What We Might Learn From Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

I have been critical of Abraham Lincoln on this blog and elsewhere. But I am still a big fan. I find his Second Inaugural Address to be one of the greatest political speeches ever delivered in American history. I have blogged about it here.

In the recent Christian Century, author, editor, and cultural critic Rodney Clapp thinks today's culture warriors need a healthy dose of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. I could not agree more. Here is a taste of Clapp's essay:

In the third paragraph of his address, referring to the North and the South, Lincoln said:

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The almighty has His own purposes.

This brief history of the jeremiad may help us deal with our current civil war—the culture war, a war so far fought mainly with words and not bullets. What if current Christians were to apply the profound theological truth of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address to the culture war? In approaching abortion, homosexuality and other intensely fought topics, Christians on both sides "read the same Bible and pray to the same God." Each may find the other's positions "strange," but they might still be slow to judge ill of the other's motive, lest they themselves suffer judgment.

Lincoln cut even deeper when he argued that the "prayers of both could not be answered," because they were flatly contradictory. So does one side clearly triumph? No. The scholar Ted Widmer calls Lincoln's oration possibly "the least triumphant speech ever delivered by a conqueror." Lincoln no sooner recognizes that the prayers of North and South are contradictory than he adds that no one's prayer "has been answered fully." Both sides suffer a kind of judgment. And neither fully fathoms God's purposes.

Though many of us know exactly where we stand on various contemporary and divisive issues, it is the nature of all wars, including the culture war, to be fought in a fog of confusion and ambiguity. Clarity, if it ever arrives, will be discerned only at a later point in history.

Recognizing as much, we might bring the American jeremiad back into the ecclesiological context in which it was originally proclaimed. That step will not miraculously resolve the culture war that pits Christian against Christian, church against church, but it might remind us that we do not know exactly how the culture war will be resolved. All we know, finally, is that after denominations are split and the ecclesial damage is done, God will have acted according to God's sometimes mysterious purposes. And there will be no ground for triumphalism, no matter who declares victory.

Why is Memorial Day About Vacations Instead of Remembrance?

So asks E.J. Dionne. Here is a taste of today's column:

Why is it that every Memorial Day, we note that a holiday set aside for honoring our war dead has become instead an occasion for beach-going, barbecues and baseball? The problem arises because war-fighting has become less a common endeavor than a specialty engaged in by a relatively small subset of our population...

Dionne's column should be read alongside Andrew Bacevich's op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times. Here is a taste:

Where I grew up in the Midwest during the 1950s and early '60s, Memorial Day was no more about remembering the nation's war dead than Labor Day was about honoring working stiffs. It was a "free day." Falling on a Monday, Memorial Day made possible that great innovation, "the long weekend." As a family, we gathered in backyards for barbecues and to celebrate the informal beginning of summer. We did not gather in cemeteries to pay homage...

Three years ago this month, my son was killed while serving in Iraq. His death changed many things, among them my own hitherto casual attitude toward Memorial Day.

Obama: Moderate Centrist

As much as those on the Right try to label him a socialist, Barack Obama is a Democratic president who "governs not from the left, but from the moderate center-right." Van Gosse makes this argument in his blog post entitled "Why President Obama is Not (and Is) a Socialist." Here is a snippet:

Almost every day I get a message from Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele denouncing President Obama's "radical socialist" policies. Fox News relentlessly sounds this chorus, and some Americans agree, rallying with posters featuring hammer-and-sickle drawings and pictures of Stalin next to our elected leader.

For the rest of the world, this sounds pretty silly: they know what socialism looks like, and we have nothing like it. When Britain's then-socialist Labor Party won the 1945 general election, they created a cradle-to-grave free National Health Service and nationalized their leading industries. Cuba in the 1960s abolished all private businesses, and guaranteed a job, health care and education to all its citizens. Here at home, Eugene V. Debs, our most influential Socialist politician, took 6 percent of the vote for president in 1912 and called for a government takeover of our entire capitalist system, "expropriating the expropriators" in the language of Marx.

To compare George W. Bush's blank check for "too big to fail" banks or Obama's propping up Ford and General Motors and modest health-care legislation to any form of socialism makes little sense historically. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal went considerably farther in the direction of socialism than Obama has attempted, with jobs programs like the Works Progress Administration that kept one-third of American families from destitution. By these standards, President Obama governs not from the left but from the moderate center-right; to historians of global politics, calling him a "socialist" is so much demagoguery.

Gordon Wood on Religion, the Founding Fathers, and Today's Christian Nationalists

I just finished a short article by Joseph A. Palermo on Glenn Beck as a historian. Palermo quotes Gordon Wood from a 2006 article in The New York Review of Books:

We can’t solve our current disputes over religion by looking back to the actual historical circumstances of the Founding [sic]; those circumstances are too complex, too confusing, and too biased toward Protestant Christianity to be used in courts today, and most of them are remote from or antagonistic to the particular needs of the twenty-first century. We do not, and cannot, base American constitutional jurisprudence on the historical reality of the Founding [sic]. . . . What Founders’ [sic] intent should we choose to emphasize? That of the deistic Jefferson and Madison? Or that of the churchgoing Washington and Adams, with their sympathies for religion? Or that of the countless numbers of evangelical Protestants who captured control of the culture to an extent most of the Founding [sic] elite never anticipated?

Review of Hope in a Scattering Time--Part One

As some of my readers remember, I have done a few posts on Eric Miller's biography of Christopher Lasch, Hope in a Scattering Time. I recently finished the book and have decided to reflect on it here at the The Way of Improvement Leads Home. The book merits an extended review.

In my past posts (here and here) on this book, I have gently chided reviewers for devoting all of their space to discussing the career of Lasch at the expense of Miller's argument. Now, after reading the text, I am more sympathetic to these reviewers. Christopher Lasch, the historian and cultural critic who died of cancer in 1994 at the age of 61, was a powerful voice. The fact that reviewers of Hope in a Scattering Time become absorbed in Lasch's ideas is a credit to Miller as an intellectual biographer. While he does not shy away from offering an interpretation of Lasch's life and thought, Miller also knows when to get out of the way and let Lasch's thundering roar burst forth. This book is masterfully written.

Though I will, over the course of the next few posts, engage Miller's biography, I hope you will forgive me if I get caught up in Lasch's roar. Stay tuned.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on-line that caught my attention this week:

More help with procrastination.

Nicholas Guyatt reviews Ira Berlin's The Making of America: The Four Great Migrations and Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom.

Chris Lehmann reviews Eric Miller, Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch.

The Sistine Chapel

Aaron Mesh reviews Samuel Schuman, Seeing the Light: Religious Colleges in Twenty-First Century America.

Beliefnet is for sale.

New York Times feature on "Speaking of Faith's" Krista Tippett.

Happy Birthday American Creation!

David Brooks on the British Enlightenment.

Why you can't take a picture of the Star Spangled Banner at the National Museum of American History.

The significance of Jefferson's mammoth cheese.

