This weekend I’ll be joining the other members of the Conference on Faith and History (CFH) for its biennial conference, held this year at Gordon College outside Boston. CFH is my favorite professional society, and I’m honored to be part of a Saturday morning panel on Pietism and Christian colleges and universities in the 20th … More A Preview of My CFH Talk on Pietism at Bethel
In the shadow of the Mall of America and Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport stand two very different kinds of memorials to Minnesotans’ participation in the two world wars and other conflicts: one the product of design, the other the victim of neglect. First, Fort Snelling National Cemetery, the final resting place of over 180,000 men … More Commemorating WWI in Minnesota: Fort Snelling
On October 30, 1793, the French National Convention — having repeatedly declined to recognize women’s right to vote — abolished women’s debating clubs and other political societies. It may be tempting to dismiss this as a little-remembered moment of misogyny by revolutionaries five weeks into their Reign of Terror. Except that the Jacobins and other … More Women, Virtue, and Politics: From 1793 to Today
This semester I’m directing an independent study on the theory and practice of public history by a student who’s interested in pursuing graduate study in that increasingly popular field. In our weekly conversation on Wednesday, we talked about his initial impressions of how public historians have tried to define what it is that they do. … More Crowdsourcing and the Practice of History
Eleven years ago this morning I was in Hamden, Connecticut, waking up after a late night of dissertation writing to turn on CNN in time to watch the collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Those structures stood less than two hours’ drive away from my apartment, and I knew people who lived in … More This Day in History: 9/11
That was the terrific question posed yesterday on ESPN.com and answered by a host of current players and broadcasters. (Click here for the photo gallery showing popular choices.) There’s Lou Gehrig’s farewell, or Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. Or for those of us who hate the Yankees… Bill Mazeroski’s and Joe … More Which One Game in Baseball History Would You Go Back in Time to See?
The largest memorial to those Minnesotans who died in World War I no longer exists, except for a preserved fragment and an impressive website that thoroughly documents its nearly ninety-year history. Opened in 1924, the University of Minnesota’s Memorial Stadium hosted six national championship-winning football teams before the Gophers moved off-campus to the Metrodome in … More Commemorating WWI in Minnesota: The Brickhouse
Now it definitely feels like I’m working more than I should on Labor Day, but one more labor-related nugget comes to us courtesy of the blog Retronaut: a manual published during World War II to help the (male) managers of RCA factories know how to deal with the women flooding into the industrial workplace while … More “When You Supervise a Woman”: Management Advice from WWII
As I did last year this time, I’ll focus this installment of my on- and off-again This Week in History series on the history of work and workers, in honor of today being Labor Day. (And I might recycle two or three anniversaries from last year, since the best part of Labor Day is not … More This Week in History
With some deadlines looming between now and September 10, I’m going to take a day off here and there and rerun some of my favorite posts. First, one from about this time last year… Last month I felt like I was living a John Denver song: country roads taking me to a colleague’s farm near … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: “God Made the Country”
The Pietist Schoolman 