All I did here was to promote some upcoming speaking engagements and to invite people to sign up to receive a free e-copy of our forthcoming Lenten devotional. (At The Anxious Bench, I considered Ulysses Grant’s position as America’s first Methodist president.) I’ll try to get back to Pietist Schoolman blogging next week; until then, here’s some of what … More That Was The Week That Was
Back from a break for our penultimate episode of season 3, Sam and I surveyed a variety of Protestant Reformations, both magisterial (Calvin’s Geneva, the Church of England) and radical (Anabaptists in particular). Featured Books Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History and All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy Other Readings John Calvin, Golden Booklet of the … More Thursday’s Podcast: Magisterial and Radical Reformations
To mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, I spent the better part of today tweeting quotations, images, and links from the Reformation — covering each year from 1517 until Luther’s death in 1546. Luther and the German Reformation was my focus, but I also touched on the Swiss Reformation, the Radical Reformation, … More The Reformations, 1517-1546
I’ll be down in New Ulm, Minnesota this Thursday evening giving a free lecture as part of the city’s centennial series on World War I. A German-American enclave in the southern part of the state, New Ulm had a difficult experience of the war, with its municipal leadership suspected of sedition by the state. You can learn … More Previewing My Talk on World War I Memorials
It’s been about three weeks since last I blogged here at The Pietist Schoolman. Anything been happening? If you didn’t know, I spent most of January in Britain, Belgium, France, and Germany, where my friend Sam Mulberry and I were leading a travel course on the history of World War I. I’m sure I’ll have more to share … More Thinking about the American Present via the European Past
Over the weekend I continued my Anxious Bench series on the challenges of writing biographies by reflecting on the problem of historical evidence. While the biographer whose book I’m currently reading seems to have enough evidence to narrate his subject’s entire life on a weekly (sometimes daily or even hourly) basis, I know that he actually is deploying … More When There’s Too Much Historical Evidence
‘Tis the season when we curate some of the histories and biographies showing up on Best Books of 2016 lists, just in case you’re struggling to come up with a gift for that history buff in your life. (Key: A – Amazon; G – Guardian; NYT – New York Times; PW – Publishers Weekly) Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: … More The Top Histories of 2016?
Time to show my hand and reveal of my favorite examples of historical moviemaking. Well, TV series-making, but then that’s just another form of the motion picture. After spending two Anxious Bench posts developing a set of four criteria for evaluating that kind of storytelling, today I applied them to two cable TV shows: the feminist time-traveling drama Outlander (Starz!) … More Soviets and Sassenachs: My Two Favorite Historical TV Series
Today at The Anxious Bench you’ll find part two of my series on how we might evaluate historical movies like Free State of Jones, which has inspired rave reviews from some historians and criticism from others. If you missed the first part, go back to read what I meant that historical movies and TV series must strive to be both … More What Makes for the Best Historical Movies? (part 2)
As I write this post, the sun is setting over the River Somme in northern France. One hundred years ago today, in the middle of World War I, nightfall hid the grisly sight of nearly 20,000 dead British and Commonwealth soldiers. One of them was a twenty-year old officer named John Sherwin Engall, who had written to his parents … More The Somme at 100