A heritage of fishing in Louisiana.

Abigail Adams to Benjamin Rush, October 18, 1800.

E.J. Dionne: Why do we trust free enterprise to clean up the oil spill?

Notre Dame president John Jenkins on universities and civil discourse.

Celebrating the grill.

Civil War Memory: Why you should use Twitter

Christianity and the Tea Party Movement

Is libertarianism compatible with Christian faith? Jim Wallis does not think so. Check out his article at The Huffington Post. He concludes:

1. "Individual choice is not the pre-eminent Christian virtue."

2. Anti government ideology violates the teachings of the Bible, especially Romans 13.

3. A "supreme confidence in the market is not consistent with a biblical view of human nature and sin."

4. "The Libertarian preference for the strong over the weak is decidedly un-Christian."

5. The Tea Party movement is too white.

What do you think? Does someone want to defend the Tea Party Movement on Christian grounds?

Glory Days: Springsteen Live in Hyde Park--2009

Here is a clip from Springsteen's forthcoming DVD, "London Calling."

Should Colleges Move to Three Year Curriculums?

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg and Gerald Kauvar think so. Here is part of their argument in a recent The New York Times op-ed:

...the assumption that it takes four years to get an undergraduate education — or three to get a law degree, or four to get a medical degree — lies at the center of the American university system.

That assumption needs to change. The college experience may be idyllic, but it’s also wasteful and expensive, both for students and institutions. There is simply no reason undergraduate degrees can’t be finished in three years, and many reasons they should be.

Switching from four to three years would be simple; it would mostly be a matter of altering calendars and adding a few more faculty members and staff. Some institutions have already shortened programs for graduate degrees: Northwestern Law School has pioneered a two-year degree, while Texas Tech University offers a three-year medical degree. But the idea has yet to percolate down into undergraduate programs, though the advantages would be even more pronounced.

Colleges should consider making the switch, too. Three-year curriculums, which might involve two full summers of study with short breaks between terms, would increase the number of students who can be accommodated during a four-year period, and reduce institutional costs per student. While there would be costs for the additional teachers and staff, those would be offset by an increase in tuition revenue.

Meanwhile, institutions that go quiet in the summer, incurring the unnecessary expense of running nearly empty buildings, would be able to use their facilities year-round.

What do you think? Would you want a three-year college experience or a four-year college experience?

The Most Cited Historians in the World

Dave Lieberson, an intern at the History News Network, has compiled lists of the most cited historians in the world. His research is based on a website called Publish or Perish that tracks citations in scholarly articles.

The Most Cited Living American Historian: David McCullough (followed by James McPherson).

The Most Cited American Historian (Dead or Alive): David Donald (followed by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.).

The Most Cited Modern International Historian (Dead or Alive): Paul Johnson (followed by Harold Hames). David Donald is 4th on this list.

Karl Marx on the Limits of History

Karl Marx: “Men make their own History, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

I use part of this quote from Marx in Chapter One of The Way of Improvement Leads Home to describe the way in which Philip Vickers Fithian was shaped by the generations who went before him, the circumstances into which he was born, and the place in which he was raised. Don't worry Mom and Dad, I have not become a Marxist, but I do think that Marx is on to something here. We may have the power to shape history and act in history, but we are also limited by the world in which we live.

This is why I like Paul Kennedy's recent op-ed in The New York Times, "Do Leaders Make History, or Is It Beyond Their Control?" It is wonderful piece about the way history places limits on our lives and challenges us to not think so highly of ourselves. Kennedy focuses much of the article on Winston Churchill's leadership during World War II, but he concludes with words of wisdom for today's international leaders.

Learning How To Be A Department Chair

I have been in Cincinnati this week at a conference for academic department chairs sponsored by the Council for Independence Colleges. I am learning a lot, but there has also been a great deal of information overload. So far I have attended sessions on student retention, legal issues, using data and research, program reviews, and working with high-level administrators.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that several friends and fellow historians are here from other colleges. I was able to touch base with the history department chairperson who gave me one of my first adjunct teaching jobs, an old acquaintance from the graduate school conference circuit, and a friend from my days as an AP U.S. History grader in San Antonio. It has also been good spending time with a colleague from Messiah College's Communication Department.

One more morning to go here and then it is time to get back home to finish editing the page proofs for Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation.

I would also be remiss if I did not mention that we went to see the Reds-Pirates game tonight at the All-American Ball Park. We were thrilled that Chris Heisey, a recent Messiah College alum, hit a solo homer for the Reds. Sometimes academic conferences have their perks!

The Way of Improvement Leads Home Reviewed in The American Historical Review

The April 2010 edition of the American Historical Review contains a nice review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home by New York University early Americanist Nicole Eustace. Here it is:

Ask any historian of early America about Philip Vickers Fithian and you are likely to get an instant look of recognition. We all think we know the much-quoted colonial American Presbyterian whose diary excerpts, especially those written during a sojourn as a private tutor in revolutionary-era plantation Virginia, are often mined for pithy remarks. Yet, for all his popularity as a source for undergraduate document readers and lecture anecdotes, Fithian’s life and letters have never before received sustained attention. In the first-ever published biography of Fithian, John Fea delves into a trove of previously ignored manuscript material to produce a searching portrayal of Fithian’s personal history that also offers a sustained meditation on the interplay of the transatlantic “republic of letters” and the local concerns of revolutionary-era republicans.

Explaining how he came to the research, Fea notes, “my interest in a book project that uses biography to explain the Enlightenment stems from my experience teaching undergraduates” (p. 4). He deserves congratulations for producing a work that brings to life the Enlightenment in an accessible way that captures the significance of Protestant theology and eighteenth century moral philosophy in the lives of ordinary British Americans, while making an engaging case for their continuing relevance to today’s students. Yet the book’s potential as a teaching tool should not be allowed to obscure its scholarly contributions.

Focusing his study on back-country New Jersey, Fea persuasively demonstrates that British Americans of the revolutionary era sought to achieve what he calls a “cosmopolitan rootedness” (p.7). While the work of scholars like David S. Shields and Richard L. Bushman has accustomed us to imagine colonists in large port cities attempting to engage in an empire-wide community of letters, we are less apt to envision colonists in the hinterlands setting aside their churns and plow long enough to peruse a newspaper. Yet Fea shows that they did just that. Even as they employed correspondence and manuscript belles lettres to strengthen local, rurally based bonds of Christian fellowship, rural dwellers like Fithian and his many associates also attempted to take advantage of the transatlantic dissemination of print to become conversant in the urbane coffee-house culture of London and Glasgow. In documenting the literary pursuits of Fithian – a farmer’s son who faced down his father’s skepticism to take instruction at a local academy and make his way to the seminary at Princeton, yet who always aimed to return to his childhood home in Cohansey, New Jersey – Fea complicates many long-accepted scholarly dichotomies: between Christian revelation and Enlightenment rationalism, between print culture and manuscript culture, and between Americanization and Anglicization in eighteenth-century British America.

