July 16-17, 1942 – Over 13,000 Jews are arrested in Paris, including four thousand children More than half were crammed into a Paris velodrome known as the “Vel d’Hiv.” There were no bathrooms; the only food came from too-rare visits by Red Cross and Quaker relief workers; and the only water came from a single … More This Day in History: The Rafle du Vel d’Hiv
We’ll get to a pretty loathsome chapter in French history in about forty-eight hours, but today, in honor of France’s national holiday, here’s a repeat of my 2011 post declaring “La Marseillaise” the best national anthem. At long last (okay, six days) we come to the end of our series counting down the best national … More Happy Bastille Day!
Here • A three-part exploration of the 1940 census records for my grandparents — Peterson, Nelson, and Gehrz (haven’t found Laubscher yet) — shed some light on ethnicity, social mobility, and education in American society coming out of the Great Depression. • As speculation about Mitt Romney’s running mate begins in earnest, a look back … More That Was The Week That Was
November 30, 1936 – Crystal Palace burns down “This is the end of an age,” remarked Winston Churchill as he joined tens of thousands of other Londoners to watch the blaze. Though it had long since fallen into disrepair, the Crystal Palace was the crowning achievement of the British Industrial Revolution, built out of cast … More This Day in History: “The End of an Age”
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 my students read The Dynamite Club, John Merriman’s account of Émile Henry, a young French anarchist who threw a bomb into a crowded Paris café in 1894 — thereby, in John’s … More Terror, Secularization, and “Imaginative Understanding”
At long last (okay, six days) we come to the end of our series counting down the best national anthems. And in the end, there was really only one choice. France, “La Marseillaise“ Longevity: official anthem since 1792 Singability: ranges from D4-E5 (C4 = middle C) Inspiration: 4.1% of Olympic golds won; 1 men’s World … More The Best National Anthems: France
September 19, 1945 – “Lord Haw Haw” is sentenced to death One of the courses I teach at Bethel University is the capstone of our major program, Senior Seminar, in which students spend the spring semester conducting original research on a topic of their choosing, produce an article-length paper, and close the year by giving … More This Week in History
August 22, 1942 – Brazil declares war on Italy Well, on Germany really; I’m guessing Italy was an afterthought. But I’ve got to think this was close to the last straw for even the most fervent supporters of Mussolini. Imagine with me, if you will, the following dialogue that fateful morning of August 22nd, 1942: … More This Week in History
A series of posts taking you day-by-day through a proposed travel version of my course HIS230L World War I. Read the introduction to the series here, or the previous post here. Wednesday, January 16, 2013 – Paris You wouldn’t think that the seemingly random combination of these four words could yield 2.1 million hits on … More “Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys”
7/14/11 (sorry: 26 Messidor 219) – Here’s hoping that all of my former Modern Europe students find themselves humming “La Marseillaise” sometime today, and that the French nation can forgive me for the tongue-in-cheek review of their military history that’ll be posted here tomorrow morning.
The Pietist Schoolman 