What is the Moral Responsibility of the Historian?

Tom Van Dyke's recent post at American Creation raises some interesting questions about the place of moral criticism in the historian's vocation.  

The topic is Mark Noll's recent review of Daniel Williams's God Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right and Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt.  Noll suggests that both of these books fail to critique their subjects from a moral or theological perspective.  Noll writes:

...Recent studies have begun to do better, with two of the best being these books by Daniel K. Williams and Darren Dochuk.  Williams, who works from the top down in attempting a broad national perspective, does as well as any writer to date in answering the basic questions of what went into making up the religious right and specifying when the movement coalesced.  Dochuk, who works from below in a superbly researched study of grassroots political mobilization, goes far to answer the question of where it came from.  The solid history in these volumes should be applauded by all as a welcome alternative to the frenzy of earlier efforts.  Yet neither Williams nor Dochuk addresses directly what should be one of the most compelling questions about political history they describe so well: what exactly is Christian about the Christian right?

And Noll adds:

From Bible Belt to Sunbelt is an important book.  It is also a perfect complement to Daniel Williams's national survey in God's Own Party.  Yet neither of these writers carries out the moral evaluation that, especially in tandem, their volumes make possible.

I would imagine that Dochuk and Williams are a bit surprised at Noll's critique of their books.  After all, both Dochuk and Williams are historians, not theologians, clergy, or critics of the evangelical political subculture.  (Or at least they are not writing as such).

Noll's review made me wonder again about the moral responsibility of the historian.  Should the author of a piece of historical scholarship be required to offer an overtly moral, ethical, or theological critique of the subject at hand?  Or perhaps this is a foolish question.  After all, a certain amount of moral criticism happens in every piece of historical scholarship, whether the historian is overt about it or not.  Yet I must admit that I cannot remember ever seeing a review in The American Historical Review or The Journal of American History that chided the author for not bringing enough moral criticism to his or her subject matter.

Van Dyke is not sure whether Noll is writing as a theologian or a historian:

If Dr. Mark Noll wants to put on the theologian's hat, OK, or the political pundit's hat. But---and this goes for anyone else in his acclaimed and exalted position as an historian---he must make clear what hat he's wearing. Just let us know.

In reviewing two scholarly historical works here, albeit in TNR, the gentle reader could not be blamed for assuming Dr. Noll has his professional historian hat on, and not the political pundit's or theologian's.

The last thing the historian should do is mix in his own religion and politics! When Mark Noll is writing as a theologian---or personally as a Christian, or as an evangelical Christian---or as a partisan and/or pundit, all I ask is that he let us know which hat he's wearing. I hope I'm not being unfair here, asking that certain lines be drawn. 

I think historians need to think more deeply about these issues, especially historians who are engaged in several different genres of writing. Does a historian write differently than a cultural critic or a theologian?  I think so.  The historian has a more limited (but no less powerful) role in society. His or her scholarship might provide fodder for moral philosophers and cultural critics, but this is not the historian's primary task.

What do you think? Help me sort this out for a chapter I am writing on the historian as a moral critic.

It's Not About You

Once again, David Brooks nails it.  His observations about today's college graduates are on the mark.  When Brooks discusses these kinds of social and cultural trends he reminds of the late Christopher Lasch.

Here is a snippet of Brooks's column:

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.

Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.

Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. A relative suffers from Alzheimer’s and a young woman feels called to help cure that disease. A young man works under a miserable boss and must develop management skills so his department can function. Another young woman finds herself confronted by an opportunity she never thought of in a job category she never imagined. This wasn’t in her plans, but this is where she can make her contribution.

Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.

The graduates are also told to pursue happiness and joy. But, of course, when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness — the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.

Finally, graduates are told to be independent-minded and to express their inner spirit. But, of course, doing your job well often means suppressing yourself. As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist.

Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.

An Apology Would Have Been Nice

Lauren Soth, an emeritus professor of art history at Carleton College, describes one of his worst mistakes in nearly forty years of college teaching.
 
As the eraser arced through the classroom, I realized with a petrifying shock what a horrible mistake I had made. The student was sleeping in class. She was too far away for nudge or comment. Grabbing an eraser from the blackboard chalk tray, I had lobbed it upward, expecting it to fall gently in front of her or in her lap. She would wake up, everyone would chuckle, class would continue. Such was my fatuity. And now I could see that the eraser, in its arched trajectory would land right in her face. It did exactly that, knocking her glasses off, startling not only her but the entire class.

Thirty-five years later this student signed-up for an alumni cruise that Soth was hosting.  Read what happened here.

The U.S. Constitution and "the Year of our Lord"

The United States Constitution does mention God.  In Article VII, the Constitution states:

Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the twelfth....

I am often asked about this reference when answering questions about my book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction.

The phrase "Year of our Lord," which is the only reference to God in the United States Constitution, was, of course, a standard eighteenth-century way of referencing the date.  It reminds us that the Constitution was written in a different world than our own. Today we do not usually refer to the date this way.  In the eighteenth century they did.  The past is indeed a foreign country.

How did this reference to "the Year of our Lord" find its way into the Constitution?

We know that the phrase "Year of our Lord" was not included in the draft of the Constitution that was approved by the Convention.  On Monday, September 17, 1787, James Madison moved that

the Constitution be signed by the members and offered the following as a convenient form viz. "Done in Convention, by the unanimous consent of the States present the 17th of Sepr. & c.---In Witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names."

After some more discussion that day (unrelated to the "Year of our Lord" phrase) most of the members voted to approve the document.  The wording of the final clause that they approved was different from the wording that would eventually appear in the final Constitution.  The new wording included the phrase "Year of our Lord."

In case you want to research this for yourself, check out:

Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 Volume II, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911). pp. 643ff.

So, once again, how did this phrase make it into the draft we have today?  I don't know.  The phrase was not in the draft that the members of the Convention voted on and it may not have appeared on the draft that the framers signed.  Daniel Dreisbach, in a 1996 article in the Baylor Law Review (Vol. 48, p. 967) suggests that the reference to "The Year of our Lord" at the end of the Constitution "may have been merely a scrivener's touch."  (He also cites a 1991 doctoral dissertation from the University of Dallas: Archie P. Jones, "Christianity and the Constitution: The Intended Meaning of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment, p.258, note 5).

The evidence available suggests that the phrase "Year of our Lord" was not part of the document approved by the members of the Constitutional Convention, but was probably added to the document sometime after the meeting.

