Most Popular Posts of the Last Week

Here are the most popular posts of the week at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.


1.  Jesus Will Return on May 22, 2011 (July 2010).
2.  Barack Obama is the Most Christian President in American History and Other Thoughts on His Easter Prayer Breakfast (April 2011).
3.  The Ten Most Religious Cities in America (November 2010).
4.  Some Forthcoming Books I Hope to Read (April 2011).
5.  David Barton on the Ropes (April 2011).
6.  Rob Bell Makes the Cover of Time Magazine (April 2011).
7.  Historian's Reflect on the Texas Textbook Controversy (March 2011).
8.  Gordon Wood's Review of Jill Lepore's Recent Book (January 2011).
9.  How to Cite Facebook and Twitter (January 2010).
10.Writing Sheds (June 2009).


Also receiving votes:
What are Your Plans for Summer 2011? (April 2011)
100 Films You Can Use in Your History Classroom (April 2011).

Historians and Online Sources

The listserv H-SHEAR (Society for the History of the Early American Republic) has recently had some fruitful discussion about the use of online primary sources in works of scholarship.  Mark Cheatham has summarized the debate nicely over at his blog, "Jacksonian America."  Here is a taste:

On the H-SHEAR discussion network earlier this week, Dan Feller called out historians who cite non-standard sources. He gave three examples from two books and one journal article that focused on the Jacksonian era. The two books cite non-institutional websites as their source for several of Andrew Jackson’s presidential messages instead of the standard sources: James D. Richardson’s multivolume collection of presidential messages or digital images of the originals, available online at the Library of Congress American Memory site.

I tend to agree with both Dan Feller and Caleb McDaniel.  Online primary sources are incredibly valuable to the historian.  I used many of them in Was America Founded as a Christian Nation and even one or two in The Way of Improvement Leads Home.  But they must be used with caution.

Keynes vs. Hayek: Round 2

I did not see Round 1, but Round 2 is sure entertaining.  Should be required for all economics students. 

Here is a little background before you watch the battle. Keynes and Hayek.

The Death of an Evangelical Icon: R.I.P. David Wilkerson

David Wilkerson died today.  He was killed in an automobile accident in Texas.  Unless you are an evangelical of a certain age, you may have never heard of Wilkerson.  He was the founder of an organization called Teen Challenge, a ministry that worked with teenage gangs in New York City. 

Wilkerson became famous in 1963 when his book The Cross and the Switchblade was published.  The book told the story of the conversion of gang member Nicky Cruz and has sold millions of copies.  In 1970, the Cross and the Switchblade was turned into a Hollywood movie.  Pat Boone played the role of Wilkerson and Erik Estrada played the role of Cruz.

In the 1980s, Wilkerson founded Times Square Church, which continues to meet in New York's historic Mark Hellinger Theatre.  He has also been known for his attempts to predict the end of the world.

Wilkerson was an evangelical hero ever since The Cross and the Switchblade appeared in print.  His ministry, which reflects Wilkerson's Assembly of God/Pentecostal beliefs, has helped hundreds and hundreds of drug attics and poverty-stricken New Yorkers.

On a personal note, my brother (who is neither a drug attic nor poverty-stricken) has been attending Wilkerson's church for several years. (So does former New York Jets defensive end and member of the "New York Sack Exchange," Mark Gastineau).

Questions All Royal Wedding Fans are Dying to Have Answered

Actually, I am not sure that the people who will wake in a few hours to watch the royal wedding really care about the religious dimensions of the ceremony.  But for those who do, Patheos has provided answers to eight common questions.  I list the questions below, but you will need to go to the Patheos site for the answers.

1.  What happens in the Anglican marriage rite?

2.  Who will perform the ceremony?

3.  Where will the ceremony be held?

4.  What is the connection between the throne and the Church of England?

5.  Why can't Catholics become monarchs?

6.  What does Kate's confirmation mean?  Did she convert?

7.  What is the monarch's role as head of the church?  Does he or she have the power to make theological rulings.

8.  Is the Church of England the official church of the country?  What does that mean?  How is the church-state relationship different than the U.S.?

Brett Kelley's Confederate Journey

Over the past nine or ten years there have been many Messiah College history majors who have fulfilled the major's "experiential learning component" through an internship in the collections of the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, PA under the guidance of museum curator Brett Kelley.

Next month Brett is going to be traveling by foot, in Confederate soldier garb, from Fredericksburg, VA to Harrisburg, PA.  He will be following the path that General Ewell's 2nd Corps took into Pennsylvania after the Battle of Chancellorsville.  It is all part of the museum's fundraising efforts.  Good luck, Brett!

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

Back in 1994, Roy Rosenzweig founded the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.  The goal was to "use digital media and computer technology to democratize history."  Rosenzweig died after a battle with cancer in 2007.

Last week the Center for History and New Media at GMU was officially named the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media.

Here is a blurb from the Center's website:

On April 15, 2011 at 3:00 pm, donors, friends and staff gathered at the Research 1 building on George Mason University (GMU)campus to rename the Center for History and New Media in memory of its founder, Roy Rosenzweig.  Through the generous support of donors, more than a million dollars was raised to rename the Center.  Daniel Cohen, Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media, welcomed guests to the dedication ceremony.  Acknowledgments were given by: Jack Censer, Dean of the GMU College of Humanities and Social Sciences; Alan Merten, President of GMU; Gary Kornblith, Professor of History from Oberlin College; Stephen Brier, Senior Academic Technology Officer Professor, CUNY; Brian Platt, Chair of the History Dept., GMU.

Congratulations!