In coining the term “rural enlightenment,” Fea brings us a portrait of eighteenth-century British Americans deeply connected to the land they lived and worked on, strongly tied to local communities through bonds of faith, yet yearning after the latest in Enlightenment theory and philosophy. In the New Jersey countryside, Presbyterian Christianity and the teachings of new moral philosophy combined to promote the pursuit of self-improvement and the advancement of individual spiritual progress through networks of communal sociability. For example, when Fithian and his country friends established a debating and social club, they called the “Bridge-Town Admonishing Society,” it superficially resembled the salons of Europe but differed in fundamentally American ways. Fithian and the members of his circle sought to combine the urbane banter of the coffeehouse with self-consciously Presbyterian spiritual friendships. In Fea’s telling, the distance between London and Cohansey did not so much ensure that colonists would fall short of metropolitan ideals as it did ignite efforts at colonial innovation. He shows that Fithian deliberately sought to ground his literary efforts in his rural homeland, quoting Horace, Ovid, and Virgin in occasional verses on the virtues of pastoral life that circulated in manuscript among his friends. It would have been useful had Fea added some contextual discussion of competition for land with Native Americans, but in general Indian/colonial relations seem to fall outside his purview.

Sticking to his chosen confines, Fea discusses philosophy and spirituality with a light touch that undergraduates will find disarming. Moreover, the biographical approach to intellectual and religious history allows Fea to leaven his discussion with frequent reference to the kind of life-cycle concerns, from courtship to career path, that Fithian shares with today’s college students. If this perspective has limitations, they come in an occasional tendency to equate Fithian’s views (or those of other specific mid-Atlantic Presbyterians) with British Americans more broadly. Particularly in the latter sections of the book, revolutionary ideas about virtue sometimes seem to boil down to the teachings of College Of New Jersey President John Witherspoon. Fea quotes Witherspoon repeatedly and at length, although Witherspoon’s censorious views on passions and the self, distinct from Fithian’s more conflicted stance and deeply at odds with those of his far more influential contemporary Thomas Paine, probably do not deserve the full weight Fea gives them. Indeed, Witherspoon’s discomfort at combining the culture of sensibility with mainline Protestant theology belies the very essence of the “rural Enlightenment” of early America that Fea so usefully and persuasively sketches in the main body of the book.

Nicole Eustace
New York University

Sorry Ann Curry, But That's the Wrong Wheaton College!

As many of my readers know, there are two Wheaton Colleges. One is an evangelical college in Wheaton, Illinois. The other is a non-religious liberal arts college in Norton, Massachusetts.

Last Saturday, Ann Curry of NBC news and "The Today Show" was commencement speaker at the non-religious liberal arts Wheaton in Massachusetts, but during her speech she mentioned the famous graduates--including Billy Graham--of the evangelical Wheaton.

See the story here.

Curry has apologized for the mistake.

The Net Worth of U.S. Presidents

The Atlantic has done a study of the "net worth" of every U.S. president in 2010 dollars.

Having examined the finances of all 43 presidents (yes, 43; remember, Cleveland was president twice), we calculated the net worth figures for each in 2010 dollars. Because a number of presidents, particularly in the early 19th Century, made and lost huge fortunes in a matter of a few years, the number for each man is based on his net worth at its peak.

We have taken into account hard assets like land, estimated lifetime savings based on work history, inheritance, homes, and money paid for services, which include things as diverse as their salary as Collector of Customs at the Port of New York to membership on Fortune 500 boards. Royalties on books have also been taken into account, along with ownership of companies and yields from family estates.

Here are the top 3 wealthiest presidents:

1. John F. Kennedy (1 billion dollars)
2. George Washington (525 million dollars)
3. Thomas Jefferson (212 million dollars)

What about the poorest presidents? The following presidents had a net worth of under one million dollars:

James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, James Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman.

This is interesting--the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, and 20th presidents (1857-1881) were all, relatively speaking, poor. Any historians want to interpret the meaning of this?

What about Obama?: His net worth is about $5 million. This makes him as wealthy as William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison.

Should Graduate Students Be Chosen By a Lottery?

If you applied to graduate school this year and did not get in, perhaps you might find some comfort in John L. Jackson Jr.'s recent Brainstorm post entitled "The Graduate-School Lottery." Here is a taste:

"How about just putting names in a hat and just picking one?"

A friend, Theresa, and I were comparing war stories about the graduate application process, and she offered up this witty solution. Indeed, we weren't actually "comparing" stories, not really. I was simply relaying frustrations that have been voiced by some of my friends and colleagues forced to choose as few as two graduate students (sometimes even just one) from among hundreds of prospectives.

This isn't about finding a needle in a haystack, the one gem that objectively shines brighter than all the rest. It can feel more like throwing a dart at a far away dartboard and then subsequently drawing a bullseye around it.

Of course, others have lamented the seemingly arbitrary criteria that sometimes separate some great grad-school candidates from other great ones. That's why I always tell my undergraduates not to take such rejections personally, not to view them as some kind of referendum on one's potential as a academician...

First Things Gets a New Cover Design

Stan Guthrie and John Wilson of Books and Culture devote an entire podcast to the change. Wilson goes so far to say that this is "one of the most interesting events in American publishing in the last several years." It looks like First Things is going to add artwork, photos, and even crossword puzzles!

The End of Law and Order

Forget about LOST. Tonight is the last episode of Law and Order, which was canceled by NBC after twenty years and 456 episodes.

Over at In Character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues, Jonathan V. Last reflects on what Law and Order has taught us over the years.

The article should be read in full, but here Last's conclusion:

But the biggest lesson of Law & Order? Justice may not always prevail, but even when it doesn't, the good guys have a scotch, go home, and come back to work the next morning. That's character.

We will miss you Jack McCoy!

Horace Greeley, Abraham Lincoln, and Active Government

History News Network has a short article by historian Johann N. Neem addressing the recent decision by the Maine Republican party to adopt a new platform "that challenges the principles of national sovereignty and active federal government." What bother Neem the most, and rightly so, is that the platform "invokes the 1854 words of New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley that the then new Republicans were 'united to restore the Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of Liberty."

Neem carefully shows how the Maine Republican party is engaging in some bad history: "Greeley, Abraham Lincoln, and other Republican founders would have been astonished at the policies that Maine’s Republicans are claiming as their inheritance."

Here is a taste:

Both Greeley and Lincoln were ardent nationalists who supported the priority of the national Constitution and the national people (as in “we the people” not “we the peoples”) over those of the states. They did not reject federalism. Federalism was and is an entrenched part of the American political system, and states and the peoples of the states retain sovereignty in those places and spaces where the federal government is denied authority.

But to Greeley and Lincoln, there could be no doubt, as President Lincoln put it, that the nation preceded the Constitution and that the Constitution spoke for a single people united by Revolution and politics. “The Union is much older than the Constitution,” Lincoln reminded his audience in his 1861 inaugural address. Lincoln, of course, was challenging secessionists who believed the Constitution was a primarily federal rather than national document. The first Republican president, in contrast, was willing to use American troops to defend the sovereignty of a single, national people formed in the crucible of the war for independence.

