Here… • This Saturday links wrap is quite a bit later in the day than usual because this morning I decided to join every other writer with a platform and muse about Prince. • There’s no charge to read this blog, but occasionally I’ll invite you to support a worthy cause like Minnehaha Academy. • On Tuesday we celebrated the … More That Was The Week That Was
During a visit earlier this year to Pulaski, Virginia, I took a few minutes to survey how the Appalachian town commemorated America’s wars. I found a veterans memorial outside the courthouse, a bridge (see earlier posts on “living memorials“), and a pair of monuments in a park near the post office — one for World War I, and … More What To Do with Confederate Memorials?
Maybe it’s just that the Twins are off to a terrible start, but I was especially tickled to come across this in Alan Ball’s new Liberty’s Tears: Soviet Portraits of the “American Way of Life” During the Cold War: Permeated with the spirit of venality, slavery, and gangsterism, contemporary American baseball maims hundreds of young lives and serves … More “Venality, slavery, and gangsterism”: Soviet Perceptions of Baseball’s Golden Age
Here… Thanks to everyone who responded to our “comment drive” questions: • Which movies are most historically accurate? (And how important is that?) • What’s your favorite biography? • Why is the Civil War so fascinating, 150 years later? …There and Everywhere • One source sustaining my fascination with that conflict is the New York Times‘ Disunion blog, which recently pointed … More That Was The Week That Was
Like many American colleges and universities founded in the nineteenth century, the place I work came into being thanks largely to the efforts of a pioneering figure who is as venerated within the school as he is unknown outside of it. For Bethel, that figure is John Alexis Edgren, whose 176th birthday our campus celebrates today. Born in Sweden … More Happy Birthday, John Alexis Edgren!
It’s time for our annual holiday tradition: picking through some prominent lists of the best books of the past year to suggest potential gifts for the history buff in your life. This year we’ll cull suggestions from the New York Times (NYT), the Guardian (G), the Washington Post (WP), and Christianity Today (CT). Jessie Childs, God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England “…conjures … More The Best History Books of 2014?
Having started the week by sharing an article questioning whether we really ever learn “lessons” from the past, let me close the week by considering another way that Americans commonly try to make the past useful: by deploying it as a rhetorical weapon in the most heated debates of the present day. Two versions of this come up a lot. … More The Wrong Side of History
Where did Memorial Day start? What does it mean? If pressed, most of us could probably guess that it emerged from the wake of the Civil War and perhaps explain that it differs from, say, Veterans Day or Armed Forces Day in specifically remembering those who have died in military service to this country. Writing in the midst of the Vietnam War, … More Revising Memorial Day
Here… • The blogging team here at The Pietist Schoolman expanded, as my student Fletcher Warren responded to John Merriman’s The Dynamite Club and we introduced historian Jared Burkholder, our new regular guest blogger (stop back next Friday to read his first post). • Meanwhile, my colleagues at Bethel University continue to inspire me as … More That Was The Week That Was
Few recent movies have received the acclaim accorded to 12 Years A Slave, currently owner of a 95% “fresh” rating at the critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. But then few recent movies attempt to immerse audiences in the antebellum experience of a free black man taken into bondage from 1841 to 1853 — working from the … More 12 Years a Slave: Film as History
The Pietist Schoolman 