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
I’m going to push back my usual Saturday links wrap until tomorrow. It’s proven impossible to ignore what happened in Britain this week, even though I’m not sure I actually have a lot of help to offer people wondering just what Brexit is or why it matters. I can’t explain just why the European Union has … More Scattered Thoughts on Brexit
In 1975 Great Britain held a referendum on its 1973 admission to what was then still the European Economic Community. By a two-to-one margin, British voters ratified their country’s new role in Europe. In nine days, they will revisit that decision with another referendum, one that could well end with Britain negotiating a withdrawal from the European … More British Christians Debate “Brexit”
For national anthem buffs like me, it doesn’t get much more exciting than this! Yes, earlier today the British parliament took a step towards England adopting its own national anthem, as opposed to using “God Save the Queen.” The sponsor of the bill, a Labour MP named Toby Perkins, noted the tension between British and national identity … More A New English National Anthem?