And Neem concludes:

Greeley and Lincoln believed that capitalism promised all people the opportunity to work hard and to achieve—to be self-made. But they were equally aware that no one was self-made, that the promise of economic opportunity and economic freedom required government to step in by providing schools, economic infrastructure, ensuring the wide distribution of wealth, and ensuring that workers were not just formally but actually free. In short, whether or not the state Republican party’s principles are good for Maine and the nation, they are radically different from those that were espoused by the party’s founders.

Great piece.

Stephen Ambrose's Son Defends His Father

History News Network is running a piece by Hugh Ambrose, the son of the late Stephen Ambrose. You may recall that we recently blogged about some of the recently uncovered problems with Stephen's books on Eisenhower. I direct you to that post for some of the details.

Hugh Ambrose does not deny the fact that his father exaggerated his relationship with Eisenhower, but he does claim that his father had a closer relationship with the former president than many of the critics are suggesting. Here are a few snippets:

The relationship between the former president and Ambrose lasted for several years. In their written correspondence, the historian asked detailed questions and Eisenhower gave substantive replies. These letters indicate that they also spoke on the phone. On at least one occasion Eisenhower encouraged Ambrose to “give me a ring.” The two men also met at the president’s home in Gettysburg. How many times they actually met is in dispute. Six discrepancies between the president’s schedule and Ambrose’s footnotes exist. As proof that the daily schedule was sacrosanct, an archivist at the Eisenhower Library recently claimed that Eisenhower’s “full schedule demanded that anyone wanting an appointment with him needed to begin the process months ahead of time.” In February 1967, though, three years after their relationship began, the president instructed Ambrose: “If you will call Miss Brown in my office I think we could set up an engagement on twenty-four hours notice.”

The six discrepancies (in a book containing 1,153 endnotes) remain a problem and the critics have made the most of them. Based upon some records that he acknowledged are spotty, the archivist proffered his opinions about what Eisenhower may have or may not have told Ambrose. The reporter, who wrote the story about the archivist’s allegations, included these speculations to prove that Steve Ambrose “fabricated” his relationship with Eisenhower. The reporter, however, admitted to me later that he had not examined all the evidence—he published what he had before someone else beat him to the punch...

It is clear, though, that Ambrose did not spend “hundreds of hours” with the president. This quote, used by the reporter, struck me and others who had worked with Steve Ambrose as strange, because we had never heard him say it. Both the reporter and the archivist told me where to find the quote. Ambrose said it to a group of high school students in 1998. He should not have said it. Like many an embarrassing moment, it lives online. Readers can decide for themselves, whether, out of a hundred TV appearances and a thousand more on radio and in print over the course of forty years, one exaggeration in an interview Ambrose did as a courtesy for some young people should be the measure of the man or his career. What kind of reporter uses this source to charge Steve Ambrose with misrepresenting his relationship in order to sell books?...

Throw out the hyperbole. What the archivist found and what the reporter wrote amounts to, by their own count, six questionable endnotes out of the thousands of endnotes in all of his books on Eisenhower. While it might be tempting to attribute these to typographical errors, the date of an interview with the former president was too important to get wrong. How to weigh these items in the light of his body of work is not a judgment, however, that should be left to a reporter and an archivist who wish to become the talk of the town. Stephen Ambrose wrote great books about Eisenhower. I find it unfortunate that my father did not take his own history, and how he came to meet the former supreme commander, as seriously as he took the subjects of his books. As for President Eisenhower, he kept a few treasured possessions from his decades as a public figure on a bookshelf in his private dressing room in Gettysburg, now a national historic site. Two volumes by Steve Ambrose stand there; one of them is Halleck.

Should You Go to Graduate School in the Humanities?

There has been a lot of discussion lately about whether or not one should head off to graduate school in the humanities after college. Thomas Hart Benton (aka William Pannapecker) has said that no one should go to graduate school in the humanities unless they are independently wealthy. Now Rob Weir, the "Instant Mentor" at Inside Higher Ed offers his take. Here is a taste:

I part company with doom-and-gloom prognosticators on two levels, though. First, as a historian one of the few things I can say with a great degree of certainty is that everyone who has ever predicted the future — no matter how prescient about some things — has misfired on most of what they forecast. Second, as a human being, I believe that a life of regret is worse than a life of diminished economic prospects. Like I said — it’s romantic — but if you share my views on regret, the risk might be worth it.I’m romantic, but I’m not blind, so there are a few things I’d very much recommend if graduate school and future employment are linked.

First — and I hear the scream of the Ivy Leaguers as I type this — go to a grad school that will pay you to come. It may be true (though I’m dubious of their placement statistics) that a degree from high-prestige private university offers some job placement advantages. But if a good state school waives your tuition and offers you a fellowship, and the fancy school doesn’t, take the money! In fact, if no one offers you a financial package, you’re probably not top grad school material and you need to rethink your career plans altogether.

Second, make sure you have health insurance, whether through a partner or your chosen grad school...

Third, if you’re partnered, make an ironclad contract with that person. Grad school can be brutal on relationships. Do not think your relationship will simply "adapt," or that you can negotiate after you "settle into a routine." You will live with less money, less free time, and more demands on both...

Fourth, define your bottom line. What will you settle for once you’re done? it’s simply a fact that very few humanities grads land their ideal job. I don’t mean immediately, I mean ever. Do you want to teach? If so, at what kind of institution?

Finally, don’t assume Plan B will appear as needed; develop one before you start. Universities owe it to students to deliver a never-promised-you-a-rose-garden message, and grad students owe it to themselves not to feel betrayed when FTD doesn’t deliver bouquets to their doorsteps. At some point your grad education will end and you do not want to be among those sad sacks waiting tables around the old U waiting for something to turn up...

Good advice. I am still of the opinion that students with a passion for the humanities should go to graduate school, as long as they know what they are getting into. It is the job of any professor, advisor, or academic mentor to sit down with a student contemplating graduate school and offer them a balanced and honest assessment of things.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on-line that caught my attention this week:

Stan Katz on academic presses and the fate of SMU Press.

Thomas J. Reese on Pope Benedict and the free market.

Texas Freedom Network on the passing of the Texas social studies standards.

Historiann and her cast of commentators defend the history major.

David Hollinger reviews Jack Rakove's Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. Alan Pell Crawford reviews Rakove and T.H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots.

Religion in American History is now on Twitter.

One of the best church signs ever.

Michael Greenwald reviews Robert Remini's At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union.

Your New College Graduate: A Parent's Guide.

U.S. Constitution is a best-seller.

Jeremy Beer interviews Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image: Art Faith, Mystery.

Thomas Hart Benton on why we need librarians.

Thomas Sugrue on Barack Obama's use of the Civil Rights Movement.

Democrats, evangelicals, immigration reform, and climate change.