St. Augustine's Journey Toward God

Garry Wills has a new book out on St. Augustine.  It is entitled Augustine's "Confessions": A Biography (Princeton University Press).  From what I can tell, Wills is trying to rescue the Confessions from scholars who seem to think that the book is about a saint's struggle with lust.  More than a autobiography, Wills suggests that the Confessions are best understood as Augustine's reflections on his journey toward God.  As Wills writes in an excerpted passage of the book published on the website of The New Statesman:

If Confessions is not an autobiography, what is it (aside from its overall framework as a prayer)? It relives the drama of sin and salvation, in the form of a journey towards God. It stands closer to The Pilgrim's Progress, or even to the Divine Comedy, than to Rousseau's Confessions. It is a theological construct of a highly symbolic sort.

I am not sure what is new about this interpretation.  I think that this is the way many Christians have always read the Confessions.

HT

This Week's Patheos Column: The Confederacy's "Christian Nation"

The Confederate States of America claimed to be a Christian nation. They managed to succeed where today's Christian nationalists have failed. The Confederacy had a Constitution that recognized God. (When John McCain said in 2008 that the U.S. Constitution established America as a Christian nation, perhaps he was confusing it with the Confederate Constitution.) The leaders of the Confederacy had no qualms about claiming that God had uniquely raised the South up to do His work in the world. Christianity held an exalted and powerful place in Confederate culture.

As we have seen in previous articles in this series, during the Civil War northern clergy believed that their cause was ordained by God. Part of their mission in this conflict was to punish the South for seceding from the United States, a political community that was indivisible because it was created by God. But as Northern propagandists extolled the Christian virtues of their national Union and the spiritual superiority of their society over a sinful South in need of God's repentance, the religious and political leaders of the Confederacy were building what they perceived to be their own Christian civilization.

Read the rest here.

Anglophilic Wusses

Are you going to get up early on Friday to watch the royal wedding?  I will not.  I need to get some rest.  Later in the day I am heading out to Pittsburgh where I will be speaking about Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? to a group of atheists and skeptics at the Carnegie Science Center. (I also have no real interest in royal weddings or the kind of gown Kate will be wearing).

Mark Oppenheimer, writing at Slate, uses the phrase "Anglophilic wusses" to describe those Americans who will be waking up at 3am to catch the wedding.  He also describes them as traitors to their country.  He reminds us that "Americans are supposed to loathe and reject monarchs."

Oppenheimer concludes:

I certainly mean no disrespect to the English, that island people that gave us abolitionism, church-ratified divorce, the modern novel, and the Beatles. Rather, I simply want to recall to us our own inheritance, which is of a vision still quite radical: that we are all created equal. Being human, some number of us will always have the urge to ogle couture wedding dresses and generally wonder how the other half gets married. And the American version of that will involve people named Trump, Kennedy, or Kardashian. That tendency is not the United States of America at its best. But at least it is our bad tendency, born here, of a free people, one that calls each of us "Mr." or "Ms."—that, in fact, encourages the familiarity of "Kim," "Kourtney," and "Khloe." That is worth something, and it is worth sleeping on Friday morning.

Evangelicals Debate the Meaning of Evangelicalism

Over at Jesus Creed, Scot McKnight calls upon his readers to reflect on the meaning of that elusive term, "evangelicalism." 

Here are his conclusions:

1.  The best definitions of evangelicalism belong to David Bebbington and Mark Noll.  McKnight summarizes their view this way: 

Evangelicalism is a movement in the Protestant church shaped by differing but clear emphasis on four beliefs: the centrality of the Bible, the centrality of the atoning death of Christ, the centrality of the need for personal conversion, and the centrality of an active mission to convert others and to do good works in society. 

2.  No one really decides who is an evangelical, but this does not stop others from applying the label.

McKnight then goes on to review David Fitch's book, The End of Evangelicalism?: Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission: Towards an Evangelical Political Theology. 

McKnight's post has received 68 (and counting) comments from his evangelical readers. While I often read Jesus Creed for Scot's insights, I read it more for the comments.  It always provides me with a great deal of insight into the views of ordinary, educated evangelicals.

Some Forthcoming Books I Hope to Read

I have too much to read.  The books are piling up around my desk.  Right now I am working through some oldies-but- goodies on New Jersey's role in the American Revolution, including Larry Gerlach's landmark Prologue to Independence: New Jersey and the Coming of the Revolution (1976) and Sheila Skemp's William Franklin: Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (1990). I am working on an essay, already overdue, on the subject.

I also have several books in the queue that I hope to get to sometime in the early summer.  They include John Smolenski's Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania; Benjamin Irvin's Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors; Tal Howard's God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide; and Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of a Nation.  And that is only a start.

New books are constantly coming out.  Here are a few forthcoming titles that have caught my eye:

Thomas Kidd, Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots (November 2011).

Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation. (September 2011).

George Boudreau, Independence: A Guide to Revolutionary Philadelphia ( July 2011).

Peter Onuf and Nicholas P. Cole, Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America (September 2011).

Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (July 2011).

David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (April 2011).

Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts (April 2011).

Adam Jortner, The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier. (November 2011).

Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. (May 2011).

Dispatches from Graduate School--Part 29

Cali Pitchel McCullough is a Ph.D student in American history at Arizona State University.  For earlier posts in this series click here. --JF

I’ve spent the past five or six days with a stack of exams. Now many of you have been grading exams for along time, but for me it’s a bit of a novelty. Don’t get me wrong, the task is time consuming, and you can only read about Mother Ann Lee and the “Shaking Quackers” so many times before you stop correcting the typo. In order to make the process the most enjoyable, I try to imagine that I’m learning some valuable skills.

First, I am now a trained BS spotter. For example, a student attempted in her matter-of-fact prose to tell me that the American Revolution “didn’t transfer new ideas, and didn’t really adopt any completely new ideals.” I suppose one might be able to argue this, but then she went on to suggest that because American Revolutionaries didn’t “churn out” new literature the event wasn’t revolutionary. (Common Sense? “The Declaration ofIndependence”?) “In fact,” she insisted, “much of the American Revolutionary ideals were based on the French Revolution literature.” The American Republic was certainly influenced by French literature—Rousseau and Montesquieu inspired some of our founding documents--but a 1789 French Revolution and its literature for the 1776 American Revolution? Her timeline is off.  Abbé Sieyès didn’t pen “What is the Third Estate?” until 12 years after the American Revolution began. Scholars continue to debate the relationship between the two revolutions, but this student tried to convince me of a causal connection (I was on exam number 100 at this point, you have to empathize with my exhaustion and exposure to BS). But her argument, although well written and exhaustively argued, was misguided.