David Blight on The First Memorial Day

David Blight describes the first recorded celebration of Memorial Day, which took place on May 1, 1865 in the Charleston, SC African-American community.

But for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official surrender. 

Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. 


The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.

After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.

The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots. 

Despite the size and some newspaper coverage of the event, its memory was suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day. From 1876 on, after white Democrats took back control of South Carolina politics and the Lost Cause defined public memory and race relations, the day’s racecourse origin vanished....

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things online that caught my attention this week:

Jim Cullen reviews Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening.  Steve Donoghue reviews it here.

Stacy Schiff reviews David McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.  Max Byrd reviews it here.  And a podcast.

John Wilson praises Historically Speaking.  (And he gives us a plug!).

Is Barcelona one of the best teams in soccer history?

John Summer reviews James Kloppenberg's Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition.

Michael Altman reviews Gary Scott Smith, Heaven in the American Imagination.

Ryan Cole reviews the Library of Congress exhibit,"The Last Full Measure: Civil Was Photographs from the Liljenquist Family Collection.

The changing face of Abraham Lincoln.

Jesse Sheidlower reviews Joshua Kendall, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obession and the Creation of an American Culture.

Photos of summer slideshow.

The most well-read cities in America.  The The New Yorker analyzes the list.

Slaves Who Shaped America

CNN reports on "African Origins," a new online project at Emory University with the goal of tracing the roots of more than 100,000 Africans shipped to America during the transatlantic slave trade.

Here is a taste:

Using the database is simple. Type in a name and a country and a list of names is returned that phonetically could be close to the spelling.

Because the African names were originally written down by English and Spanish speakers at a time when many African languages had no written counterpart, the spelling is a phonetic representation of how the name might be spelled by an English or Spanish speaker.

For example, typing in Kwesi and Ghana brings up 189 names, ranging in spelling from Cuesi to Quesi.
Each individual name on the database also comes with additional details, such as a person's gender, age and where he or she boarded the ship that took them to the Americas.
One "Kwesi" on the database was a 22-year-old male, liberated by an international court in Havana, Cuba, in 1829. He had been onboard the slaving vessel "Voladora," which departed from the port of Po-po before being intercepted and taken to Havana.

If a user is confident of the geographic origin of the name they can send the information to the African Origins team, who then vet the submission.

If consensus is reached, that slave -- who once was just a number in a ship log -- will be given a name and an identity.
Eltis says the ultimate goal of the project is to create a geographic profile of the origins of the people pulled into the slave trade.

Most Popular Posts of the Last Week

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

1. A Little History Humor (May 2011).
2. Blogging David Barton's Appearance on Jon Stewart: Part 1 (May 2011).
3. Jesus and Jefferson (May 2011)
4. So What Can You Do With a History Major: Part 31 (May 2011).
5. Jesus Will Return on May 22, 2011 (July 2010).
6. Richard Beeman on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (May 2011).
7. The Top Ten Most Religious Cities in America (November 2010).
8. Blogging David Barton's Appearance on Jon Stewart: Part 7 (May 2011).
9. I Want to be a More Shallow Person...On Facebook (May 2011).
10. David Greenberg Reviews James Kloppenberg's Reading Obama (May 2011).

Not All Presbyterians Were Radical Whigs in April 1776

This morning I was reading the memoirs of Elias Boudinot (1740-1821), a Presbyterian lawyer from Elizabethtown, New Jersey, the president of the Continental Congress (1782-83), and the first president of the American Bible Society (1816).

Boudinot was a strong supporter of the American cause, but in the months leading up to July 4, 1776 he was a bit more conservative than some of his fellow Presbyterian Whigs. Boudinot thought that John Witherspoon, the president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, was moving far too quickly toward independence in some of his speeches and political activities.

In April 1776, Boudinot attended a meeting of the Board of Trustrees of the College of New Jersey, a Presbyterian school in Princeton that Witherspoon had transformed into a bastion of American patriotism. After a routine day of business, Boudinot found it odd that Witherspoon did not show up for the second day of meetings.  What college president skips out on a meeting of his own Board of Trustees?  There must have been something more important to tend to.  And there was.

Witherspoon had left the Trustees meeting to give a speech to a gathering of New Jersey county representatives who had answered an anonymous call in a New York newspaper to come to New Brunswick for the purpose of discussing a "matter which greatly concerned the province." As the delegates learned upon their arrival to New Brunswick, it was Witherspoon himself who had called this meeting for the purpose of "declaring a separation from Great Brittain."

Meanwhile, on his return to Elizabethtown following the College of New Jersey Trustees meeting, Boudinot and his traveling companion, William Peartree Smith, stopped at New Brunswick to feed their horses. They soon learned that Witherspoon was not only the driving force behind the delegates meeting, but he was also planning a speech later that afternoon to try to convince the delegates to support independence.  Concerned that Witherspoon's ideas were too radical, and perhaps wondering what kind of revolutionary fire Witherspoon was going to try to ignite among the gathering of delegates, Boudinot and Smith decided to make a stop at the meeting before heading to Woodbridge for dinner.  Here is his description of what happened that afternoon in New Brunswick:

We accordingly attended the Meeting in the Afternoon when Dr. W rose and in a very able and elegant speech of one hour and an half endeavoured to convince the audience & the Committee of the absurdity of opposing the extravagant demands of Great Brittain, while we were professing a perfect allegiance to her Authority and supporting her courts of Justice.  The Character of the speaker, his great Influence among the people, his known attachment to the liberties of the People, and the artful manner in which he represented the whole subject, as worthy their attention, had an effect, on the assembly that astonished me.

Boudinot was obviously impressed by Witherspoon's rhetorical skills, but he was also angered by the Princeton president's political scheming.

I never felt myself in a more mortifying Situation.  The anonymous publication; The Meeting of the Trustees of the College but the Day before made up wholly of Presbyterians; Their President leaving them to attend the meeting & avowing himself the Author of it; The Doctor known to be at the head of the Presbyterian Interest; and Mr Smith & Myself both Presbyterians, arriving at New Brunswick in the morning, as if intending to go forward & then staying an attending the meeting, altogether looked so like a preconcerted Scheme, to accomplish the End, that I was at my wit's end, to know how to extricate myself from so disagreeable a situation, especially as the measure was totally ag[ainst] my Judgment.