What caused the Civil War? Chrisopher Clausen explains in The Wilson Quarterly.

Megan McArdle on the return of Michael Bellesiles.

Michael Kenney reviews Marla Miller, Betsy Ross and the Making of America

Sam Tanenhaus reviews Howard Bryant's The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron.

David Oshinsky reviews Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.

New McNeil Center Fellows

Here is the new crop of fellows who will soon be making their way to the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at Penn. I wish them all a good year of research and writing.

Caitlin Fitz (Yale) "Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions." (Barra Postdoctoral Fellow)

Cheryl R. Collins (Virginia) "Sister States, Coalition Commonwealths: The American Interstate System, 1775-1790." (Bruce Baky Valley Forge Fellow)

Matthew Karp (Penn) "'This Vast Southern Empire’: The South and the Foreign Policy of Slavery, 1833-1865." (Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Fellow),

Nicole N. Ivy (Yale) "Materia Medica: Black Women, White Doctors, and Spectacular Gynecology in the Nineteenth-Century U.S." (Richard S. Dunn Fellow)

Jayne Ptolemy (Yale) "‘To Extend the Empire of Civilization and Knowledge: Philadelphian Quakers and the Frontier in the Benevolent Imagination." (E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Fellow in Early American Religious Studies)

Michael Goode (Illinois-Chicago) "In the Kingdom but Not Of It: The Quaker Peace Testimony and Atlantic Pennsylvania, 1681-1720." (Friends of the MCEAS Fellow)

Felicity Donohoe (University of Glasgow) "Native North American Women, White Men, and Ritual Violence in the Eighteenth Century." (Advisory Council Fellowship)

Katherine Gaudet (Chicago) "Fear of Fiction: Novels and Their Antagonists in Eighteenth-Century America," (Mellon Fellow in Early American Literature and Material Texts)

Joseph Rezek "Tales from Elsewhere: Fiction and Literary Ambition in the Anglophone Periphery." (Barra Post-Doctoral Fellowship)

Alea Henle (Connecticut) "Preserving the Past, Making History: Historical Societies and Editors in the Early Republic." (Mellon Early American Literature and Material Texts Fellow).

Whitney A. Martinko, "Progress through Preservation: History on the American Landscape in an Age of Improvement." (Barra Foundation Fellow)

Simon Gilhooley (Cornell) "The Textuality of the Constitution and the Origins of Original Intent. " (Barra Dissertation Fellow)

Robert J. Gamble (Johns Hopkins) "A Secondhand Republic: The Informal Economy in the Antebellum Mid-Atlantic." (MCEAS Consortium Fellow)

MCEAS Consortium Summer Faculty Fellows: Brooke Hunter (Rider) and Tanya Kevorkian (Millersville University).

Backstory on the Tea Party Movement

If you are unfamiliar with the radio show "Backstory with the American History Guys," you really should be. University of Virginia history professors Peter Onuf ("18th century guy") and Brian Balogh ("20th century guy") and University of Richmond president Ed Ayers ("19th century guy"), with support from the Virginia Foundation For the Humanities, have put together an informative and entertaining show that brings history to life and connects it to contemporary issues.

I just finished listening to the most recent edition of "Backstory." It deals with the Tea Party Movement. Here is a description: "In this podcast, the History Guys take a closer look at the Tea Party Movement, and ask what, if anything, 2010 has in common with 1773. They also consider what the history of American populism portends for the Tea Party’s future."

The highlight of the show is Peter Onuf's interview with Ben Carp, author of the forthcoming Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America.

Romans 13 and the American Revolution

I learn a lot from the folks over at American Creation. I always enjoy reading their debates over whether or not the American Revolution was carried out in violation of the New Testament book of Romans, chapter 13. I have a brief section on Romans 13 in my forthcoming book, "Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: An Historical Primer" and a lot of what I have written has benefited from reading that blog. Thanks to Brad Hart, Jon Rowe, "King of Ireland," and the rest of the American Creation gang. (Guys: How about putting The Way of Improvement Leads Home in your book montage!!).

As I was recently polishing up the section of my book manuscript dealing with Romans 13, I ran across a great passage in Steven M. Dworetz's The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American Revolution.

I don't think I could put it any more succinctly:

Basing a revolutionary teaching on the scriptural authority of chapter 13 of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans must rank as one of the greatest ironies in the history of political thought. This passage, proclaimed by George Sabine as "the most influential political pronouncement in the New Testament," served as the touchstone for passive obedience and unconditional submission from Augustine and Gregory to Luther and Calvin. "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers, for there is no power but of God: The powers that be are ordained of God. Whoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil...For he is the minister of God to thee for good...."

The medieval church fathers as well as the reformers and counter-reformers of the sixteenth century all invoked this doctrine in denouncing disobedience and resistance to civil authorities. To them it seemed absolutely unequivocal. If civil rulers, as such, " are ordained of God," then resistance is in all cases a sin and, indeed, as Luther put it, "a greater sin than murder, unchastity, theft, and dishonesty, and all that these may include." In sum, Romans 13 easily earned its reputation in the history of political thought as the "locus classicus of passive-obedience theory."

Vote for the Best Garden Office

One day I will get that nice garden office/writers shed in my backyard, but until that happens I can always waste some time looking at pictures to get some ideas about what my shed will look like some day.

Vote for you favorite here.

50 Most Extraordinary Churches in the World

If you like to look at pictures of churches, check these out.

Richard Beeman Wins The George Washington Book Prize

Congratulations to Richard Beeman, author of Plain and Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution

MOUNT VERNON, Va. – The sixth annual George Washington Book Prize, which honors the most important new book about America’s founding era, has been awarded to Richard Beeman for Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (Random House, 2009). Beeman, author of five previous books on the history of revolutionary America, received the $50,000 prize Thursday evening, May 20, at a black-tie dinner at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

Richard Beeman is professor of history and former dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a trustee of the National Constitution Center. Plain, Honest Men is a dramatic and engrossing account of the men who met in Philadelphia over the summer of 1787 to design a radically new form of government. In describing the daily debates of the Constitutional Convention, Beeman explores the passionate intellectual and political conflicts among the Founders.

The jury of scholars who chose Beeman’s book as a finalist from among 62 nominees described it as “the fullest and most authentic account of the Constitutional Convention ever written.” They also praised the author for his clear, accessible prose and his mission “to instill a sense of stewardship among 21st-century Americans, urging them to see the Constitution as not only a durable document, but a living one, unfettered by original intentions.”

The George Washington Book Prize is sponsored by a partnership of three institutions devoted to furthering scholarship on America’s founding era: Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington's Mount Vernon. The $50,000 prize is the nation’s largest literary award for early American history, and one of the largest prizes of any kind.

History is Not Politics

Inside Higher Ed is running an insightful piece about last night's Jefferson's Lecture in the Humanities sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The speaker was Jonathan Spence, the esteemed historian of China who teaches at Yale. (I have only heard him speak once--at my cousin's graduation from Gettysburg College back in the '90s). The essay focuses on how Spence took a lecture that has in the past been associated with bridging the humanities and contemporary issues, and turned it into a history lecture about the interaction between the West and China in the 17th century.

