A first of its kind for biblical studies, planting and Reaping Albright draws on private letters, interviews, and published work to expose ideological presuppositions and political machinations embedded in historical knowledge about the Bible that this group of scholars constructed and disseminated through its various activities. Long investigates Albright's many assumptions about the "way things really are" and the ways in which his students, describing themselves as "sons of Albright", embarked on a crusade to secure political and ideological dominance of the landscape of American biblical scholarship
The Albright School constituted a sociological phenomenon that had lasting consequences for American intellectual history and scholarship. Accordingly, this book suggests ways in which Albright, or a social realization of Albright, was present in, and presented to, a culture of generational and ideological solidarity