Secondly, my spelling has improved. I’ve turned into a one-woman dictionary (and thesaurus for the inappropriate or awkward use of words). Many lament text messaging, instant messages, and e-mail for the declining spelling and grammar of students. Agreed. I routinely notice extra consonants—"basiccally," they have trouble with some of the most commonly used words.

Third, I can decipher just about any handwriting. I pride myself in this, and actually credit the time I spent in the Presbyterian archives for Dr. Fea with my ability to crack the code of college scribble and scrawl. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century penmanship from diaries and meeting minutes prepared me well for college co-eds more accustomed to Blackberry thumbs than pencil indents on their fingers.

Lastly, I’ve learned to be kind. There is great vulnerability in writing and I’m weary to be too critical of students’ responses. I point out the fallacy and I suggest further questions that they might consider, but I rarely, if ever, completely disregard an answer (the BSers do receive my red-pen wrath). I want my comments to be useful, not a reason for a student to resent history or the classroom in general.

The Civil War App

I must admit that I am very much behind the times when it comes to phone technology.  I have a cell phone, but all it does is make calls.  (OK--it can also "text" and I believe it has an alarm clock).  I have thus never used an "app" before.  Maybe some day...

Over at The New York Times, Virginia Heffernan informs us about the History Channel's "Civil War Today" app and in the process reflects more generally about attempts to make the Civil War entertaining for a larger public.  Here is a taste:

Civil War Today is the brainchild of Tina Prause, the head of product development at A&E Television Networks. She’s the daughter of Revolutionary War re-enactors, she told me. She grew up loading black-powder rifles at restaged battles in Connecticut. Critics and users alike have praised the Civil War Today app, and Apple has knighted it an App of the Week. With the help of Bottle Rocket, the superstar Dallas-based developer that has created apps for PBS and NPR, Prause and A&E have managed with little fanfare to make from scratch a new approach to history, museology and pedagogy. When Burns did this with “The Civil War,” he was hailed as a national treasure.

But Burns, an establishment figure who cast academic historians in starring roles, was easy for historians to like. By contrast, the Civil War Today app may remind historians not of Burns but of Disney’s America, the proposed theme park from the 1990s that historians deplored — and managed to boo out of existence.

The app costs $8 and it "expires" in 2015. 

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things online that caught my attention this week:

Wilfred McClay: The Soul and the City.

5 Myths About Church and State in America.

Alan Wolfe reviews Lawrence A. Scaff's Max Weber in America.

1970s Historiography 

Lauren Winner on Rob Bell. And Krista Tippett.

Finding the Civil War in Washington D.C.

Will social media play a role in the second coming of Christ?  Franklin Graham thinks it might.

Richard White on cuts to high-speed rail.

Timothy Morriss reviews George Rable's God's Almost Chosen People's: A Religious History of the American Civil War.

Thomas H. Benton reflects on Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.

Bernard Bailyn on federalism.

Jill Lepore on Benjamin Franklin's sister, Jane.

David Stowe on Jesus and popular music.

Why church historians should be cynical and pessimistic.

The April 2011 Common-Place focuses on foodways.

New website at American Heritage.

Debby Applegate reviews Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening.  Here is a podcast on the book.

Internships have value even if the student is not paid.

John Henry Crosby reviews James Davison Hunter, To Change the World.

How Easter Has Managed to Avoid the Consumerism of Christmas

Apparently James Martin does not have young children.  In the past forty-eight hours we have purchased several bags of jelly-beans, dye for Easter eggs, a bag of the green stuff that goes in the bottom of the Easter basket, and I am sure there are some chocolate bunnies around the house somewhere. 

Easter has its fair share of consumerism attached to it, but I generally agree with Martin's argument that the level of consumerism during Easter does not even come close to that of Christmas.

In this article at Slate, Martin suggests why this might be the case.  Here is a taste:

Despite the awesome theological implications (Christians believe that the infant lying in the manger is the son of God), the Christmas story is easily reduced to pablum. How pleasant it is in mid-December to open a Christmas card with a pretty picture of Mary and Joseph gazing beatifically at their son, with the shepherds and the angels beaming in delight. The Christmas story, with its friendly resonances of marriage, family, babies, animals, angels, and—thanks to the wise men—gifts, is eminently marketable to popular culture. It's a Thomas Kinkade painting come to life.

On the other hand, a card bearing the image of a near-naked man being stripped, beaten, tortured, and nailed through his hands and feet onto a wooden crucifix is a markedly less pleasant piece of mail.

The Easter story is relentlessly disconcerting and, in a way, is the antithesis of the Christmas story. No matter how much you try to water down its particulars, Easter retains some of the shock it had for those who first participated in the events during the first century. The man who spent the final three years of his life preaching a message of love and forgiveness (and, along the way, healing the sick and raising the dead) is betrayed by one of his closest friends, turned over to the representatives of a brutal occupying power, and is tortured, mocked, and executed in the manner that Rome reserved for the worst of its criminals.

The Seminary Bubble

Back in the 1990s I enrolled in an evangelical divinity school on the north side of Chicago.  I am not sure why I was there.  I wasn't sure I wanted to be a pastor or a missionary, but I knew I liked studying and had an ongoing fascination with theology and church history.  I spent three years in divinity school. After I finished I did not go into the ministry, but my experience in divinity school prepared me to think about the world from a Christian perspective.

A lot of my classmates at divinity school were there because they they wanted to pastor evangelical congregations.  Some of them left careers or good-paying jobs to following God's call on their lives.  Many of them had spouses and children.  A lot of them were going into debt in order to fund their divinity education.