Why didn't Spence use his lecture to make connections "between his topic and issues of current cultural or political relevance?" Here are a few snippets from the article, with quotes from Spence, that address that question:

In his lecture, Spence gave what may (or may not) have been one brief acknowledgment that he'd chosen an unusually narrow topic of discourse: "It is a commonplace, I think, that the sources that underpin our concept of the humanities, as a focus for our thinking, are expected to be broadly inclusive." But, for himself, Spence dismissed that notion in one more sentence: "...as a historian I have always been drawn to the apparently small-scale happenings in circumscribed settings, out of which we can tease a more expansive story."

Thus he dedicated the rest of his lecture to the story of those three historical figures in the year 1687. Shen had traveled to Europe in the company of one of his teachers, a Flemish Jesuit priest who was co-editing a book of the sayings of Confucius from Chinese into Latin. Hyde, librarian at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, invited Shen there to assist him with the cataloging of some Chinese books -- and also because Hyde, who in that era would have been called an Orientalist, wanted to learn Chinese himself. After a brief stay at Oxford, Shen returned to London, bearing a letter of introduction from Hyde to his friend Boyle; the letter recommended that Boyle meet and converse with the Chinese scholar. The letter had to be convincing, Spence explained, because Boyle's reputation was by then widespread, and "he was so inundated with curious visitors that at times he had to withdraw into self-enforced seclusion...."

"All three men," Spence ultimately concluded, "though so different, shared certain basic ideas about human knowledge: these included... the importance of linguistic precision, the need for broad-based comparative studies, the role of clarity in argument, the need for thorough scrutiny of philosophical and theological principles.... Theirs, though brief, had been a real meeting of the minds. And the values they shared remain, well over three hundred years later, the kind that we can seek to practice even in our own hurried lives."

That final point was the closest Spence came to suggesting a particular take-home message for his audience; however, in an interview with Inside Higher Ed, held that morning in the lobby of the Willard Hotel, he did mention a few ideas that he was hoping to convey. For one thing, Spence said, given the current importance of U.S.-China relations, he hoped this much older, smaller-scale example of dialogue between the East and West would "give some perspective to that."

"Historians," he said, "try to get people away from just focusing on the present; they try to give them some sort of stronger sense of continuity, human continuity. And I just like the range of things, these three people that draw together, and they're writing their letters to each other, and their few meetings... and in that short time they talk about examination systems, they talk about language, competition, they talk about medicine, they talk about -- I was fascinated, they talk about chess..... All these things seemed to me to flow together, and I think they'd make an interesting -- I hope they'd make an interesting -- package about cultural contact."

There's a lesson in that, Spence said: "to make our range of contact as wide as possible, and to use our intelligence about how to do this."...

But on the larger importance of the humanities, and their current status in higher education and society at large, Spence was reluctant to make a strong argument: "It's not just a case of encouraging humanities in the abstract; it's having something to say.... The main search should be for what is the most meaningful thing you can achieve with the humanities, how can you share some kind of broader cultural values, or how can you learn things about yourself or other societies. The challenge is to use the humane intelligence and see what can be built on that."

Those who want to politicize history should take notice of Spence's remarks. I think he captures the essence of what a historian does. Historians "try to get people away from just focusing on the present; they try to give them some sort of stronger sense of continuity, human continuity." Brilliant!

Was The United States Established in 1774?

Jim Cullen has a nice review of T.H. Breen's new book American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People. I have a copy of this book sitting on my desk right now, but just in case I never get around to reviewing it here or elsewhere, I offer this snippet from Cullen's review:

Ask anyone when the United States became an independent nation, and many will answer with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Others will cite the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. Perhaps some will say not until victory at Yorktown in 1781, or even the Treaty of Paris in 1783. But in this compellingly structured and argued book, T.H. Breen asserts that a de facto nation came into existence between the spring and fall of 1774. It was in these crucial months that the people of the thirteen colonies -- not the Founding Fathers, not the Continental Army, not the maladroit British government -- executed a series of steps that collectively solved problems of governance and demonstrated how a republic could be successfully constituted...

The Jonas Brothers at the National Museum of American History

I would have probably skipped this story completely if I did not have two pre-teen daughters. My oldest visited the National Museum of American History yesterday on a class field trip.

Melinda Machado, the Director of the Office of Public Affairs at the museum, describes a recent visit by the Jonas Brothers. (I am going to assume that all of my readers know about the Jonas Brothers. If you do not, you really need to get a life!). Here is a taste of Machado's post:

Just after 10:30 a.m., the brothers—Kevin, Joe, and Nick—arrived wearing gray morning suits (they were going to a brunch after the tour) and like many of our visitors, they came as a family group: Kevin’s wife Danielle, Camp Rock co-star Demi Lovato (Joe’s girlfriend), and mom and dad (Kevin, Sr. and Denise Jonas). Unlike our other visitors, they had personal security guards.

Peeking out of the Reception Suite, I saw that the museum had visitors but the coast looked pretty clear to make it to the elevators and up to the second floor to see the Star-Spangled Banner. We commandeered two elevators as there were two dozen people in our group. Just as we were almost in the elevator cabs, I heard someone shout: “The Jonas Brothers!” And the doors closed...

Wow! I didn't know that Joe Jonas and Demi Lovato were dating!

Is Opposition to Labor Unions a Mortal Sin?

Yes, according to some Catholic scholars:

A group of Catholic scholars contends that management efforts to break labor unions are a grave breech of the church's social doctrine and tantamount to committing mortal sin.

A statement from Weymouth, Mass.-based Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice, released May 1, the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, offers a detailed argument that actions to thwart union organizing campaigns, stifle contract talks, unilaterally roll back wages and benefits, and break existing labor agreements are a "grave violation of Catholic social doctrine on labor unions."

"This violation of Catholic doctrine constitutes material grounds for mortal sin because it stands in grave violation of both the letter and spirit of Catholic social doctrine," said the document, titled "Union Busting Is a Mortal Sin."

In laying out their argument, the scholars said efforts to deny workers the right to organize violate the First, Fifth and Seventh commandments regarding idolatry, scandal and theft, respectively.

Joe Carter of First Things asks whether social encyclicals are binding on Catholics and, if so, to what extent?

More on Bellesiles

Yesterday's Inside Higher Education ran a piece by Scott McLemee on Michael Bellesiles's new book, 1877: America's Year of Living Violently. You may remember from a post we did last week that Bellesiles is the historian who fabricated evidence in his last book, Arming America. I won't go into the details of his atrocities here, but you can read about them in McLemee's piece or in my original post. Bellesiles's historical sin cost him his job at Emory University and disgraced his reputation in the historical community.

