It’s late November, which means that newspapers and periodicals are starting to put out their “Best of 2012” lists. Here are the works of scholarly and popular history (and some historical fiction) that have shown up on “Best Books” lists produced by Publishers Weekly (PW), The Washington Post (WP), and Britain’s The Guardian. For each, … More The Best History (and Religion) Books of 2012?
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
While I work on another post for Tuesday, enjoy this post from last fall prompted by the collision of a couple of discussions in one of my signature courses at Bethel. In the last two weeks of my Modern Europe course, we’ve twice run headlong into the hardest question historians ask: Why? First, I had … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Terror, Secularization, and “Imaginative Understanding”
If years were measured by the stature of the historians who die during them, 2012 would have to rank right up there. I wrote earlier this year in tribute to the military historian John Keegan. Then last week we lost Eugene Genovese, one of the leading scholars of the American South, and American intellectual historian … More Eric Hobsbawm: A Historian and His Hope
This year I’ve written several posts on how the First World War has been commemorated: first a set of four on memorials, monuments, and cemeteries in Western Europe; then a recent series of five on commemoration here in Minnesota. If you missed some or all of the series, you can find the entries indexed here, … More Commemorating WWI in Europe and Minnesota: An Overview
With the Summer Olympics about to start, there’s been some attention paid to the last Olympiad hosted by London: the 1948 summer games, which took place in a country still subject to rationing and other austerity measures, experiencing the beginning of the end of history’s greatest empire, and nervously watching Cold War tensions heat up … More Mussolini’s World’s Fair
It’s not quite MacArthur hitting the beach at Leyte, or M.J. winning three post-baseball NBA Finals, but after a 37-week hiatus, behold the triumphant return of “This Week in History”! July 9, 1850 – Millard Fillmore succeeds Zachary Taylor as U.S. president This after the former war hero died of acute gastroenteritis, likely caused by … More This Week in 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
6/5/12 – I’m not much of a monarchist, but it was hard not to get caught up in Queen Elizabeth’s jubilee celebration. Hearing the gathered crowd sing “God Save The Queen” made me think that (if they missed it last fall) some readers might be curious how my European history students and I judged that … More God Save The Queen
Every one of the now nine years I’ve taught at Bethel University, I’ve led a section of our department’s capstone course, HIS499 Senior Seminar. In it, our majors conduct a significant project of original historical research on any topic of their choice, which leaves me to act more as facilitator and editor than lecturer. We … More Bethel’s History Senior Seminar Presents…
The Pietist Schoolman 