Mrs. Young is a historian and independent scholar who previously taught at princeton university. [applause]. Scenic good evening and thanks for coming out tonight. I thank you for that introduction, which does a nice job of setting up my talk for today. This project began as a dissertation when i was at columbia. I went to graduate school to be a 19th century southern history historian, so i was a bit surprised to find myself writing about a barely recent historical moment. As i was in graduate school during the george w. Bush years a lot of historians were asking questions about how to explain the bush presidency. In particular, the promise of religious social conservativism and there was kind of a first wave of historiography coming out about the religious right and it tended to make this argument that religious conservatives became a unified political constituency in the 1970s and 80s, basically around these questions of abortion and issues of equal rights in the 70s and so this was