Today I’ll wrap up a three-part exploration of what’s revealed about my grandparents and their families in the 1940 U.S. Census. We started among the Petersons and Nelsons of western Wisconsin, and will now cross the Badger State to meet my father’s forebears. My dad’s dad grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is a much … More The USA in 1940: The Gehrzes of Milwaukee
Yesterday I took a look at the 1940 Census records of my Grandpa Peterson and his family, noting that they were relatively more comfortable than the family Grandpa married into in 1946: the Nelsons of River Falls, Wisconsin. My grandmother, Hildur, was fourteen at the time of the census, the third of four daughters for … More The USA in 1940: The Nelsons of River Falls
For genealogists and U.S. historians, this has been an exciting month, marking the full release of records from the 1940 U.S. Census. (Such data are treated as confidential until seventy-two years after the census. The aggregate statistics can be found here.) My colleague Diana Magnuson happens to be a census historian and could tell you … More The USA in 1940: The Petersons of Pierce County
One more post on baseball writing in honor of one more Opening Day: that of my Minnesota Twins, playing their first 2012 game against the Baltimore Orioles later today. Having already spotlighted an 1888 baseball manual by one of the most unique players in MLB history and a 2001 update of a cult classic by … More Play Ball! – My Favorite Baseball Books (part 3)
Yesterday I celebrated the official start to the Major League Baseball season by describing my favorite book written by an active baseball player: pitcher/shortstop/lawyer/labor organizer John Montgomery Ward’s 1888 how-to guide, Base-Ball. But I’m enough of a traditionalist to believe that the honor of starting the season ought to belong (as it did for decades) … More Play Ball! – My Favorite Baseball Books (part 2)
Check out the “tag cloud” on the home page of this blog, and you’ll find — amid all the terms related to Christianity, history, and education — one sport. So even if you hadn’t read my post-Super Bowl post extolling the virtues of baseball over football, you might be able to guess how excited I … More Play Ball! – My Favorite Baseball Books (part 1)
The title of this post will be news to many of our readers, so let me give some context right away: As part of an interview with Christianity Today about his reaction to the death of Trayvon Martin, Baptist pastor and neo-Reformed theologian John Piper was asked about his book Bloodlines, on racism and racial … More John Piper: “I think I’m a pietistic Calvinist”
Seeing as how I spent part of my Monday post tearing into a Washington Post op-ed piece that vilified small college faculties for the few hours they put into their job, then followed it on Tuesday by spotlighting a couple of articles about the value of the liberal arts, today I’d like to praise another … More The U of M
See, this is why you spend all those hours teaching college students: so that one day they’ll be your Facebook friend and point you in the direction of a tool as interesting as this interactive map from Bloomberg. For each of United States’ 3100+ counties, it lets you see how heavy or light is the … More Mapping the Melting Pot
One more post about British TV as I continue to reprise some posts from recent months during this mini-hiatus coinciding with Bethel’s Spring Break: my defense of Downton Abbey against withering criticism from one of Britain’s most popular historians. Downton has been back on my mind of late, after my wife and I watched its antecedent, the … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Downton Crabby
The Pietist Schoolman 