Tomorrow marks the beginning of our spring semester at Bethel, which should officially make me stop thinking about our recently-concluded three-week travel course in England, Belgium, France, and Germany and force me to focus on, oh, writing syllabi for the classes I have to teach. So as a farewell to January’s journeys, a few things … More What I Will and Won’t Miss About Europe
1/21/13 – Gruss Gott from Munich, where we’re into the last leg of our history of WWI travel course. Over on our department blog I just posted a new update covering our five days in Paris — including a photo of me leading a simulation of the Versailles Peace Conference… in the Hall of Mirrors … More How Ya Going to Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm…
1/11/13 – If you’d like to read some highlights and see some pictures of our first week studying World War I (in London and Oxford), I posted a summary at our department blog this morning. On to the Western Front!
150 years ago today, the courts-martial of over 300 Dakota warriors came to an end with convictions for murder and rape. While Pres. Abraham Lincoln commuted most of the sentences, the day after Christmas 1862, thirty-eight were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota. In commemoration, here’s a post on the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 that I originally … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: “All have sinned”
Last Friday I decided to put syllabus revision on hold and spend an afternoon continuing my tour of World War I commemoration in the Twin Cities by visiting Fort Snelling, the nearly 200-year old former military installation at the convergence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers that trained officers, processed recruits and draftees, and housed … More “All have sinned”: The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862
I’m still half a year away from taking a group of Bethel University students to Europe for a three-week course on the history of World War I, but while I’ve still got some time before our fall semester starts up, I thought I’d revive an earlier series on how the war was commemorated. My earlier … More Commemorating WWI in Minnesota: Duluth’s Soldiers and Sailors Monument
This fall a joint venture from Harvard and MIT, called edX, will make available free online courses from two of the world’s elite research universities. As the New York Times reported, the Harvard-MIT collaboration follows in the wake of a similar partnership involving Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan (“Coursera“). … More Education as “Infotainment”: or, The One Where I Become Part of the Problem
Belatedly (and too quickly), let me wrap up this series on European museums and their role in presenting the history of the First World War. (Read the first post here.) In previous posts, I’ve employed Jay Winter’s phrase “cathedrals of the modern world” as an especially lofty vision of what museums could or should be. Today … More “Cathedrals of the Modern World”: Paris and Ieper
One week ago today Charles Dickens turned 200. For some, it was the most important thing to happen in England in 2012, a year in which London will host the Summer Olympics for the first time in over 60 years. I’m almost positive it was the most important thing to happen in the English town … More Dickens World
Calling museums “cathedrals of the modern world” (as I quoted cultural historian Jay Winter last week) might seem like setting the bar awfully high. Probably too high for something like the National Army Museum in London, which seeks simply to document the evolution of the British way of war in a way that’s neither intimidating … More “Cathedrals of the Modern World”: London
The Pietist Schoolman 