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Department of History

Jacob Betz

Senior Lecturer in History

Jacob Betz's research sits at the intersection of law, religion, and the family. He has published articles and book chapters on such topics as immigrant children's religious practices, Native American religious freedom, and the legality of religious contracts. His current book project is tentatively titled Contracting Religion: Law, the Family, and American Pluralism, 1870-1970, which explores how religious groups harness state power on behalf of their youngest members.

His teaching areas include American legal history, law and religion, and the history of family law. Betz received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago, where he held a prize lectureship in the Human Rights Program.


Representative Publications

Monograph

  • In Progress Contracting Religion: Law, the Family, and the Problem of American Pluralism, 1870-1970

Articles and Book Chapters

  • In Progress “Religion and Real Estate: The Power of Religious Contracts in Postwar America
  • Jacob Betz, “‘The Free Exercise of Religion according to the Catholic Faith’: Catholic Antenuptial Contracts and the Challenge to American Religious Pluralism, 1890-1960,” U.S. Catholic Historian 36, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 79-106.
  • Jacob Betz, “‘There Is No Such Thing as a Reverend of No Church’: Incarcerated Children, Nonsectarian Religion, and Freedom of Worship in Gilded Age New York City,” in The Lively Experiment: The Story of Religious Toleration in America, eds., Chris Beneke and Christopher Grenda (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016): 177-191.
  •  Jacob Betz, “Beyond the Judeo-Christian Tradition? Restoring American Indian Religion to United States History,” in Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians, eds., Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015): 227-239.

Textbook

  • Jacob Betz et al., “Life in Industrial America,” David Hochfelder, ed., in The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. Textbook, eds., Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019): 56-81.