I thought about these fellow students when I read Jerry Bowyer's post, "The Seminary Bubble."  (Thanks for the link, Russ Reeves).

Bowyer writes:

Imagine an institution that requires its leaders to attend not only college, but graduate school. Imagine that the graduate school in question is constitutionally forbidden from receiving any form of government aid, that it typically requires three years of full-time schooling for the diploma, that the nature of the schooling bears almost no resemblance to the job in question, and that the pay for graduates is far lower than other professions. You have just imagined the relationship between the Christian Church and her seminaries.

Read the rest here.

On Academics Thinking in Public

Over at Stanford's Arcade blog, Natalia Cecire reflects on academic blogging.  She writes:

In blogging, I've come around to the idea that academics need to do a lot more thinking in public if we want said public to have a clue as to what it is that we actually do. It really only seems fair.

Thinking in public is a difficult habit to get into, though, because public is the place where we're supposed to not screw up, and thinking on the fly inevitably involves screwing up. Blogging with any regularity in essence means committing oneself to making one's intellectual fallibility visible to the world and to the unforgiving memory of the Google cache. This is particularly a problem for academics, who are, after all, professional thinkers; we have a culture of making it look easy, and of concealing as much as possible "the raw material of poetry in all its rawness." 

I couldn't agree more.

Who Fired First at Lexington?

Up in Boston they are still living in the wake of Patriots Day.  I imagine that this time of year J.L. Bell has a significant jump in visitors to his excellent blog, Boston 1775.

Today he reflects on the first shots at the Battle of Lexington (19 April 1775).  Who actually fired the "Shot Heard Round the World," a phrase made famous in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord Hymn (1837)? 

Growing up I always thought the British fired first.  I probably learned it from this:



Bell notes that the debate over who fired first was contested from the very beginning.  Both sides claimed that someone from the other side pulled the trigger first.  Here is Bell's conclusion:

Until the early twentieth century, almost all American historians echoed the provincial sources and described the British firing first. With more British sources appearing, more skepticism, and less defensiveness, more recent American authors acknowledged that the situation was probably more confused than that, and even that it was possible that the first short came from someone on the provincial side.

Read the entire post.

Understanding the BP Oil Spill

I know very little (if anything) about the history of Louisiana or the history of oil, but for some reason I am drawn to this story on the website of Louisiana State University.  I first learned about it through Randall Stephens's post at Religion in American History (RiAH).

The story describes the work of Michael Pasquier, a professor of religion at LSU who is documenting the cultural impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the people living in Lousiana's coastal communities.  I have never met Pasquier, but we are both contributors to RiAH.  I also know that he just published a book entitled Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789-1870.

According to the LSU article, Pasquier is heading up a project called "Standard Lives: Visualizing the Culture of Oil in Louisiana."  The project, in Pasquier's words, takes "a long and unbiased look at Louisiana's relationship with the oil industry, and by extension, its effects on everyday lives of refinery and offshore workers, as well as the businessmen, teachers, farmers, fisherman, mariners, homemakers and others with direct and indirect ties to petroleum-based services." 

I am drawn to this story for two related reasons:

First, I am impressed by the range of Pasquier's interests and the way he is defining his vocation as an academic.  The move from a monograph on Catholic priests to a study of oil in Louisiana is an unusual one, especially for a scholar of American religion. (Although both projects do deal with Louisiana).  But Pasquier appears to be a young scholar who refuses to be defined by the narrow limitations of academic life in a research university.

Second, I think Pasquier's case is yet another example, which I hope will inspire my students and other students, of the way history can be used to serve a local community. For the past couple of years I have been challenging my students, their parents, and the readers of this blog to think outside the box when it comes to using their history degree in the world.  Pasquier show us one more way to do this.

Most Popular Posts of the Last Week

Here are the most popular posts of the week at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

1. Jesus Will Return in May 22, 2011 (July 2010)
2. Barack Obama is the Most Christian President in American History and Other Thoughts on His Easter Prayer Breakfast (April 2011)
3. Busy Day in the Twin Cities (March 2010)
4. The Top Ten Most Religious Cities in America (November 2010)
5.  Liberty University Received More Federal Funding Than National Public Radio (April 2011).
6.  Rob Bell makes the Cover of Time Magazine (April 2011)
7.  Historians Reflect on the Texas Textbook Controversy (March 2011)
8.  How to Cite Facebook and Twitter? (January 2010)
9.  Jon Stewart Gets It Right.  So Does Huckabee (April 2011)
10. Writing Sheds (June 2009)

Also receiving votes:
100 Films You Can Use in Your History Classroom (April 2011)
Gordon Wood's Review of Jill Lepore's Recent Book (January 2011)

Dogs Love The Way of Improvement Leads Home

A reader from western Pennsylvania reports that my book The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America has had a wonderful effect on his family dog, Hank.  The reader's son claims that the very phrase, "The Way of Improvement Leads Home" has had a certain calming (soothing?) effect on Hank and has "made him a better dog."  (True story--you can't make this stuff up!).

Here is Hank with his favorite book:

Get your copy today.  (Pet Smart executives: Are you reading this?).

Do you have an animal that loves The Way of Improvement Leads Home?  If so, send us a picture and we will post it on the blog.

David Barton on the Ropes

Recently I was doing an interview for Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction on a radio show hosted by a conservative evangelical woman.  The host asked me a question about Thomas Jefferson's Bible.  She wondered what I thought about David Barton's belief that Jefferson's "Bible"--the one with all the supernatural parts of the four Gospels removed--was written by Jefferson to convert the Indians to Christianity.  I had heard Barton say this before, and had just had a discussion about this with another radio talk show host earlier in the day.

When I argued that the Jefferson Bible (which does not include the Resurrection or miracles of Jesus) would have been an ineffective tool of Christian evangelism, the host agreed with me. She then mentioned that she was losing confidence in many of Barton's assertions and in fact had heard a nationally-syndicated conservative Christian talk show host utter the same lack of confidence in some of Barton's historical claims.