I ended my post last week by mentioning that I hope Bellesiles is able to rehabilitate his career. A few commentators wrote to remind me of the seriousness of Bellesiles's crime against history. I agree with them entirely. There are some who want to give him some kind of intellectual or academic death penalty for his actions. In other words, some believe that Bellesiles's crime against the discipline is so great that he should not be permitted to practice history anymore. Fair enough. I respect that position.

Bellesiles should be given another chance--and now the New Press has provided him with one. But McLemee is right to call our attention to the blatant falsehood in the New Press's press release for 1877: America's Year of Living Violently. Here is the full release.

“A major new work of popular history, 1877 is also notable as the comeback book for a celebrated U.S. historian. Michael Bellesiles is perhaps most famous as the target of an infamous ‘swiftboating’ campaign by the National Rifle Association, following the publication of his Bancroft Prize-winning book Arming America (Knopf, 2000) -- ‘the best kind of non-fiction,’ according to the Chicago Tribune -- which made daring claims about gun ownership in early America. In what became the history profession’s most talked-about and notorious case of the past generation, Arming America was eventually discredited after an unprecedented and controversial review called into question its sources, charges which Bellesiles and his many prominent supporters have always rejected.”

McLemee's piece makes it clear that Bellesiles was not "swiftboated." His scholarship was sloppy and shoddy and he deserved to have his Bancroft Prize taken away and be fired from his job. As McLemee notes in regard to the Free Press: "If a major commercial press wants to help a disgraced figure make his comeback, that is one thing, but rewriting history is another."

The 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in America

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has issued its list of the most endangered historic places in the United States. They are:

1. America's State Parks and State Owned Historic Sites.
We have spent a bit of time speaking and writing about this as it relates to budget cuts in the state of Pennsylvania.

2. Black Mountain, Kentucky

3. Hinchliffe Stadium in Paterson, New Jersey (pictured above).
The stadium is one of three remaining Negro League baseball stadiums in the United States.

4. Industrial Arts Building in Lincoln, Nebraska

5. Juana Briones House in Palo Alto, California

6. Merritt Parkway in Fairfield County, Connecticut

7. Metropolitan AME Church in Washington D.C.
Founded in 1821 by enslaved and free African Americans.

8. Pagat in Yigo, Guam

9. Saugatuck Dunes in Saugatuck, Michigan

10. Threefoot Building in Meriden, Mississippi

11. Wilderness Battlefield in Orange and Spotsylvania Counties, Virginia
Civil War battlefield currently being threatened by Walmart. We have blogged about this before.

Bethany Moreton: To Serve God and Walmart

GRITtv with Laura Flanders is running an interview with University of Georgia historian Bethany Moreton, author of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise.

I have not yet read Moreton's book, but it is on my reading list. Moreton makes some very interesting points in the interview comparing Walmart's "Christian" understanding of work with that of the "labor left" in the United States.

Evangelicals and Social Reform

I have been impressed lately by the fact that evangelicals have been returning a bit to their nineteenth-century roots. No longer is the Christian Right defining what counts as meaningful social reform.

The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has, for the last several years, called the nation's attention to evangelical efforts at fighting poverty, AIDS, sex-trafficking, malaria, and genocide around the globe. This past January Richard Cizik and David Gushee founded the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, a faith-based non-profit for evangelical social engagement. Earlier month, a group of evangelicals--some of them from rather conservative institutions--called for immigration reform that, according to this CNN article, "includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants." And now a group of evangelicals are calling for prison reforms that will protect prisoners from violence and rape.

This reminds me of a post I did back in January on the 1873 meeting of the General Conference of the Evangelical Alliance, a group of evangelicals from around the world who met to discuss a host of social issues, including cruelty to animals!

Duped!

I just got done talking to some of the Messiah College faculty today about the importance of critical thinking and the liberal arts. Tonight I have failed to apply this lesson to blogging.

In my last post (which I have removed), I wrote about Al Gore's commencement address at the University of Tennessee, which was labeled the "most depressing commencement speech ever." My friend and faithful reader Amy Bass has pointed out to me via Facebook that this video is an edited version of the Gore speech. It was put on-line by Tea Party Movement supporters. It seems that the video I posted was a "severely edited" version of the speech and as a result it was unfair to Gore. I knew the video was edited, and it does seem as if Gore spends a lot of time talking about global warming, but the edited version leaves out significant parts of the speech that clearly show that Gore DOES understand the commencement address genre.

See this report by Media Matters. Here is a taste:

The Drudge Report is hyping a severely edited video of former Vice President Al Gore's recent commencement address at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville under the mocking headline, "Gore Gives Depressing Commencement Speech On Global Warming."

Drudge links to Real Clear Politics, which posted the video -- produced by Americans for Prosperity, the tea party-affiliated group reportedly financed by oil and gas tycoon David Koch -- and echoed AFP's derisive headline, "The Most Depressing Graduation Speech Ever."

Essentially, AFP grabbed about two minutes worth of cropped comments from Gore's 20-minute speech -- during which he discussed some of the potential effects of global warming -- and spliced them together to make it seem like Gore spent his time ripping the joy and emotion from graduation day by warning of Earth's impending doom. In a blog post that RCP dutifully reprinted, AFP mockingly wrote: "Instead of providing encouragement for the graduates of the University of Tennessee, Al Gore takes the opportunity to promote his doomsday global warming scenario."

In reality, Gore did not "promote" "doomsday global warming scenarios." The full video of Gore's speech makes clear that while Gore discussed serious problems facing not only the United States but the entire world -- primarily the effects of climate change and the global economic crisis -- he used the opportunity to issue a challenge to the graduates to find solutions to these problems that will lead to "economic renewal with millions of good new jobs being created in this transition to a sustainable economy and a sustainable society." In fact, he rejected the idea of a "world filled with chaos because the predictions of the scientists were allowed to come true," saying that he believed this generation of graduates would "find the moral courage to rise up and solve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve."

So I apologize for leading my readers astray on this one. I have removed the post and I will try harder in the future to be a more critical blogger.

Live Blogging of Texas Social Studies Hearings

As usual, the Texas Freedom Network is offering live blogging of the meetings of the Texas State Board of Education. The Board is once again discussing the state social studies standards. It looks like politics as usual.

Here is a taste of what is going on:

11:23 – Kelly Shackelford, head of the Liberty Institute/Free Market Foundation, the Texas affiliate of the far-right Focus on the Family, is up. Shackelford argues that the words “separation of church and state” aren’t in the Constitution. Neither, we might say, is “fair trial,” “separation of powers” “checks and balances” and other basic constitutional principles. Shackelford thinks “separation of church” is being used to “abuse” the freedom of students. He wants students to contrast the intent of the Founders (or what he believes was the intent of the Founders) who wrote the Constitution with the phrase “separation of church and state.”

11:32 – Board member David Bradley calls separation of church and state a “myth.” He notes that the Ten Commandments adorn federal buildings like the Supreme Court.

11:34 – Shackelford: There are people who want to engage in a “religious cleansing” in this country. He argues that students are being punished for expressing their faith in public schools.