I am still trying to decipher what Boudinot is saying here, especially related to his remark that the Princeton board meeting was scheduled a day before the New Brunswick meeting and the former meeting was "made up wholly of Presbyterians."  Does this means tha Boudinot believed that Witherspoon scheduled the New Brunswick meeting at the time he did precisely because he knew there would be a large number of Presbyterian patriots down the road in Princeton who might come to New Brunswick to support his political ends?

Whatever the case, Boudinot would not allow Witherspoon to dominate the New Brunswick meeting. When the opportunity arose, he gave a thirty-minute extemporaneous speech opposing Witherspoon's plea for independence.  Boudinot claimed that Witherspoon's plan:

...was neither founded in Wisdom, Prudence, nor Economy; That we had a chosen Continental Congress, to whom we had resigned the Consideration of our public affairs; That they, coming from every part of the Union, would best represent all the Colonies not thus united.  They would know the true Situation of our Country with regard to finances, Union & the prospects we had of a happy reconciliation with the Mother Country..."

Of course Boudinot could not have been more wrong about the Continental Congress. Two months later its members would take the radical step of breaking with England. And it would be Witherspoon, representing the New Jersey delegation, who would end up signing the Declaration of Independence.

But on this particular day, Boudinot was victorious. After his dissenting remarks, Witherspoon responded and a debate between the two Presbyterians ensued on the floor of the meeting.  When Boudinot sensed that he had the upper hand and had won over the delegates with his rhetoric, he called for a vote on independence. Witherspoon was not happy:

The Doctor was a good deal out of humoor & contended warmly against a vote, but a large Majority of the Meeting insisted on a Vote, which, being taken, out of 35 Members, there were but 3 or 4 who Voted for the Doctors proposition, the rest rejecting it with great warmth.  Thus ended this first attempt to try to the pulse of the People of New Jersey on the Subject of Independence...."

Stay tuned for more stuff like this when and if I ever complete my manuscript: "A Presbyterian Rebellion: The American Revolution in the Mid-Atlantic."  I am hoping to make some good headway this summer.

David Greenberg Reviews James Kloppenberg's _Reading Obama_

Today The New Republic website is running David Greenberg's review of James Kloppenberg's Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition.

Kloppenberg argues that Obama is an intellectual who has been most influenced by American pragmatism.  Greenberg is not buying it.  Here is a taste of the review:

Kloppenberg’s esteem for Obama leads him to over-value Obama as an intellectual. Here the praise strains credulity. He deems Obama’s books “the most substantial books written by anyone elected president of the United States since Woodrow Wilson.” Obama is credited with being “able to interrogate his own convictions—to place them in a broader cultural and historical context by imaginatively scrutinizing them from a position centuries in the future—without abandoning them, much as William James did.” Of one excerpt from Obama’s prose, Kloppenberg writes that “neither Madison nor Jefferson, neither James nor Dewey … could have said it better.” Kloppenberg routinely presumes Obama to be “immersed” in the current intellectual debates of Harvard Law School, “wrestling with texts such as Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” and “probing the arguments in [Walter] Lippmann’s Drift and Mastery.” Isn’t it possible that Obama, like a lot of us who loaded up on humanities courses in college, left a few classic works on his shelves with their spines uncracked? Besides, does undergraduate and graduate reading really make one a full-fledged philosopher?

Kloppenberg has committed a category mistake. He asserts that besides being a politician, “Obama is also very much an intellectual.” But while Obama is obviously smart and has strong intellectual tendencies, I do not believe that he can comfortably be awarded that label. Few politicians can. Jefferson, Adams, and Madison certainly warrant the term, anachronistic though its application would be; and a century later Wilson, a renowned political scientist, deserved it, as (perhaps) did his prolific and erudite contemporary Theodore Roosevelt. But most of the highly educated, well-read, brainy politicians of our own time—Obama, Clinton, Gore, Gary Hart—are cut of different cloth. They have traveled in the world of ideas, consorted with intellectuals, in some cases written books, in some cases taught at universities. They may even think about political philosophy. But everything they wrote—everything they thought—was necessarily refracted through the prism of electoral politics. There is nothing shocking or shameful about this, but it is not how intellectuals proceed.

Obama in the National Museum of American History

Barack Obama and his daughters Sasha and Malia recently took a tour of the Abraham Lincoln exhibit at the National Museum of American History.  The blog of the NMAH describes what it was like to host the president.  Here is a taste:


As we closed the museum last Sunday after a typically busy spring weekend, we prepared for three visitors who live in Washington but rarely have time to visit local attractions—President Obama and his daughters, Malia and Sasha. Like thousands of people who are flocking to the museum this spring, the president heard about the Abraham Lincoln exhibition and wanted to be sure he saw it before it closes on May 30. He also wanted his children to see the exhibit and learn more about one of America’s most admired and influential leaders. Their visit reminded me why families value the museum as a place for teaching and inspiration, where people make the connection between the past and present.

From the moment the president arrived, it was clear that he did not need a guided tour. His knowledge of Lincoln’s life and of the Civil War is extensive. In front of a wooden desk, he explained how Lincoln and other lawyers traveled to various courthouses in Illinois along the unpaved roads of the “Mud Circuit.” He was keenly aware of Lincoln’s political rise and the strategy he used to secure the Republican nomination for president in 1860. He noted the impressive collection of campaign artifacts in the exhibition. At a display that describes Lincoln’s first days in office, the president explained to his daughters the causes and consequences of the Civil War.

Harvard's First Wampanoag Students

Over at The Beehive, the blog of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Anna Cook has a really interesting post about Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck and Joel Iacommes, Wampanoag Indians who attended Harvard in the 17th century.  Today, Iacommes will be awarded a posthumous degree.

Cheeshahteaumuck and Iacommes are getting renewed attention in light of the 2011 graduation of Tiffany Smalley, the first member of the Wampanoag tribe to graduate from Harvard since 1665.

Read Cook's post here.

In Defense of Public Libraries

Public libraries are closing all over the United States.  Over at the blog of the New York Review of Books, Charles Simic reflects on what this means.  Here is a taste of his piece, "A Country Without Libraries."