As I argue in Was America Founded, David Barton and other Christian nationalists like him get a lot of things right about the role of religion in the founding of the early American republic.  But Barton is not interested in telling the full story of the American founding.  He is a political propagandist--someone who engages in what Bernard Bailyn once called "indoctrination by historical example."  For people like Mike Huckabee to call him the greatest American historian alive is absurd.

The more popular Barton becomes, the more he will be exposed for the misinformation and distorted view of the past that he promotes.  Here are two examples:

First, Grove City College (a politically conservative school) psychology professor Warren Throckmorton has been skewering (in a polite way) some of Barton's claims at his blog. Check out here and here and here and here. (Thanks to my colleague Gene Chase for calling Throckmorton's blog to my attention).

Recently, Throckmorton and Barton appeared separately (Barton would not appear on the program at the same time as  Throckmorton) on the Paul Edwards Show, an evangelical Christian radio talk show out of Detroit. (I have appeared on this show twice).  You can listen to the conversation here (beginning at 1:23:23).  Edwards seems very excited to have Barton on his show, but he also does not back down from some of Barton's claims.  After Barton makes his argument for a Christian nation, Throckmorton comes on the show to counter Barton's claims that Thomas Jefferson used federal money to fund the Kaskaskia Indians.

The other attack on Barton comes from MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell and Peter Montgomery of People For the American Way.  Here is the interview:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Barton will continue to play an important role in Republican politics as the 2012 election approaches. Stay tuned. 

Barack Obama is the Most Christian President in American History and Other Thoughts on His Easter Prayer Breakfast

Anyone who does not believe that Barack Obama is a Christian should listen to Tuesday's Easter Prayer Breakfast speech.  (Unless of course he was lying about everything he said in the speech in a subtle attempt to the disguise the fact that he is either a Muslim or the anti-Christ).

Here is a taste.  (You can read the entire transcript here).

I wanted to host this breakfast for a simple reason -– because as busy as we are, as many tasks as pile up, during this season, we are reminded that there’s something about the resurrection — something about the resurrection of our savior, Jesus Christ, that puts everything else in perspective.

We all live in the hustle and bustle of our work. And everybody in this room has weighty responsibilities, from leading churches and denominations, to helping to administer important government programs, to shaping our culture in various ways. And I admit that my plate has been full as well. (Laughter.) The inbox keeps on accumulating. (Laughter.)

But then comes Holy Week. The triumph of Palm Sunday. The humility of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. His slow march up that hill, and the pain and the scorn and the shame of the cross.

And we’re reminded that in that moment, he took on the sins of the world — past, present and future — and he extended to us that unfathomable gift of grace and salvation through his death and resurrection.

In the words of the book Isaiah: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”

This magnificent grace, this expansive grace, this “Amazing Grace” calls me to reflect. And it calls me to pray. It calls me to ask God for forgiveness for the times that I’ve not shown grace to others, those times that I’ve fallen short. It calls me to praise God for the gift of our son — his Son and our Savior.


Over at Brainstorm, Jacques Berlinblau takes a critical look at Obama's speech.  Berlinblau's thoughts are interesting because he sounds a lot like the critics of the Christian nationalists that I write about in Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction. According to Berlinblau, Obama's breakfast speech "shuts out nonbelieving Americans," it "excludes," and "demonstrates a clear preference for certain religious groups over others."  These are the same things levied against the Christian Right when they promote the idea that America is a uniquely "Christian nation."  Perhaps Obama has more in common with the Christian America crowd than we think.

Berlinblau's critique aside, I am also intrigued by the way this speech is saturated with Christian theology and Biblical references (including multiple references to Jesus Christ).  I have said this before, but if we evaluate Obama's faith in the same way that we evaluate the faith of the Founding Fathers (in terms of references to God, Jesus, the Bible, etc... in public addresses), then Obama may just be the most Christian president in American history.  For example, he has mentioned Jesus Christ dozens of times more than George Washington, who only mentioned him once or twice (depending on how you count).

I don't know Obama's heart, but he sure understands Easter.

Easter Through History

On Inside Higher Ed's "Academic Minute," Mount St. Mary's College's Charles Zola reflects on the meaning of Easter to Christians through history and the present.

Bill Cullen on Forrest Gump

Bill Cullen continues with his series on Hollywood actors as historians.  As we noted last week, he is currently focusing on Tom Hanks.

Today Cullen takes on Hanks's most famous role: Forrest Gump.

Here is Cullen on the relationship between the movie and Winston Groom's novel by the same name:

The filmmakers took the core of the novel for their plot: mentally handicapped mid-century Alabama man stumbles into a series of famous historical moments while pining away for his childhood sweetheart. But in an unusual reversal from what one typically expects, Forrest Gump is a far more nuanced character on the screen than on the page. Even with a deadpan expression, Hanks manages to endow the character with more psychological complexity than Groom does. Screenwriter Eric Roth (and presumably uncredited collaborators) took the opening line, “Bein’ an idiot is no box of chocolates,” and refashioned it into the still trite, but more resonant, “Mama always said life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get.” The signature line of the novel is variations on “I am tryin to do the right thing.” But “stupid is as stupid does” has a lot more zing. Both versions note that Forrest’s name, derived from Klu Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, was given by him by his mother (played in the movie by Sally Field) as a cautionary tale, but the movie hits this irony more cleanly. The filmmakers took a lot of incidents from the book and incorporated them into the movie, but left others, like Forrest’s stint as a professional wrestler, behind. (Would have liked to see him rescue Chairman Mao from drowning, though.) And they dropped his sweetheart marrying another man in favor of having the joylessly sybaritic, but unmarried, Jenny Curran (Robin Wright), who dies of AIDS, more dramatic choice that makes the story more relevant even as it somehow makes her a more pure character. They also replaced the hulking figure of the novel and clapping braces on his legs that he only sheds when fleeing bullies – hence Jenny’s famous line, “Run, Forrest Run!” With the proper support, literal and figurative, the film suggests, weak children can still make strong adults. So it is that Sally Field’s mama Gump resorts to sexual barter so that Gump can attend the local public school. The overall effect of these changes makes the movie a more deft, but also more sentimental, story.

