people should learn about Black history. Instead, he imagined it as an opportunity for schools to demonstrate what students had learned all year–it was a call for intentional remembering.
As Woodson envisioned it, Negro History Week was not an exercise in memorization or a box to be checked. He understood that how we remember the past has profound implications for the present. After all, 1926 was the height of Jim Crow segregation. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan was at an all-time high. Lynchings remained prevalent. Nativist and anti-immigrant rhetoric saturated public discourse. In Virginia, the General Assembly was passing racial integrity laws that banned interracial marriage, enforced the so-called “one-drop rule,” and mandated segregation in public spaces.
Dr. Woodson knew what he was doing when he created Negro History Week. He believed that knowing the truth could tear down the walls of segregation, hatred, racism, and white supremacy. “There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom,” Woodson declared.
Fifty years later, in 1976, Negro History Week evolved into Black History Month. And of course, 1976 was also the bicentennial, the year that Americans celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. So at precisely the moment Americans were asking themselves, “What is America? Who is American? And what does “liberty and justice for all” really mean?” At that moment, Woodson’s intellectual descendants were pushing to recommit the nation to remembering Black history.
This collision – of both the intentional remembering of Black history and the nation – is here with us today, too. 2026 is, after all, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration. And we are once again living in a time when the history of the Revolution and the founding era is being debated. Just weeks ago in Philadelphia, the National Park Service removed signage addressing the history of enslaved people held at the President’s House where George Washington lived while serving as the first President of the United States. History is never just about the past.
And so, in this 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence and the 100th anniversary year of Black History Month, we have not just the opportunity but a duty to examine the experiences of Black Americans during the American Revolution. That is what makes today’s conversation so timely—and why I’m so excited to welcome our speaker today, a leading young scholar of African American history and the Revolution.
Adam Xavier McNeil is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Dr. McNeil is currently revising his award-winning dissertation into a book, Contested Liberty: Fugitive Women and the Shadow of Re-Enslavement and Displacement in a Revolutionary World. Contested Liberty is under contract with the University of Virginia Press.
Please join me in giving a Wildcat Welcome to Dr. Adam McNeil._
10 Dec 2025
This fall I was nominated in the Rising Star category for the 2026 State Council of Higher Education for Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Awards! As part of the nomination process, I had to solicit letters from supervisors, colleagues, students, and community leaders. Several letter-writers graciously shared their letters with me. What a treat! Regardless of whether I’m selected or not, I appreciate having a stash of letters I can turn to next time I’m feeling blue.
A few months earlier, the image below appeared on the college’s homepage. I was hoping my 15 minutes of fame would be a little cooler, but you take what you can get, I guess!
15 Nov 2025
This past spring, Admissions asked me to give a “sample class” for an Admitted Student Day. I decided to create a version of historian Cate Denial’s “What Do Historians Do?” exercise. It’s a fun activity for the first day of class because students think it is just a fun game but later realize the activity helped them think critically about narrative, evidence, and the archive. I thought it’d work well in this setting because it’s engaging and students don’t need to know anything about the topic prior to the exercise. The exercise makes clear to students that if they come to Randolph, they won’t just be memorizing – they’ll learn to become critical thinkers.
To set up the exercise, I decided to talk a little about the Revolution and how historians have told it in different ways at different times. Ms. Llewellyn, my fifth grade teacher, would be proud to know that I opened my talk with the first two stanzas of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” – all from memory! After making fun of myself for clearly going to school in the 1900s, I have them do a little math to calculate that this is the 250th anniversary of “the eighteenth of April in (seventeen) seventy-five”.
I give them a heads up that they’re going to hear a lot about the American Revolution over the course of the next year. But I insist that telling the story isn’t just a matter of regurgitating facts. We have to tell the story; and in doing so, we’re making choices (whether we realize it or not) about what stories to include and how to frame them. How you tell the story of the Revolution shapes the contemporary lessons people draw from it. Is the Revolution about the evil of taxation… or about the necessity of overthrowing autocratic rulers? Well, it depends on how you tell the story. How we tell the nation’s origin story shapes how we think about our country in this moment.
I then pivot back to Longfellow’s poem. Like most people, I learned the poem in the Revolutionary War unit of my elementary history class. But that wasn’t when it was written. As I have since learned, the poem was published on the eve of the Civil War as Southerners had begun to secede from the union in order to preserve the institution of slavery. Longfellow was an ardent abolitionist. In other words, I’ve come to realize that the famous poem wasn’t just about Paul Revere. It was a powerful call to arms for the Union:
A cry of defiance and not of fear…
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
The story of the Revolution isn’t just about the past; it has ramifications for us in this moment. I tell the students that unlike Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (who played fast and loose with some facts), historians use evidence to tell us what happened… cue transition to analyzing a set of Revolutionary-era political cartoons and coming up with the narrative they elicit!