I heard some politician say recently that closing libraries is no big deal, since the kids now have the Internet to do their reading and school work. It’s not the same thing. As any teacher who recalls the time when students still went to libraries and read books could tell him, study and reflection come more naturally to someone bent over a book. Seeing others, too, absorbed in their reading, holding up or pressing down on different-looking books, some intimidating in their appearance, others inviting, makes one a participant in one of the oldest and most noble human activities. Yes, reading books is a slow, time-consuming, and often tedious process. In comparison, surfing the Internet is a quick, distracting activity in which one searches for a specific subject, finds it, and then reads about it—often by skipping a great deal of material and absorbing only pertinent fragments. Books require patience, sustained attention to what is on the page, and frequent rest periods for reverie, so that the meaning of what we are reading settles in and makes its full impact.

How many book lovers among the young has the Internet produced? Far fewer, I suspect, than the millions libraries have turned out over the last hundred years. Their slow disappearance is a tragedy, not just for those impoverished towns and cities, but for everyone everywhere terrified at the thought of a country without libraries.

Pauline Maier Wins George Washington Book Prize

Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1789 was awarded the prestigious Washington Book Prize yesterday. 

She edged out a tough field of finalists, which included Jack Rakove's Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America and Alan Taylor's The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies.

For more on award see this press release from Washington College and the C.V. Starr Center for the American Experience.

Congratulations!

Bob Cornwall's Full Review of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction

I am very thankful to Bob Cornwall, a Disciples of Christ pastor and church historian, for this extensive review of my book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction.  It is always gratifying to read a review from a reviewer who truly understands the nuances of my argument.  Here is a taste of Cornwall's review from his blog Ponderings on a Faith Journey:

The question posed by this book continually vexes the American people and seems to drive the unending culture wars.  Partisans argue vociferously for and against the premise that the United States either is a Christian nation or was founded as one.  Both sides lob rhetorical mortar shells back and forth.  On one side Christian Nationalists argue that the intention of the Founders was for this to be a Christian nation governed by biblical principles.   Secularists fire back claiming that at best the Founders were Deists intent on keeping church and state separated by an impermeable wall, wherein the state would stay out of the religious business and the church should in turn keep its nose out of the business of state.  Of course, both sides marshal “evidence” to support their claims.   Stepping into the midst of this fray and calling for a ceasefire is John Fea, who argues in this book that – from a historian’s perspective – the situation is a lot more complex than the partisans would like us to believe.   Instead of “arguing the case” as might an attorney, Fea the historian invites us to engage in the work of interpretation.      

Fea is a professional historian teaching American history at Messiah College, which is an evangelical liberal arts college in Pennsylvania.   As a historian he asks us to consider the question of America’s religious past using the principles of the historical profession, five of which he names:   1) Recognition that historians must expect to find “change over time”; 2) they must “interpret the past in context”; 3) must look for “causality”; 4) be concerned with “contingency”; and 5) recognize that the “past is complex.”  When one seeks to reconstruct the past according to these principles, refraining from cherry-picking evidence, then reality is rather muddled.    Some of the Founders were evangelicals, others weren’t.  Some were Deists, but others merely embraced what some would consider heterodox positions.  Jefferson, Adams, and Washington weren’t orthodox in their theology but they embraced the idea of providence, which suggests a belief in an activist God and believed that religion played an important role in promoting virtue, which was an essential building block for democracy.   Theirs was a mixture of Christian and Enlightenment ideals.  Reality was, and is, very complex.    

Fea recognizes that the reason why this debate is so heated is that it has implications for the contemporary situation.   Because the question of America’s religious origins has contemporary implications, Fea invites the reader to join him in seeking the truth (to the greatest degree possible).  

 

Read the rest here. 

So What Can You Do With a History Major: Part 31

Make a comfortable living.

According to this study from the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University:

• The undergraduate majors that produce the highest median earnings are Petroleum Engineering ($120,000); Pharmaceutical Sciences ($105,000); Math and Computer Science ($86,00); Aerospace Engineering; and Electrical Engineering ($85,000).

• The undergraduate majors with the lowest median earnings are: Counseling and Psychology ($29,000); Early Childhood Education ($36,000); Theology and Religious Vocations ($38,000); Human Services and Community Organizations ($38,000); Social Work ($39,000).

•  Liberal Arts and Humanities undergraduate majors have a median income of $47,000 a year.  This places them in the middle of the pack in terms of earnings and employment.

• Of all the humanities majors, United States History is by far the most lucrative, with median earnings of $57,000 per year.

• "United States History" majors earn, on average, $7000 a year more than those who just majored in "History."

•  English and Literature is the most popular humanities undergraduate major.  The median earnings for English and Literature majors is $48,000.

•  46% of undergraduate History majors pursue a graduate degree.  A graduate degree gives the History major a 60% income boost.

• 93% of undergraduate History majors are currently employed. 

•  60% of undergraduate History majors are men.  40% are women.

• Male History majors make, on average, $15,000 more per year than female History majors.

• 86% of History majors are white.  Only Anthropology, Archaeology and Art History and Criticism are "whiter" when it comes to humanities majors.

• 12% of "United States History" majors are African-American, making it, along with Theology and Religious Studies, the undergraduate humanities major with the largest number of African-Americans.

• United States History majors in the 75th percentile of income for those with this major, make $85,000 a year.  History majors in the 75th percentile of income for those with this major make $77,000 a year. This makes United States History and History the highest paying humanities major.

• In terms of occupation, 23% of United States History majors work in management.  16% work in sales. 12% work in education.  11% do office work. 9% work in computer services.  

• In terms of occupation, 18% of History majors work in management.  16% work in sales.  15% do office work.  11% work in education.  6% work in business.

• In terms of industry, 15% of United States History majors work in finance.  13% work in education. 10% work in retail trade. 9% work in the information sector. 9% work in professional services.

• In terms of industry, 15% of History majors work in education. 14% work in finance.  10% work in retail trade. 10% work in public administration. 9% work in professional services.

This study tells me several things, but two are worth stressing here:

1.  History majors are making a living.  They are doing better, on average, than other humanities majors.

2.  Most history majors do not go into history-related fields.

Something to think about.

A Little History Humor

I laughed hard when I read this at Dave Swartz's blog.  Here is it is:


Q: How many historians does it take to change a light bulb?

