Today’s semi-rerun takes me back pretty far in the life of this blog, to December 2011. But then, the debate goes back to the eve of the Civil War… Original Post: “This Day in History: John Brown’s Body” Follow Up: “An Exchange on John Brown” (New York Review of Books, May 9, 2013) “I tend … More Following Up: Debating John Brown
Last week I had the chance to chat by Skype with some 8th grade social studies students in Kalispell, Montana. Their teacher, Mr. Ferda (one of my favorite Bethel alums), had each student draft a question ahead of time, and while we didn’t quite get to all of them, the questions were so good that … More Good Questions: Did Your History Teachers Make You Want to Be a Historian?
Back when I taught my history of World War I course on campus instead of gallivanting around the Western Front itself, I made extensive use of clips from The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, a documentary miniseries from PBS and the BBC. (It came out in 1996, but the website is … More Why the Middle Ages Could Have Saved Lives in WWI
In last week’s historical sketch of the closures of American colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher learning, I closed by noting an oddly symmetrical pair of statistics: Of schools that closed between 1950 and 1979, 36% opened before 1945 Of schools that have closed since 1980, 37% opened before 1910 Much of the attrition of the … More When Colleges Close: Recent History
When I first started teaching Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture class, we went all the way from ancient Athens through the 20th century. We’ve since decided that that might be two or three too many centuries for one semester, but I do miss the week where we read through three 19th century Christian responses to … More The Love of Libraries
Mutual admiration society: (idiomatic) A group of two or more people, in a workplace or other social environment, who routinely express considerable esteem and support for one another, sometimes to the point of exaggeration or pretense. So says Wiktionary, and I fear that a picture of Messiah College history chair John Fea and I … More Must Watch: John Fea’s Virtual Office Hours
Last Friday afternoon I posted the following graph, promising that I’d come back to it this week: Let me pick up by reiterating that “institutions of higher learning” includes everything from Research I universities to “colleges in name only” and lots of post-secondary diversity in between. I didn’t have the time to code things so … More When Colleges Close: A Historical Sketch
I don’t often do posts like this, but it’s Friday afternoon and I’m out of steam… Let me just frame and pose a question, show some data, invite comments, and then come back to the subject next week. If you haven’t heard, my place of employment is going through a fairly significant financial crisis. Still, … More How Many Colleges and Universities Have Closed, Decade by Decade, Since 1900?
Fifty years ago this year a British intelligence agent named David Cornwell published his third novel. As he had with his previous two, Cornwell wrote under the pen name John Le Carré. But unlike his earlier experiences as a published author, Cornwell/Le Carré not only achieved global fame this time, with The Spy Who Came in … More Good War, Cold War, Soldier, Spy
Among my favorite posts from this past February was this second entry in my — not yet complete — series on “The Vocation of a Christian Historian,” asking whether historians ought to think of what they do as a profession, vocation, or both. As I mentioned last week, as part of Bethel’s faculty promotion process … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Profession vs. Calling
The Pietist Schoolman 