[ecrea] New book - Government Surveillance of Religious Expression: Mormons, Quakers, and Muslims in the United States

New book announcement: /Government Surveillance of Religious Expression: 
Mormons, Quakers, and Muslims in the United States
/
Published by Routledge: 
https://www.routledge.com/Government-Surveillance-of-Religious-Expression-Mormons-Quakers-and/Montalbano/p/book/9781138306714

Description: Recent revelations about government surveillance of 
citizens have led to questions about whether there should be better 
defined boundaries around privacy. Should government officials have the 
right to specifically target certain groups for extended surveillance? 
United States municipal, territorial, and federal agencies have 
investigated religious groups since the nineteenth century. While 
critics of contemporary mass surveillance tend to invoke the 
infringement of privacy, the mutual protection of religion and public 
expression by the First Amendment positions them, along with religious 
expression, comfortably within in the public sphere.

This book analyzes government monitoring of Mormons of the Territory of 
Utah in the 1870s and 1880s for polygamy, Quakers of the American 
Friends Service Committee (AFSC) from the 1940s to the 1960s for 
communist infiltration, and Muslims of Brooklyn, New York, from 2002 to 
2013 for suspected terrorism. Government agencies in these case studies 
attempted to understand how their religious beliefs might shape their 
actions in the public sphere. It follows that government agents did not 
just observe these communities, but they probed precisely what 
constituted religion itself alongside shifting legal and political 
definitions relative to their respective time periods.

Together, these case studies form a new framework for discussions of the 
historical and contemporary monitoring of religion. They show that 
government surveillance is less predictable and monolithic than we might 
assume. Therefore, this book will be of great interest to scholars of 
United States religion, history, and politics, as well as surveillance 
and communication studies.

About the Author: Kathryn Montalbano is an Assistant Professor of 
Communication Studies at Young Harris College. Her interdisciplinary 
research examines the intersection of religion, history, media, and 
communication. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia 
University in 2016 and her B.A. in English and sociology (minor) from 
Haverford College in 2009.

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