One of the joys of teaching is having the chance to talk about great books with bright students. I enjoy teaching few books more than John Merriman’s The Dynamite Club, the story of a young French anarchist named Émile Henry, who detonated a bomb in a crowded Paris café in 1894. And I’ve taught no … More The Dynamite Club (Fletcher Warren)
Too much about higher education of late… Let’s cleanse the palate with a dose of military history! It was during my first year of college, when I had decided to forego my planned career in international law and instead devote myself to the study of European history, that I first realized how little of the … More The Second World War Before Pearl Harbor: France, 1940
I’m not sure that anyone has made a good movie about the stretch of WWII that lies between the fall of Poland in early October 1939 and the German invasion of western Europe in early April 1940. But if they did, it wouldn’t fit the conventions of war movies. Given that this half-year was sometimes … More The Second World War Before Pearl Harbor: The Phoney War, 1939-1940
With two exams to grade at work, it seems like a good moment to rerun some favorite posts from the first three months of 2013. We’ll start by stretching the “Best of The Pietist Schoolman” definition a bit and collate four posts I wrote for our department blog, at different points along the way in … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Teaching WWI in Europe
Here… • Games like the one my Minnesota Twins played yesterday are the reason that I might need to rely on the Amish to help me feel good about the national pastime this season. • A day-late celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr., dead forty-five years as of this past Thursday. • Dabbling in the … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • Pope Francis: first Latin American pope and first non-European pope since the 8th century; but also the first pope named Francis and the first Jesuit pope. (Maybe one more on this subject on Monday…) • Discussion of Pietism continues to spread: in the pages of the denominational magazine of the Brethren in Christ … More That Was The Week That Was
In my two-part series asking which wars had inspired the best movies, I noted that the views of the fans who register their opinions with the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) sometimes diverge significantly from those of the film critics whose reviews are aggregated by Rotten Tomatoes (RT). The example I gave in Monday’s analysis of … More The Most Over- and Underrated War Movies
1/21/13 – Gruss Gott from Munich, where we’re into the last leg of our history of WWI travel course. Over on our department blog I just posted a new update covering our five days in Paris — including a photo of me leading a simulation of the Versailles Peace Conference… in the Hall of Mirrors … More How Ya Going to Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm…
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”
On October 30, 1793, the French National Convention — having repeatedly declined to recognize women’s right to vote — abolished women’s debating clubs and other political societies. It may be tempting to dismiss this as a little-remembered moment of misogyny by revolutionaries five weeks into their Reign of Terror. Except that the Jacobins and other … More Women, Virtue, and Politics: From 1793 to Today
The Pietist Schoolman 