A (by Dr. L): There is a great deal of debate on this issue. Up until the mid-20th century, the accepted answer was ‘one’: and this Whiggish narrative underpinned a number of works that celebrated electrification and the march of progress in light-bulb changing. Beginning in the 1960s, however, social historians increasingly rejected the ‘Great Man’ school and produced revisionist narratives that stressed the contributions of research assistants and custodial staff. This new consensus was challenged, in turn, by women’s historians, who criticized the social interpretation for marginalizing women, and who argued that light bulbs are actually changed by department secretaries. Since the 1980s, however, postmodernist scholars have deconstructed what they characterize as a repressive hegemonic discourse of light-bulb changing, with its implicit binary opposition between ‘light’ and ‘darkness,’ and its phallogocentric privileging of the bulb over the socket, which they see as colonialist, sexist, and racist. Finally, a new generation of neo-conservative historians have concluded that the light never needed changing in the first place, and have praised political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for bringing back the old bulb. Clearly, much additional research remains to be done.

–> Response by peer reviewers

Dear Dr. L,

We regret that we cannot accept your historian joke in its present form…. However, a panel of anonymous reviewers (well, anonymous to YOU, anyway) have reviewed it and made dozens of mutually contradictory suggestions for its… improvement. Please consider them carefully, except for the ones made by a man we all consider to be a dangerous crackpot but who is the only one who actually returns comments in a timely fashion.

1. This joke is unnecessarily narrow. Why not consider other sources of light? The sun lights department offices; so too do lights that aren’t bulbs (e.g. fluorescents). These are rarely “changed” and never by historians. Consider moving beyond your internalist approach.

2. The joke is funny, but fails to demonstrate familiarity with the most important works on the topic. I would go so far as to say that Leeson’s omission is either an unprofessional snub, or reveals troubling lacunae in his basic knowledge of the field. The works in question are Brown (1988), Brown (1992), Brown (1994a), Brown (1994b), Brown and Smith (1999), Brown (2001), Brown et al (2003), and Brown (2006).

3. Inestimably excellent and scarcely in need of revision. I have only two minor suggestions: instead of a joke, make it a haiku, and instead of light bulbs, make the subject daffodils.

4. This is a promising start, but the joke fails to address important aspects of the topic, like (a) the standard Whig answer of “one,” current through the 1950s; (b) the rejection of this “Great Man” approach by the subsequent generation of social historians; (c) the approach favored by women’s historians; (d) postmodernism’s critique of the light bulb as discursive object which obscured the contributions of subaltern actors, and (e) the neoconservative reaction to the above. When these are included, the joke should work, but it’s unacceptable in its present form.

5. I cannot find any serious fault with this joke. Leeson is fully qualified to make it, and has done so carefully and thoroughly. The joke is funny and of comparable quality to jokes found in peer journals. I score it 3/10 and recommend rejection.

I Want to be a More Shallow Person...On Facebook.

Over at ProfHacker, Ryan Cordell explains why he cut his Facebook friends in half:

I realize that, for many people, a Facebook friend differs substantially from a “real” friend. Indeed, I’ve heard my students use the term “Facebook friend” as a rough synonym for “acquaintance”: e.g. “She’s a friend of mine—well, she’s at least a Facebook friend.” Many people maintain a wide circle of acquaintance on Facebook, and tailor their use of the service accordingly. Many of my colleagues foster deep, ongoing professional relationships through Facebook, which is a wonderful use of the service.

I wasn’t doing that, however. I was using Facebook as a personal network, despite the fact that my network extended far beyond the personal. When I thought carefully about how I was using social networks, I realized—or, perhaps, I reasserted—two things:

1. I don’t have to friend everyone who asks. This might seem self-evident, but I realized that I was friending everyone who sent me a request, even if I barely knew them or wasn’t genuinely interested in (re)connecting with them. I was doing this, mostly, to avoid insulting anyone or appearing aloof. However, I would often end up hiding these people’s updates, which means I wasn’t actually networking with them. I decided to remove these faux friends, and to make real decisions about friend requests in the future. From now on, I will not feel compelled to friend someone because I took a class with them in high school. Some people use Facebook for class reunions, but I’m not interested in doing  
2. I can separate my personal and professional worlds. This one is, I will admit, a little tricky. I have colleagues whom I consider friends, and so those relationships bridge these two worlds. However, I realized that I use Twitter primarily for professional communication, and Facebook almost exclusively to post personal updates, including pictures and video of my family. Frankly, I can’t imagine that many of the people who were on my Facebook friends list would care about what I post there. What’s more, I realized that I was hesitant to post certain things—a lament, say, about a bad day at work—for fear of who might see it. I decided to remove purely professional contacts from my Facebook friends.

Ultimately, I cut my Facebook friends list by half. Doing so has slowed my Facebook news feed drastically—a change I’ve appreciated. If any of my distant acquaintances noticed the change—which, if they were ignoring my updates as I was theirs, is unlikely—they haven’t written any angry emails letting me know. Honestly, this change has allowed me to spend less time on Facebook; I go there to post pictures of my kids, or to post the occasional personal update. In my case the time saved probably isn’t too significant—I’ve never been a heavy Facebook user—but I’ve been surprised how much mental space this purging has created.

Cordell has put into words something I have been thinking about for some time.  How does one separate the professional and the personal on Facebook?  I am friends on Facebook with family members and friends who do not have much interest in the kind of musings we do here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.   On the other hand, I am also friends with colleagues at work, fellow historians and academics, and readers of the blog and my books who may not care about family photos and other personal stuff.  (And, in some cases, I may not necessarily want them to see personal stuff).  Some of these people I have never met face-to-face. Of course a lot of my Facebook friends, if not most of them, either fall somewhere in between these two extremes or else find themselves in both groups.

I largely use Facebook for professional purposes.  As some of my current Facebook friends know, the posts from this blog go automatically to my Facebook wall (and yours!) and some of the best discussion of my blog posts appear on that wall. 

Frankly, I do not have a whole lot of interest in using my Facebook account for personal reasons and I rarely "update" my status with personal comments (i.e.  "I just love my new Chrysler minivan" or "Wow, I am feeling really tired today").

So I guess I am taking a different approach to Facebook than the one Cordell has chosen to take.  In the past several months I have scaled back the number of personal items I have on my page and have actually, for the first time ever, solicited new friends.  While I still hope that Facebook will allow me to connect with people, I definitely see it more as a way to connect with friends, my blog and book readers, the people I meet on speaking engagements, and other acquaintances in an informal, but professional (as opposed to deeply personal) way.  I guess I want to be more shallow on Facebook.