National Park Week

Don't forget to take advantage of free admission at national parks this week.  Click here for more information.

Perhaps a National Park might be a good place to hold an Easter sunrise service. (Or is that a violation of the separation of church and state?)

What are Your Plans for Summer 2011?

This is a big risk.  We usually don't do posts so openly interactive here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home, so there is a very real possibility that no one will respond to the question I pose in the title of the post.  That would be embarrassing so I am asking my faithful readers to comment.

I actually got the idea from George Williams at ProfHacker, but I am tailoring it for my readership.

So how about it?  What are you up to this summer?  Are you starting a new job?  Doing an internship or summer program? Working on a new book or presenting a conference paper? Visiting a Revolutionary War or Civil War battlefield?  Taking a historically-related vacation?

I will start things off.  This summer I am planning to:

--Do a bit more promotion for Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?
--Attend part of the SHEAR Conference in Philadelphia
--Work on a new contracted book tentatively entitled "The Power to Transform: A Christian Reflection on the Study of the Past."
--Spend a week directing the Greenwich Tea Burning Project
--Take a vacation in a remote corner of the Outer Banks, NC
--Try to write a book proposal for "A Presbyterian Rebellion: The American Revolution in  the Mid-Atlantic."
--Help my basketball-playing daughters work on their games.

How about you?

This Week's Patheos Column: "God's Judgment Upon the South"

In last week's column, I argued that many northern clergymen during the Civil War believed that the United States was a Christian nation because God had uniquely blessed the American union established by the Constitution. The Northern clergy railed on the sin of secession and defended the proposition that the purpose of the war was to keep the Christian Union intact. After 1863, the year Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation and thus made the War about slavery, the North had even more moral ammunition to levy against the Confederacy.
Northern ministers pulled no punches in their attacks on what they perceived to be the sins of the South. Secession and slavery deserved punishment. E.E. Adams, the minister at Philadelphia's North Broad Street Presbyterian Church, wrote that whoever resisted the "good government of the United States resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

Read the rest here.

More Tips on Surving Academic Life from Gina Barreca: "You Got Tenure"

Here at the The Way of Improvement Leads Home we have been passing along Gina Barreca's tips on how to survive academic life.   (See here and here).  Now she offers some tips about how to survive life after tenure.  They are:

1.  Throw a party
2.  Tell your former advisers and members of your dissertation committee
3.  Join the AAUP
4.  Speak Up
5.  "Make sure you're not speaking up only for yourself."
6.  "You're not done."  (You're only getting started).
7.  "You can afford to select with more care the committees you join."
8.  "Don't start dressing either like a character out of Kafka or like a hooker."
9.  "Accept more graduate students, honors students, independent study students, students in need of mentoring..."
10.  "Get ready to start reading big, fat tenure files for people who are coming up next year."

College Architecture

I know very little about architecture, but I do like to look at old academic buildings on old campuses.  That is why I am looking forward to reading and viewing Bryant Tolles Jr. new book Architecture & Academe: College Buildings in New England Before 1860. (If University Press of New England will send me a review copy we will review it here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home!).

Here is a summary of the book from a recent article in Inside Higher Ed:

Bryant F. Tolles Jr. examines the buildings and planning concepts of some of the country's first colleges and universities, starting with Harvard and Yale Universities (sorry, William & Mary -- Tolles focuses exclusively on the Northeast) and moving through Brown University; Dartmouth, Williams, and Bowdoin Colleges; the University of Vermont; and more. Tolles, professor emeritus of history and art history at the University of Delaware, traces the origins and influences of each campus's individual style, as well as the impact it may have had on others: Harvard's quadrangle plan, for example, was modeled on England's universities, while Yale's row plan set a new precedent that was followed by the first planners of many later institutions, such as the University of Vermont and Amherst, Colby, and Bates Colleges, among numerous others.

Chernow Wins Pulitzer for Biography

Yesterday we noted that Eric Foner received the Pulitzer Prize in history for The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.  Today we note that Ron Chernow won the Pulitzer in biography for Washington: A Life.  Congratulations.

Was America Founded as a Christian Nation Kindle Edition is Here

Check it out here.

Boston 1775 on the First Reenactment at Lexington

As some of my readers know, I am really interested in the way the American Revolution has been remembered.  Next year I have a student doing an honors thesis on this topic and for the last several years I have been working on a collaborative project with students and former students on the memory of a tea burning in the southern New Jersey town of Greenwich.

I was thus fascinated by J.L. Bell's recent post on what may be the first reenactment of the Battle of Lexington.  Bell suggests that it may have occurred in 1822. Check out more here.

Rob Bell Makes the Cover of Time Magazine

Is Hell Dead?  This is the title of Jon Meacham's cover story on Rob Bell, the Grand Rapids mega-church pastor whose controversial book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived has been making waves in evangelical circles because Bell apparently rejects the orthodox Christian doctrine of hell.

I am less interested in the theological tussle associated with Bell's book than I am in the way this intramural evangelical debate has made it to the cover of a national news magazine. 

I am going to guess that most everyday evangelicals have never heard of Rob Bell. Why does he get to shape evangelical theology?  I would much rather listen to people like N.T. Wright or Alister McGrath or Rowan Williams or Miroslav Volf or Oliver O'Donovan or Kevin Vanhoozer talk about hell. 

What does Bell on the cover of Time tell us about American evangelicalism? Your thoughts are welcome.

"Upper Blowhardia"

David Brooks insists that Donald Trump is no joke.  In fact, he is representative of the "most subversive ideology in America today.  Donald Trump is the living, walking personification of the Gospel of Success."  Now only if he would declare America to be a "Christian nation."

