By all rights, I should be thrilled that Unbroken, the biopic about Olympic athlete-turned-WWII POW Louie Zamperini, is coming to theatres this week. I always celebrate turning in my grades by going to the movies, and this one has been on my radar ever since I read Laura Hillenbrand’s remarkable book about Zamperini during my trip to California earlier … More Unbroken: The Challenge of Biography
It’s time for our annual holiday tradition: picking through some prominent lists of the best books of the past year to suggest potential gifts for the history buff in your life. This year we’ll cull suggestions from the New York Times (NYT), the Guardian (G), the Washington Post (WP), and Christianity Today (CT). Jessie Childs, God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England “…conjures … More The Best History Books of 2014?
4/12/14 – Please do yourself a favor and visit Autobiography, the new podcast/blog from my good friend and frequent collaborator Sam Mulberry. I was honored to be Sam’s first interview, but he’s now on to episode four and going strong. The idea here is straightforward, and powerful: inspired by something Frederick Buechner once wrote, Sam chats … More New from Sam Mulberry: The Autobiography Podcast!
Is two years too soon to call something an “annual holiday tradition”? For our readers who like to give such gifts for Christmas, here’s a list of some of the history books to have appeared on the “Best of 2013” lists that I first examined in a recent post on academic historians achieving success with … More The Best History Books of 2013?
‘Tis the season for media old and new to trot out their “best of” lists for the soon-to-conclude year. As I did in 2012, I’ve been working on collating some such lists into a Christmas gift-giving guide for history buffs. In the process, I’ve been heartened to find a few academic historians garnering praise for … More Academic Historians On (and Off) Year-End “Best of” Lists
My Saturday links post will take a break, since on Monday I’ll be giving a “best of 2012” version of it. Instead, let me know what you think about a couple of film-related questions on my mind the last few days… My wife and I finally had a chance to watch Lincoln earlier in the … More Biopics: The Best, and the Can’t Misses No One’s Made
Earlier this year the New York Times ran a story about an English professor at Duke University named Cathy Davidson, who decided to replace more traditional term papers with a course blog for which students would regularly contribute 500-1500 word posts. While much of the Times article focused on the arguments for and against what … More Student Blogging: A Report from a Modern European History Course
I’m a PhD-holding history professor myself who will likely never write any book with sales approaching even quadruple figures, but I cringe when fellow guild-members like Louisiana State University professors Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg write things like the following, in Salon this past Sunday: Frankly, we in the history business wish we could take out … More Who Owns History?
During Bethel’s commencement exercises last month, our speaker told the soon-to-be graduates the story of the British evangelical politician William Wilberforce, who dedicated his life to the abolition of the slave trade (accomplished in 1807) and then slavery itself (just before his death in 1833). Up on stage among the berobed faculty, my friend Sam … More The Curious Case of the Popularity of Wm. Wilberforce
It’s the first full week of June, and that can mean only one thing if you’re a history nerd: time to get working on your summer reading list! I’ll be posting my own suggestions this week or next, but in the interim, here are some histories, biographies, and historical novels suggested by NPR, the L.A. … More It’s Summer Reading List Season!
The Pietist Schoolman 