So feel free to be my friend!! Or don't be surprised if you get a friend request from me!

Now I am going to go mow the lawn and take the dog for a walk. :-)

The Disappearance of the Boston Massacre (Or at least the stones commemorating it).

J.L. Bell has been on a roll lately.  Today's post at Boston 1775 discusses the disappearance of the cobblestone circle that marks the site of the Boston Massacre (1770).  Apparently it has been removed for roadwork.  Nor is this the first time the stones have been moved.

Bell explains:

This will not be the first time that subway construction has required the stones’ relocation. They were originally placed in the street pavement in 1887 near the corner of State and Exchange Streets, much closer to the present site of 60 State Street. (Exchange Street is now gone, but it roughly corresponded with the southbound lanes of Congress Street.)

In 1904 they were removed to allow construction of the subway to East Boston, and replaced in a new site right in the middle of the intersection, near where James Caldwell had died.

Again in the 1960s, when urban renewal caused reconfiguration of the streets, the circle of stones was moved to its most recent site, apparently chosen simply because that’s where the city wanted to place a traffic island.

All this means that the circle of stones no longer represents the spot “where Crispus Attucks fell.” To stand on that site, you'd have to go back to the 1887 location of the stones, and you’d probably get hit by a truck as soon as the traffic signal changed.  

Something to keep in mind for all of you taking a vacation to Boston this summer!

This Week's Patheos Column: Thy Kingdom Come: Harold Camping and American Evangelicalism

As I write this, Harold Camping is speaking to the press in the wake of his failed prediction that the rapture would occur on May 21, 2011. I have been amazed at how Camping's false prophecy has become a cultural and media event. On Saturday night I was doing a book signing in Wilkes-Barre, PA and the entire staff at the Barnes & Noble could not stop commenting on the impending rapture. A fierce debate raged among the salespersons at the "Nook" table as to whether the great earthquake Camping predicted would take place at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time or 6:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. This week I received e-mails and Facebook messages from family and friends soliciting my thoughts on the matter. The preacher I heard on Sunday morning made Camping's message the central theme of her sermon.

On Saturday night at 6:00 p.m. EST I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of a Panera Bread restaurant in Wilkes-Barre watching a man and a woman in the nearby parking lot of an Outback Steakhouse. They were looking into the sky. I have no idea why there were gazing in this way. Maybe they were watching a plane fly overhead. Perhaps they were noticing a unique cloud formation. But it sure looked like they were waiting for the rapture. At about 6:03 p.m. they stopped staring at the heavens, chatted with each other for a few seconds, and then headed into the restaurant, presumably to get their dinner. If they weren't going to get their rapture, at least they could get a blooming onion.

Read the rest here.

The Beast of Boston Harbor

Boston 1775 is running a post today on this 1770s engraving.  It is entitled "British Troops Barricade Boston Harbor Against the Beast from the Unknown." I believe it is a doctored version of the original.

You can buy a copy for $20.00 through Etsy.  Here is the description:

A handsome 11 x 17 print that is suitable for framing. Comes with this description: "European artist Franz Xaver Habermann created this engraving sometime in the early 1770s. It shows the early days of Boston Harbor and is designed to emulate the feel of a typical European city and create sympathy for the colonies. Adding to a viewer's feelings of empathy is the appearance of the Beast of Boston Harbor, who regularly ravaged the residents of the town. The Beast was eventually dispatched with the dumping of hundreds of pounds of tea into the harbor by intrepid citizens who correctly surmised that the bitterness of the leaves would drive the creature away. Unfortunately this “Tea Party” was seen as a revolutionary act by the British troops, which led to some degree of unpleasantness."

Mark Noll: Jesus and Jefferson

Over at The New Republic, Mark Noll reviews Daniel K. Williams's God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (see our review here) and Darren Dochuck's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt:Plain Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism.

At the moment the review is still behind the subscriber wall, but I am sure it will be available soon.  Here are the first two paragraphs:

In the presidential election of 1976, the Democrat Jimmy Carter split the votes of American white evangelical Protestants almost evenly with the Republican Gerald Ford. With a clear plurality of at least ten percentage points, Carter did even better among the nation’s white Baptists. Four years earlier, white conservative Protestants, mostly from the North, had organized the first postwar interest group to campaign for a presidential candidate: it was called “Evangelicals for McGovern.” In that campaign of 1972, no Republican was as outspoken against abortion as Sargent Shriver, George McGovern’s Democratic running mate. In those same years the nation’s best-known selfidentified evangelical politician was Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon. He was a fiscal conservative, but in Oregon he had led efforts to pass civil rights legislation; in 1970 he co-sponsored a measure calling for the complete withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam; and somewhat later he teamed up with Senator Ted Kennedy to seek a permanent freeze for nuclear arms. In the early 1970s, the press was making much of Billy Graham’s friendship with Richard Nixon, but in fact Graham was never as close to Nixon as he was to his fellow Southerner, Nixon’s predecessor Lyndon Baines Johnson.

One of the first gatherings by self-identified evangelicals aimed at advancing a national political agenda convened over Thanksgiving in 1973 at the YMCA in Chicago. Its “Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern” featured advocacy for civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, and strategies for alleviating poverty. The moderate to progressive stance of those initiatives was far from the whole political story for the nation’s large but amorphous population of white evangelical Protestants, but in the early 1970s they were among its most salient political signposts.

The World Will End on October 21, 2011

Last night Harold Camping said he was wrong about the "physical" rapture taking place on May 21, 2011, but he is sticking to his calculation that the end of the world will take place on October 21, 2011.

He told a group of reporters that the world did indeed come under judgment on May 21, 2011, but the judgment was spiritual, not physical. Whatever the case, people can expect the world to end in five months.

Check out this report from the BBC and watch a short a video clip of Camping's statement.

Stay tuned for another five months of craziness.  I just checked my calendar and on October 21 I will be at a conference in Birmingham, Alabama.

Gina Barecca: How to Bribe Yourself to Write

For those of you in a writing funk, here is some advice from Brainstorm's Gina Barreca:

Some writing is its own reward: I have permission to write this post only because I finished the three letters of recommendations which have been staring up at me with their big, sad eyes every morning as I approach my desk. The letters and their neatly addressed envelopes been eying me like stray kittens: “Please! We’re orphans! Help!” I sent them all to good homes and that means I can now play with Brainstorm.