Here is a taste of Brooks's column:

But, in every society, there are a few rare souls who rise above subservience, insecurity and concern. Each morning they take their own abrasive urges out for parade. They are so impressed by their achievements, so often reminded of their own obvious rightness, that every stray thought and synaptic ripple comes bursting out of their mouth fortified by impregnable certitude. When they have achieved this status they have entered the realm of Upper Blowhardia.

These supremely accomplished blowhards offend some but also arouse intense loyalty in others. Their followers enjoy the brassiness of it all. They live vicariously through their hero’s assertiveness. They delight in hearing those obnoxious things that others are only permitted to think.

Thus, there has always been a fan base for the abrasive rich man. There has always been a market for books by people like George Steinbrenner, Ross Perot, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Knight, Howard Stern and George Soros. There has always been a large clump of voters who believe that America could reverse its decline if only a straight-talking, obnoxious blowhard would take control.

And today, apparently, Donald Trump is that man. Trump, currently most famous for telling people that they are fired, has surged toward the top of the presidential primary polls. In one poll, he was in (remote) striking distance in a head-to-head against President Obama. Many people regard Trump as a joke and his popularity a disgrace. But he is actually riding a deep public fantasy: The hunger for the ultimate blowhard who can lead us through dark times. 

Read the rest here.

Foner Wins 2011 Pulitzer Prize for History

Congratulations to Eric Foner, the recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in history for his book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.  See AHA Today for more coverage.

The other two finalists were Stephanie McCurry's Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South and Michael Rawson's Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston.

100 Films You Can Use in Your History Classroom

Each year the history club at Messiah College sponsors a couple of "movie nights."  The students ask a professor in the department to pick a movie to view and offer a short (15 minutes or so) lecture on the movie the that helps to place it in historical context.  Since I am not a big movie-goer, when asked by the students to join them for movie night I often struggle to come up with an appropriate film. 

No longer.

AHA Today has posted a list of 100 movies that have been featured as part a series called "Masters at the Movies."  The series has been running in Perspectives on History since 2006.  Today's post not only lists the titles of 100 movies, but also links to historical commentary on each of them.  This is a small goldmine for any historian who teaches with film or has to come up with a movie for a history club movie night.

Here are just a few films covered:
Wall Street
Birth of a Nation
Amazing Grace
Eyes on the Prize
Dr. Strangelove
Godzilla
Glory
Billy Elliott
The Women
A Streetcar Named Desire
Patton
La Dolce Vita
The China Syndrome
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Flags of Our Fathers

Do You Teach Your Students How to Network?

James Lang, writing at The Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses the importance of networking and the importance of teaching undergraduates how to network. 

This is a tough one.  I have always understood myself to be a decent networker, but how does one teach undergraduates how to do it?  Frankly, I have no idea.  Lang is not sure either and has asked his readers to offer some suggestions in the comment section of his article.

Here is a taste of his piece:

...By the same token, I have come to understand that helping students get into graduate school or get jobs is part of my responsibility, too. They didn't pay all of that tuition money to come to a small, liberal-arts college only to be kicked out the door at the end of my seminar without a second thought for their futures. And I do my share of advising students about graduate school, writing letters of recommendation, and responding to any requests for help from graduating seniors or recent graduates.

But if the lessons I learned about networking last month in Montreal are correct, then I am not doing nearly as much as I could to help them understand the importance of this basic skill.

Acknowledging that doesn't help me come up with any concrete steps I could take in or out of the classroom, though. Even if I can see how helpful it would be to teach my senior majors the importance of career networking, and help them get started on it, I don't have a clear vision of what that lesson would look like.

Robert Darnton's 5 Myths About the "Information Age"

1.  The book is dead.

2.  We have entered the information age.

3.  All information is now available online.

4.  Libraries are obsolete

5.  The future is digital.

For Darnton's discussion of these myths, check out his recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Problem With a Business Degree

Richard Arum, one of the co-authors of the Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, rips the academic quality of most business degrees.  Here is just a small taste:


Business-related fields account for slightly over 20 percent of all undergraduate degrees in the United States, the most popular field of study. But the quality of that education is facing growing scrutiny and criticism, as detailed in an article by David Glenn in the Education Life section of The Times as part of a joint project with The Chronicle of Higher Education. A recent study found that undergraduate business majors study less than other students, and lag behind in assessments of critical thinking and writing skills -- scoring lower than students in education and communications, and well behind liberal arts majors.

Is it worth majoring in business, particularly in the so-called softer fields like marketing and human resources? 

And here is one more taste:

We found that students concentrating in business related coursework were the least likely to report spending time studying and preparing for class. If one considers simply hours spent studying alone, undergraduates concentrating in business coursework invest less than one hour a day in such pursuits. Given such modest investments in academic activities, it is not surprising that business students show the lowest gains on measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication. The implication of these troubling patterns, however, goes well beyond these particular types of programs.

Historians and Op-Eds

Should historians who write opinion pieces, or "op-eds," consider topics related only to their primary area of research?  Will op-ed writing advance your career as a historian?  Are historians peculiarly well-equipped to write op-eds?

These are some of the questions that Chris Beneke asks historian Jonathan Zimmerman about writing op-eds.  Zimmerman, the chair of the history department at New York University, has written over 300 op-eds in major newspapers and magazines.  Here is a taste:

And that brings me to my most important suggestion. Whatever you write, you need to link it to what editors call a "news peg"—that is, something that happened VERY recently. In the 24-7 media world, things become yesterday's news—to borrow another cliché—more quickly than you might guess. So if you see something in the paper that you want to write about, you need to write about it as soon as humanly possible
 
And when you do write, make sure to put the point of the piece—the reason you're writing it—no later than the second or third paragraph.
 
That's what editors call the "nut graph"—the paragraph that establishes the central claim of the piece. Editors get hundreds of these things per day, so if they don't get to your nut graph right away . . . they'll stop reading.

