I wish I could say that I was clever enough to have planned yesterday’s post on the beginning of the Second World War in Asia to be published on the 68th anniversary of the Japanese surrender that ended that conflict, but… Total coincidence. But I was reminded of the significance of August 15 in the … More China and Japan 68 Years after WWII
On my recent vacation spent driving from small Minnesota town to slightly smaller Minnesota town looking at war and veterans memorials, I listened to The War, Geoffrey Ward’s book based on Ken Burns’ PBS miniseries of the same title. I’d picked it simply because it was one of the few WWII histories available as a … More The Second World War Before Pearl Harbor: China, 1937
It is now generally conceded that mere shafts of granite and statues of bronze, be they ever so artistic, are inadequate to express the tribute we would pay to our soldiers of democracy. Writing in American Architect in 1919, Martha Candler was about a generation too early to speak for most readers of that journal. … More Commemorating WWII: Living Memorials
At least, that’s how it might feel for the next few weeks… Some explanation: Next January, for Bethel’s three-week “interim” term, I’ll be debuting a new course on the Second World War (HIS231L), designed to alternate J-terms with a long-standing class on the First World War (HIS230L) that I’ve converted into a travel course in … More WWII Takes Over The Pietist Schoolman
Here… • Pride and Prejudice, going strong after 200 years. • Re: my post on the music of Monty Python… Did I mention that I was such a devoted fan in high school that I convinced a group of friends to come over to the house for a marathon viewing party that took us through … More That Was The Week That Was
Here… • I concluded my series on patriotic songs in American hymnals: part two introduced a few songs that never made it into more than one or two hymnals; part three asked why even very popular patriotic songs fail to appear in many hymnals. • No, Pope Francis did not promise “get out of purgatory … More That Was The Week That Was
Last Friday afternoon I posted the following graph, promising that I’d come back to it this week: Let me pick up by reiterating that “institutions of higher learning” includes everything from Research I universities to “colleges in name only” and lots of post-secondary diversity in between. I didn’t have the time to code things so … More When Colleges Close: A Historical Sketch
Aside from posts on John Le Carré and the history of college closures, it was a mostly quiet week here at The Pietist Schoolman. But other writers more than picked up my slack: • Two more essays on Le Carré: Emma Hogan analyzed the spy novelist’s writing style; Dwight Garner profiled him for the New … More That Was The Week That Was
Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel and elsewhere around the world. I don’t think it’s widely known in the United States — partly because it falls on the 27th day in the Jewish month of Nissan, and so moves year by year within the Gregorian calendar — but even if this is … More Holocaust Remembrance Day
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
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