“How does the guilt and emotional blackmail part work?” asked one aspiring writer during the book-signing part of Saturday’s events. She liked the bribes idea, but was worried that I  might have sent myself to bed without dinner. Or a beverage. Assuring her that deprivation of food was never permitted in my household, I explained that the emotional blackmail I wielded was a dangerous weapon. It was something best done by professionals in a closed setting and probably should be used by amateurs only in a controlled situation.

Emotional blackmail as a tool for writing should be saved for those moments when nothing else works.

Here’s what I tell myself: “Think of the privilege you’ve been given, Barreca. Are you going to take that for granted? You going to sit around, wasting time without enjoying it, and moan about how tough it is to get work done? Try really working. Remember when you cleaned houses? Remember cleaning other people’s bathrooms? Remember working retail? Remember working in Bloomingdales? Think about the younger version of yourself and how she got you here. She’s going to get you back if you don’t get on with it. She’s going to marry that guy from the vo-tech school who always drove around with one working headlight and drop out and end up living in a two-room apartment in Queens where the screen is torn and flies come in and get stuck in the grease fan.”

If guilt is an emotional response and blackmail is an exchange, I suppose I’m proposing a combination of both. “If you don’t finish this article/essay/book,” I tell myself, “You know you’re going to be miserable.”

Read the entire post here.

Camping Speaks Out

In case you are interested, Harold Camping is now speaking on Family Radio.  Over at the Huffington Post, Jaweed Kaleem is live-blogging the interview.

Why Write?

Today's Insider Higher Ed "Academic Minute" features Lock Haven University's Dana Washington on why it is important to write.

The St. Louis Hegelians

Forget about Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis. Well before the University of Wisconsin history professor suggested that the key to American identity was the settlement of the frontier, a group of Georg Hegel disciples were arguing that history had a direction, and it was all pointing to St. Louis.

Here is a taste of Kerry Howley's article at The Daily:

In 1856, a Prussian immigrant named Henry Conrad Brokmeyer retreated deep into the Missouri woods with a gun, a dog and a copy of “Science of Logic,” a philosophical text by Georg Hegel. Alone with Hegel’s thoughts over the next two years, Brokmeyer became convinced that this abstruse work by a German 25 years dead could save the nation from the very divisions about to lead it into civil war. It didn’t, of course, and Missouri, a border state, would not escape a gruesome guerrilla war. But a decade later, Brokmeyer and a friend named William Torrey Harris convinced the elite of St. Louis that Hegel’s work was central to the recovery of their country, their city and their own lives. The Civil War, Brokmeyer said, was part of a dialectical process. In what turned out to be one of the oddest episodes in the history of American thought, a group of men known as the St. Louis Hegelians declared that the direction of history led to eastern Missouri.

Brokmeyer sold a warped Hegelianism just flattering enough to believe: History had a direction. That direction was west, from Europe to the United States. History would unfold in the direction of a world-historical city, culminating in a flowering of freedom under a rational state. While Hegel had assumed Europe to be the place to which all of history pointed — when he said “west,” he meant from Asia to Europe — Brokmeyer said history would keep on rolling across the Atlantic, toward the biggest American city west of the Mississippi: St. Louis.  

Read the rest here.

Bruce: Don't Disappoint Macie!

Why couldn't I have a teacher who took "Bruce breaks." 

And how could a 11-year old kid have seen Springsteen at the Meadowlands 10 times?

This kid is Working on a Dream (for her teacher).

Timothy Dalrymple: A Letter to the Followers of Harold Camping

Tim Dalrymple, the editor of my column at Patheos, has written a thoughtful Christian reflection on the whole "rapture," Harold Camping, "end of the world" thing.  But first, let me make a few comments:

If my Facebook feed is any indication, Christians and non-Christians are having a field day with Camping's failed rapture prediction.  We had some fun with it as well.

I have been utterly amazed at how this prediction has become a media event.  Everyone is talking about it.  On Saturday night I was doing a book signing in Wilkes-Barre, PA and the entire staff at the Barnes & Noble could not stop commenting on this.  I have been getting e-mails and Facebook messages from family and friends soliciting my thoughts on the matter. 

On Saturday night at 6:00EST I was sitting in my car in the  parking lot of a Panera Bread in Wilkes-Barre watching a man and a woman in the nearby parking lot of an Outback Steakhouse. They were just standing there looking into the sky.  I have no idea what they were doing.  Maybe they were watching a plane fly overhead or noticing a unique cloud formation.  But it sure looked like they were waiting for the rapture. At about 6:03 EST they stopped staring at the heavens, chatted with each other for a few seconds, and then headed into the restaurant, presumably to get their steak and "bloomin' onion."

As a historian, the craze triggered by Camping's prediction has been fascinating to think about.  If I was a historian living a hundred years from now, I would be asking the following questions:

1.  Why did Camping's rapture prediction strike a chord with so many Americans?

2.  What was the social-demographic make-up of the people who believed him?  Can we find any patterns?  What was the relationship between the economic downturn and these end-time longings?

3.  What does the fact that Camping was mocked so mercilessly and adamantly by non-Christians and Christians alike tell us about American culture and its relationship to religion in early 21st century America?

4.  How did the wildly popular "Left Behind" novels, written by Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins, set the cultural stage for this specific rapture prediction?

As a Christian, I approach this whole thing a bit differently. (And here I will be speaking largely to my readers who are fellow Christians). Camping was clearly misguided and should, in some way, be held accountable for leading so many people astray, dividing families, etc....  Those who are fed up with the cult of personality and the Left Behind theology that defines American evangelicalism have my sympathy.  I can understand why so many of my fellow Christians who are evangelicals no longer want to be associated with this movement any longer.  Thoughtful Christians want nothing to do with Harold Camping and, in fact, see him as harmful to the cause of Christianity in the world.  I don't disagree.

But at the same time it is a fundamental belief of historic Christianity--Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, Mainline Protestant, etc...---that Jesus will one day return and will judge the living and the dead.   I hope Christians will not throw out the baby with the bathwater.  Camping is deluded. Many Christians do not buy into the rapture theology he is selling.  But to identify oneself as a Christian one must affirm that Jesus will one day come back.  There will be a Second Coming.  This, after all, is where we place our hope.  This is the belief that gets us through day.  As Christ rose, we will also rise.  I hope my friends who are Christian intellectuals, Christian academics, and Christian scholars will remember this because, frankly, we don't talk about it that much.