Dispatches from Graduate School--Part 28

Cali Pitchel McCullough is a Ph.D student in American history at Arizona State University.  For earlier posts in this series click here. --JF

Sometimes I forget that I am good at things besides school. There is more to my life than book reviews and research, but often I forget how much I love taking photographs. Capturing a moment in time is the photographer’s craft, which has striking similarities to that of the historian. The historian, too, captures a moment in time—preserving memories and attempting to combat the ephemeral nature of the present. So, I suppose my passions align nicely. Now if only writing an historigraphical essay was as simple as the snap of a shutter.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things online that caught my attention this week:

Can you get tenure by editing Wikipedia pages? At Auburn University the answer is yes.

Interesting piece on Francis Fukuyama's break with neoconservatism.

Springsteen or Snooki? 

Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig on the existence of God.

Jesuits at Fairfield University get a new building.

The problem with business majors.

Douglas Jacobsen: A global Easter.

Thomas Kidd reviews Edward Lengel's Inventing George Washington: America's Founder, in Myth and Memory.

Complete update on congressional budget cuts to history and archives.

National Museum of American History intern: "I simply could not imagine a career unrelated to history."

Jonathan Cohn on Obama and the American Dream.

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe on blogging.

Tim Lacy on "Great Books Liberalism."

Jonathan Rees's 3-part series on "post-coverage" in the United States survey course.

Taylorism and why we no longer need teachers.

Gettysburg casino rejected.

No more philosophy at UNLV.

Review of new documentary on Alexander Hamilton.

Obama in Libya.  Jefferson in Tripoli.

Slate interview with Adam Goodheart, author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening.

Jonathan Yardley reviews Gary Gallagher's The Union War.

Barton Swain reviews Joshua Kendall, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of American Culture.

Harold Holzer chooses the five best Civil War diaries.

Mennonite Weekly Review Interview

Check out Sheldon Good's article in the Mennonite Weekly Review.  He interviews Greg Boyd and me on the subject of Christian America.

Most Popular Posts of the Last Week

Here are the most popular posts of the week at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

1. Jesus Will Return on May 22, 2011 (July 2010).
2. Busy Day in the Twin Cities (March 2011).
3. The Top Ten Most Religious Cities in America (November 2010).
4. Liberty University Receives More Federal Funding Than National Public Radio (April 2011).
5. Jon Stewart Gets It Right. So Does Huckabee (April 2011).
6. Obama's Bracket (March 2009).
7. Garrison Keillor on Stephen Ambrose's Plagiarism (April 2010).
8. Historians Reflect on the Texas Textbook Controversy (March 2011).
9. Christopher Hitchens on Religion and American Life (March 2011).
10. Writing Sheds (June 2009).

Also receiving votes:
Michael Lindsay is the New President of Gordon College (March 2011).
Gordon Wood's Review of Jill Lepore's Book (January 2011).

Tonight at the Fraunces Tavern Museum

On December 4, 1783, George Washington came to Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan and gave a farewell speech to his fellow Continental Army officers.  The tavern also served as home to the department of Foreign Affairs, Treasury, and War.

Tonight I took New Jersey Transit (the Mid-Town Direct line) into the city and headed down to the tavern for a lecture on my book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction.  I was pleased to see that there was a full house. The last time I spoke at the tavern, only two or three people showed up for a talk on The Way of Improvement Leads Home.  When I saw the chairs starting to fill I breathed a sigh of relief.

As far as the question of whether or not America was founded as a Christian nation, the crowd (at least the people who asked questions or talked with me after the lecture) were inclined to answer it with a resounding "no."  (Such a response was expected in Manhattan).  There were, however, a few people who were not so sure, including one woman who wanted me to take off my "historian's hat" and tell me what my personal convictions were on the subject.  Another person wanted to know what my religious background was, where I went to school, and what kind of school Messiah College was because this would help him to better understand my bias. 

I also met a guy (one of the two or three people who had come to my previous lecture a few years ago) who claimed to have had attended 6000 lectures at Fraunces Tavern.  When I said that he must have attended a lecture every day of his adult life, he did not answer.  Nevertheless, he said that I did a good job--high praise from a guy who has been to 6000 historical lectures!

Overall it was a fun night with a very stimulating audience.  Thanks to Jennifer Patton at the Fraunces Tavern Museum for inviting me and hosting me tonight! 

I now am taking some time away from the road until I speak at the end of the month to a group of atheists in Pittsburgh.

Good News and Bad News About the Teaching American History Grants

The good news:  The Teaching American History grants have survived!

The bad news:  The program will be funded at $46 million.

Lee White explains at the blog of the National Coalition of History:

The Teaching American History Grants program sustained a cut of $73 million (-61%) down from $119 million in FY ’10 to $46 million. While this is disheartening, throughout the budget process House Republicans had repeatedly targeted the program for elimination. The Administration as well had zeroed out TAH for FY ’11 and proposed consolidating history education in a new Well Rounded Education program where it would have competed for funding with arts, music, foreign languages, civics, economics and other subjects.

So the fact that TAH survived at all is a major victory. Had the TAH program been eliminated it would have been nearly impossible to resuscitate it in the upcoming FY ’12 budget process and down the road in the pending reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

One question is whether the $46 million will be enough to fund new FY ’11 TAH grants. At a public forum earlier this year, Department of Education staff stated continuing grants would have priority in receiving FY ‘11 funding and any remaining funds would go to new grants.

In FY ‘08, the Education Department awarded three year TAH grants, but provided the option for the grantees to apply for additional funds for a fourth or fifth year. The FY ’08 grantees have been required to file detailed progress reports with the department and they are being evaluated to determine whether they merit additional funding.

The application deadline was April 4. However, there is no way of knowing yet how many FY ‘08 grantees applied for additional out-year funding and if they will qualify. As a result, given the limited amount of funds available, conceivably there could be no new TAH grants made this year.