11:37 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar: “tremendous confusion” about how the First Amendment should be implemented in relation to religious freedom. It’s hard to disagree — people like Dunbar and Shackelford have worked hard make it confusing.

11:39 – Board member Barbara Cargill: students used to be taught correctly about the First Amendment’s protection for religious freedom (meaning that they weren’t taught about separation of church and state).

This is An Impressive Vita

This is an impressive vita for a twenty-three year old kid. Unfortunately none of it is true.

The New York Times has a short article today on Adam Wheeler, the man who faked his way into Harvard. Mr. Wheeler has been caught and faces charges on 20 crimes, including identity fraud and larceny.

Meanwhile, it looks like Mr. Wheeler applied for an internship at The New Republic. The folks at TNR have posted his fake vita on their website along with a short post on the matter.

Wow!

AHA Takes on the Texas State Board of Education

The American Historical Association has finally weighed in on the Texas Board of Education social studies curriculum. Here is the press release:

WASHINGTON DC, May 18, 2010 —The elected council and officers of the American Historical Association fully concur with the commitment expressed by many members of the Texas State Board of Education that historical understanding is an essential element in educating young people in their developing role as citizens of their state, the nation, and the world. The Council, however, calls on the Texas State Board of Education to reconsider their recently proposed amendments to the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Social Studies. We attach, therefore, a statement prepared by key elected officials of our organization who have studied the documents relevant to the State Board of Education’s upcoming decision. This statement proposes a constructive way forward for reconsidering the amendments with the goal of enhancing the historical education of Texas school children. We strongly endorse the statement’s urgent call for a delay in the decision on the current proposed amendments. The American Historical Association, chartered by the Congress of the United States in 1889 includes almost 15,000 individual members as well as 113 affiliated organizations committed to the study of history.

The formal statement is an interesting one. The statement praises the standards for Texas History and World History for their "exemplary attention to the diversity of human population, and the ways in which an accurate understanding of the past requires a reckoning with that diversity." It then asks the Board to consider the same kind of attention to diversity in the United States history standards, with particular attention to the U.S. history before 1877 standards. Here is the paragraph from the AHA statement dealing with pre-1877 United States history:

The proposed U.S. History standards for the period before 1877 make a radical shift from
the Texas History standards, almost entirely discounting the importance of human
activity in North America before the British colonization of the Atlantic Coast. This
reverses the major premises that guide the students’ learning in middle school, and such a
shift is sure to be disorienting and perplexing to them. Just as important, the U.S. history
standards drop the Texas history standards’ careful attention to the context of European
settlement, and the thorough reckoning with the presence of Indian people and
representatives of the various empires. While this omission raises considerations of
fairness, there is a larger problem of historical accuracy. The complicated process that
led to the creation of the United States involved a great range of people, ideas, and
interests. To draw a comparison with science education, no curriculum in chemistry
would be of much value to students if it made arbitrary selections and deletions among
the elements to be studied; if the focus were to be on oxygen with hydrogen omitted, then
students would be at a considerable disadvantage when it came to understanding water.
The analogy applies directly to U.S. history: omit the key elements of Indian, Spanish,
African, and Mexican people’s presence and actions, and the resulting history will not
qualify for the adjective accurate. Thus, bringing the proposed U.S. History standards
into a direct relationship with the current Texas History standards would not only bring
clarity and consistency to hundreds of classrooms, it would also provide a firmer
foundation for a more accurate knowledge of American history.

This seems to be a fair treatment. While some might wish that the AHA would also raise questions regarding the politicized nature of the post-1877 United States history standards, I think the committee drafting this document responded with appropriate prudence.

New Blog: "Mystories"

Check out Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe's new blog, Mystories. Beth and I go way back. We both spent some time together in residence at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at Penn and both started our full-time college teaching careers together at Valparaiso University.

Here is a brief bio from her blog:

Dr. Pardoe writes for and speaks to academic and popular audiences about ethnic and religious diversity in Europe and America from the 16th-18th Centuries. She specializes in exploring the impact of diverse communities on individual lives and educational institutions. Dr. Pardoe completed her BA with Distinction at Northwestern University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and earned honors in History. She spent the summer following her Freshman year in Northwestern’s Ethnographic Field School on the Navajo Reservation conducting interviews with Navajo college students about their educational experience and her Junior year at the Eberhardt-Karls Universtitaet in Tuebingen, Germany. A grant for her Senior thesis research on Lutheran education in colonial Pennsylvania took her to the archives of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. Selected as Marshall Scholar, she began her graduate career at the University of Cambridge, UK, where she earned an MLitt for her research on Lutheran schools in Reformation Germany and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History. Her doctorate from Princeton University, “Refugees and Revolutionaries: Defining Pluralism in Early America,” integrated these interests. It examined an Indian interpreter’s, the Lutheran Church’s, and Pennsylvania’s political responses to that colony’s extraordinarily diverse population.

Beth's blog is quite impressive. If her recent post on sheep is any indication, we are in for a treat! Welcome to the blogosphere, Beth!

Call for Papers: Divided By Faith: A Decade Retrospective

This call for papers just came in from Rusty Hawkins, a loyal reader of The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

Divided by Faith: A Decade Retrospective

The John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University invites proposals for an
interdisciplinary conference commemorating the tenth anniversary of Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith’s groundbreaking book, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, to be held on the campus of Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, on October 15-16, 2010. The conference will begin Friday evening with a dinner and panel discussion with Michael Emerson on the impact Divided by Faith has had on scholars and church practitioners. Professor Emerson will also present a closing address Saturday afternoon.

Divided by Faith’s influence has been felt among a variety of academic disciplines. Over the past decade, scores of historians, sociologists, and theologians have produced scholarship intersecting with the book’s theme of the power of race in American religion. American religious historians have explored the roots of segregated churches, sociologists have undertaken further investigations into ethnic and racial divisions of American congregations, and theologians have produced works suggesting that the days of racialized evangelicalism are numbered. Ten years after its publication, the scholarly ground initially tilled by Emerson and Smith’s book remains fertile for researchers from multiple disciplines.

In recognition of the growing scholarship being generated in this area, the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University invites scholars working broadly on the overlapping topics of race and American religion to participate in this conference marking the tenth anniversary of Divided by Faith’s publication.

Successful proposals may consider a variety of topics related to the general theme of the
intersection of religion, race, and American society. Proposals should include an abstract of
approximately 500 words and a CV. Submissions from scholars and advanced graduate students working in sociology, history, theology, or other relevant fields are encouraged. Presented papers may also be considered for publication in an anticipated interdisciplinary volume on the influence of race in American religion. A limited amount of funding for travel may be available to students and scholars who are unable to obtain funding from their own institution.

Proposals must be received by July 15, 2010, and should be sent by email to rusty.hawins@indwes.edu or by post to John Wesley Honors College c/o Rusty Hawkins; Indiana Wesleyan University; 4201 S. Washington; Marion, IN 46953.