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
1/14/13 – Greetings from Paris! I hadn’t intended to post a new update on our history of World War I trip until our off day, but having just finished the Western Front leg of our trip today, I just had too many highlights to save until Thursday. You can find my post (with some more … More All Still Quiet on the Western Front…
In less than a month now, fourteen of us from Bethel University will leave for London to start a three-week travel course on the history of World War I. After eight days in England, we’ll cross the Channel to tour battlefield and memorial sites in Belgium and northern France, then wrap up with five days … More Text in Context: Readings for Our World War I Travel Course
Looking for ideas for the history buff and/or book lover on your Santa list? To my earlier collection of history books making the cut for some early “Best of 2012” lists, let’s add the following, selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review for their 10 Best and 100 Notable lists: Pat … More Some More “Best of 2012” History Books
You and I believe that slavery is wrong, but neither of us came to this conclusion on our own. So starts perhaps my favorite blog post of the year, published last weekend by historian Jay Case (professor at Malone University; author of An Unpredictable Gospel) and entitled, “An Ethical Conviction That You Hold, For Which … More Abolition as Grace
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
In our Christianity and Western Culture program at Bethel, we refer frequently to the biblical image of being surrounded by “so great a cloud of witnesses.” In my experience, few witnesses have been greater than the Dutch-born writer known as Erasmus (1466?-1536). In class yesterday I mostly presented Erasmus as exemplifying how the “Catholic Reformation” … More The Education of a Christian President
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
The Pietist Schoolman 