Here is a taste of Tim's piece:

This letter is more for those who are wondering: How did this happen?  Why was I deceived?  Why did God allow me, when I sought the truth in prayer, to believe this and go into the cities and distribute flyers and tell my loved ones that they should prepare for the Day of Judgment?  How do I face the mockers now?  And how do I know that my faith as a whole is not a falsehood as well?  When I once went about with my youth group or college group or small group and proclaimed the gospel, and told people earnestly that Christ had died for them and that they should receive God’s gracious offer before the end — was believing that and pronouncing that any different than believing and pronouncing that May 21st was Judgment Day?  What if it’s all just a silly story, and I’m a fool to believe it?

Tonight the Rapture Parties will go on.  The atheists will gloat, the mockers will mock.  Yet there’s nothing funny about this for you.  You are broken and crestfallen, left abandoned in the ruins of unfulfilled expectations, among them the very highest expectations a human can have — the hope of union with God, the hope of a world made new, the hope that every tear will be wiped away.  You are left disoriented.  You were so sure of this.  People you love and respect — perhaps your parents, your pastor, your mentor, your brother and sister — may have believed it too.  You do not feel relieved that the end of the world did not arrive.  You are not rid of this world yet, so all of its weight fell back upon your shoulders.
So let’s reflect on this together.  First, what can be affirmed? What were you right to feel and to believe?

1. Your heart was in the right place. This may sound like a minor matter, or it may sound like condescension, but I assure you it’s not.  This is a rare and exceedingly important thing.  It’s perfectly right to yearn for the day of Christ’s return.  It’s right to desire with all of your heart that you could be with God right now.  ”Better is one day in your courts,” writes the Psalmist (84:10), “than thousands elsewhere.”  You longed to be in those courts together with the saints.  It is a good thing to thirst for God and to look forward to the day when God’s truth and grace and justice will be made known to all humankind.  I believe that desire is precious to God.
2. You were right to believe that God will, one day, gather his children unto himself and draw history as we know it to a close. The most persuasive falsehoods are always the ones that contain the greatest proportion of the truth.  Although only a very small slice of the Christian community believed that Judgment Day was arriving on May 21st, the vast majority of the church around the globe and throughout its history has believed that Christ would come again to bring judgment and restoration, and ultimately the beginning of a new age of peace and justice.  We should always live as though Christ’s return is imminent.  Today is always the day of salvation.
3. You were right to spread the warning.  It’s important to say this, because the Harold Camping prophecy and the movement he mobilized will be used by the skeptical press to make Christians in general look silly.  Yet given what you believed was coming, it would have been irresponsible and unloving in the extreme if you had chosen not to spread the news as broadly as possible.  Some will jeer at the billboards that were rented and the literature that was distributed.  Given your sincere belief that the end was near, sounding the alarm was the only loving option.

Read the entire piece here.

The Greenwich Tea Burning Project: 2011 Edition

As some of my readers know, I have been working (slowly) on a book about history and memory in Greenwich, NJ, the eighteenth-century home of Philip Vickers Fithian.  From June 25 to July 2 I will be back in Greenwich conducting research at the Lummis Library of the Cumberland County Historical Society.  Once again, I will have a team of students and former students with me.  We call ourselves the "Greenwich Tea Burning Project."  The name comes from the revolutionary-era "tea burning" that took place in the town in 1774. The Project is funded by both the New Jersey Historical Commission and Messiah College.

If you are interested in exactly what we are doing in this historic town--a community that dates back to the seventeenth-century and predates William Penn's founding of the colony of Pennsylvania, I would encourage you to do two things:

1.  Check out our previous posts on the Greenwich Tea Burning here.  (Scroll down to read them all).

2.  Join our Facebook page for updates on the project.

In the next year or two we hope to talk a bit about the project in front of larger audiences.  Look for us at a historical conference near you!

May 23, 2011?

Yesterday was a HUGE day at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.  In terms of the number of visitors we received, it was surpassed only by the August 29, 2008 post when I asked if Sarah Palin spoke in tongues. (That post was written on the day John McCain picked Palin as his 2008 presidential running mate).

The reason why we had so many visitors yesterday was because of an error I made in the title of a post from July 29, 2010.  The title of that post was "Jesus Will Return on May 22, 2011.  The post itself was little more than an embedding of a CNN video about people who believed the end of the world would take place on May 21, 2011. But unfortunately (or fortunately) I typed the wrong date in the title.

So basically anyone who took the time yesterday to Google "May 22, 2011" (perhaps in the hopes that Harold Camping was off by one day in his rapture calculations) was directed to The Way of Improvement Leads Home.  Not many of those people stayed here very long, but they did check in.  Some of them even looked around a bit.

In a blatant attempt to keep the traffic coming (in the hopes that some folks might find and read some of the more thoughtful pieces here), I thought I would title this post "May 23, 2011" and see what happens.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things online that caught my attention this week:

Don't forget to tell Congress not the eliminate the Teaching American History grants! 

J.H. Elliott reviews Dan Richter, Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts.

Teaching Civil War battlefields.

Mary Beth Norton reviews Alfred Young, Gary Nash, and Ray Raphael,  Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation.

My daughter is running for student council president this week.  Here is her campaign speech.

Kevin Baker reviews Peter Hartshorn's I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens.

Harold Camping and the cult of personality.

Postal service announces top dog attack cities.

Chris Beneke on Kevin Schultz's Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews held Postwar America to its Protestant Promise.

Lionel Messi

David Barton is a liberal.  And Barton's response to this accusation.

Russell Arben Fox responds to Matthew Bowman's fine piece on Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman.

Beth Pardoe on why the smartest people aren't always rich.

Doomsday throughout time.

The rise of SportsCenter.

Jonathan Rees: Kindles are for suckers.

Thomas Kidd on hell.

Rare color photographs of the Great Depression.

Mark Noll on the publication of Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana.

An unnamed Massachusetts Historical Society researcher toils in the papers of John Quincy Adams.

Peter Berger on Rob Bell and hell.

Fergus Bordewich reviews Paul Finkelman's Millard Fillmore.

Wilkes-Barre Barnes & Noble Tonight

I don't know how many readers of this blog are in the Wilkes-Barre, PA area, but I will be at the Barnes & Noble at The Arena Hub tonight at 7:00pm.  I will be speaking and signing copies of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction.