It is now generally conceded that mere shafts of granite and statues of bronze, be they ever so artistic, are inadequate to express the tribute we would pay to our soldiers of democracy. Writing in American Architect in 1919, Martha Candler was about a generation too early to speak for most readers of that journal. … More Commemorating WWII: Living Memorials
At least, that’s how it might feel for the next few weeks… Some explanation: Next January, for Bethel’s three-week “interim” term, I’ll be debuting a new course on the Second World War (HIS231L), designed to alternate J-terms with a long-standing class on the First World War (HIS230L) that I’ve converted into a travel course in … More WWII Takes Over The Pietist Schoolman
7/31/13 – Glad to see my colleague Chris Armstrong return to blogging after taking some time to focus on leading Bethel’s Work with Purpose initiative. (Look for a new Patheos channel on faith and work from Chris and team, later this year.) He started off by sharing a couple of passages from the current draft … More Welcome Back, Chris Armstrong
If you’re not a member of the American Historical Association (AHA), you might not have heard that our guild is in the middle of a fracas heated enough to have generated its own hashtag: #AHAgate. Or perhaps you have, since it attracted the attention of the New York Times on Monday. Quick version: nine days … More The Underquestioned Assumption at the Heart of #AHAgate
Just over 6000 American soldiers are buried outside the French village of Fère-en-Tardenois, at Oise-Aisne Cemetery. The most famous was killed by a German sniper ninety-five years ago today: a sergeant in the New York National Guard named Joyce Kilmer. So we were informed by the cemetery superintendent when our group visited Oise-Aisne last January … More “I think that I shall never see…”: Joyce Kilmer as War Poet
I grieve to report that America’s latest bout of Anglophilia has infected this corner of the blogosphere. Perhaps one post on Monty Python (one-sixth American, and that fraction hailing from the niftiest of the fifty states) can be dismissed, but even as we Colonials rejoice at the birth of a new heir, I find myself … More Pride and Prejudice at 200
When I teach my class on Human Rights and International History (as I will again next spring), few issues are as vexing as that of female circumcision, a practice that has affected something like 130 million women around the world — including 2-3 million girls each year in Africa alone. If you’re unfamiliar with it, … More Rights-Talk as Conversation, not Condemnation
By far the most popular American patriotic hymn is Samuel Francis Smith’s “America,” appearing in over 1600 of the hymnals indexed at Hymnary.org — nearly four times as many as Katharine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful” and Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” five times more than Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.” And … More “Of thee I sing”: A Brief History of Patriotism in American Hymnals (part 3)
I’m still researching an answer to last Monday‘s closing question: why is it that so many hymnals don’t include popular patriotic hymns? As a placeholder, though, I thought it might be fun to share a rare evening post spotlighting a few songs in this genre that just never found an audience. (Here again, relying on … More “Of thee I sing”: A Brief History of Patriotism in American Hymnals (part 2)
I took the picture above during my first tour of the former Ypres battlefield, a key point along the Western Front of World War I. Our tour guide Carl pulled up to a local farmer’s house, opened the garage, and here was a table full of shells, grenades, bullets, and fragments of such ordnance. When … More Iron Harvests: The Death Toll from World War I Continues to Grow
The Pietist Schoolman 