Here • I’m really not looking for a new occupation, but if I were… Apparently, here’s where I should invest my energies. • How my denomination is continuing its long tradition of partnering with others in missions, this time with World Vision in the country rated 187 out of 187 by the UN Human Development … More That Was The Week That Was
Here • In retrospect, I’m not sure I should have lumped in The Avett Brothers with Mumford & Sons in a post probing the challenges of making good folk-pop music. At least a couple of the tracks on their new album are downright Beatlesque… • As a Protestant, it was interesting to read such a … More That Was The Week That Was
A pretty heavy blogging week here at The Pietist Schoolman, partly because it was my first real week off for the summer and partly because I know my writing output will drop next week while my family travels to Virginia for a vacation. Here • My summer reading list is heavy on World War I, … More That Was The Week That Was
Today I’ll wrap up a three-part exploration of what’s revealed about my grandparents and their families in the 1940 U.S. Census. We started among the Petersons and Nelsons of western Wisconsin, and will now cross the Badger State to meet my father’s forebears. My dad’s dad grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is a much … More The USA in 1940: The Gehrzes of Milwaukee
For genealogists and U.S. historians, this has been an exciting month, marking the full release of records from the 1940 U.S. Census. (Such data are treated as confidential until seventy-two years after the census. The aggregate statistics can be found here.) My colleague Diana Magnuson happens to be a census historian and could tell you … More The USA in 1940: The Petersons of Pierce County
See, this is why you spend all those hours teaching college students: so that one day they’ll be your Facebook friend and point you in the direction of a tool as interesting as this interactive map from Bloomberg. For each of United States’ 3100+ counties, it lets you see how heavy or light is the … More Mapping the Melting Pot
In 1911, the country of Italy celebrated its 50th birthday as a unified nation-state. The Italian government marked the occasion with a special census that revealed, among other things, that one out of every six Italians lived outside of Italy. Between 1880 and 1914, thirteen million Italians emigrated to the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, … More Italy as an “Emigrant Nation”
Fifty years ago today, the government of the German Democratic Republic (the GDR, or simply East Germany) cut off its own citizens’ ability to move to the west. Before August 13, 1961, such a journey simply required crossing into West Berlin, then an enclave of the western Federal Republic, surrounded by the Communist GDR and Warsaw … More The Berlin Wall, Fifty Years Later
I’m very reluctant to comment on last Friday’s tragic events in Norway. (1) The story is still evolving. (2) I’m not an expert on Norway, or on right-wing extremism in Europe. And (3) as a historian, I’d always prefer to analyze events from a temporal distance. But… I do teach modern European history regularly, and … More Norway: “A Very Old War”
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. Tuesday, January 15, 2013 – to Paris Between 1840 and 1914, as many as one million Swedes crossed the Atlantic Ocean to seek economic … More Bennie and Mabel
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