Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things online that caught my attention this week:

Membership in the American Historical Association is on the rise.

Jim Cullen reviews Benjamin Irvin's Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors.

Thomas Friedman praises George H.W. Bush.

Emily Clark reviews Anthony Burke Smith, The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture From the Great Depression to the Cold War. 

Nicholas Kristof honors John Stott.

Paul Harvey discusses Christian financial guru Dave Ramsey.

Greg Carey suggests that NASCAR prayer is all about evangelicalism and masculinity.

Thomas Kidd reviews Benjamin Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America.

In search of Mercy Otis Warren.

Civil War ads from the collections of the American Antiquarian Society.

John Judis:  Obama should act like Lincoln.

Can the 18th century serve as a guide in our debt ceiling debate?

Alan Jacobs on teaching "long-form reading" and "deep attention."

Scot McKnight on John Stott and the "elegance of evangelicalism."

William Pannapacker on digital humanities.

History's worst Congresses.

Glenn LaFantasie on Robert E. Lee.

Harold Bloom on the Book of Jonah.

Ocean City Weekend

I just got home from a great weekend in Ocean City, New Jersey where I did some teaching on the themes I wrote about in Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction.  As readers of this blog know, I love Jersey shore boardwalk towns, so it was great to spend about 24 hours or so in Ocean City.

It was very hot this weekend, but the weather did not stop us from walking up to the boardwalk late Saturday afternoon to grab an early dinner at Mack and Manco's Pizza.  Mack and Manco's serves- up one of the top three or four pizza-pies I have ever tasted.  (We were there last month with the research associates of the Greenwich Tea Burning Project). 

I spent Saturday night at St. Peter's United Methodist Church discussing Was America Founded.  Ocean City was founded in the late 19th century as a Methodist camp meeting and St. Peter's was the flagship church of this seashore community.  I was invited by Rev. Brian Roberts, the pastor of the church, and George Franz, a member of the congregation and an American historian who taught for nearly forty years at Penn State-Brandywine.  (I had met George earlier this year during a lecture at the Chadds Ford Historical Society).  About forty people came out on a hot Saturday evening at the Jersey shore to learn more about religion and the American founding.  This was a well-educated and thoughtful audience who asked some very insightful questions.

It was also good to see Tim Beirne and his wife Laura.  They drove down from Burlington County to hear the talk and spend some time in Ocean City.  Tim is a former student of mine who now teaches AP US History at the Stony Brook School in Stony Brook, Long Island, New York.  After the lecture Tim, Laura, and my family wandered the Ocean City boardwalk a bit (it was packed) and got some famous Kohr's custard.  I spent some time talking history with Tim.  We discussed the possibility of doing an early American history tour with Stony Brook students and he told me about his experience at a Gilder-Lehrman seminar at Monticello last summer with Peter Onuf and Francis Cogliano. 

Brian Roberts asked me if I would be willing to preach in two services on Sunday morning and I agreed to do it.  Brian has spent the month of July doing a sermon series called "Let Freedom Ring."  He wants his congregation to be appreciative of American history, but he also wants them to realize that there is a fundamental difference between the United States of America and the kingdom of God.  Though preaching is a bit outside of my comfort zone, I thought the sermons went well. (I also ran into the mother of my college roommate.  I had no idea she attends St. Peter's). Brian and I think in very similar ways about how Christians should navigate their memberships in what Augustine called the "City of God" and the "City of Man."  He is doing great work at St. Peter's United Methodist and it was a pleasure to meet his family as well.  His daughter Alison will be coming to Messiah College in the fall so I am sure I will see him again.

The church treated us to a great lunch at the Port-o-Call Hotel. We had some good conversations with a group of church members (including William Becker, the chair of the history department at George Washington University), who met as undergraduates in the 1960s at Muhlenberg College and have remained friends through the years.

My family and I want to thank all the folks at St. Peter's, and especially Brian Roberts, for their hospitality this weekend.  It was a pleasure and blessing to spend time with the great people of St. Peter's United Methodist Church.  We hope to return to this church the next time we are in Ocean City.

Friday Night Chautauqua

Now I know how William Jennings Bryan felt when he spent his summers on the Chautauqua circuit.  Tonight I did a lecture on Was America Founded as a Christian Nation at the Pennsylvania Chautauqua in Mt. Gretna.  I spoke in a large lecture hall called the "Hall of Philosophy."  It was about 95 degrees and very muggy. The hall had no air conditioning.  Yet about 40 people showed up for the talk and most of them seemed to be interested.  Some even stayed a good 45 minutes following the lecture to talk about everything from Christian America to Presbyterians and the American Revolution to Messiah College to the history of American evangelicalism.  A great night with some great people, but I was thankful to get back in my air-conditioned car and drive out of the world of the late 19th century.

I hope it will be a bit cooler tomorrow in Ocean City, NJ.

Most Popular Posts of the Last Week

Here are the ten most visited posts this week at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

1. The Top Ten Most Religious Cities in America (November 2010).
2. A Little History Humor (May 2011).
3. Traditional Conservatives vs. Contemporary Conservatives (July 2011).
4. SHEAR 2011 (July 2011).
5. Michelle O'Bachmann (July 2011).
6. Kazin Rips Newt Gingrich (July 2011).
7. Joe DePugh Could Throw That Speedball By You and Make You Look Like a Fool Boy (July 2011).
8. Biblicism (July 2011).
9. Do Evangelical Politicians Help Evangelicals? (July 2011).
10. David Barton the Daily Show Series (May 2011).

Also receiving votes:

The Benefits of a Classroom Lecture (June 2011).

Using Sticky Notes to Stay Focused on Writing

Billie Hara, writing at ProfHacker blog, uses sticky-notes to clear her mind of distractions so she can concentrate on writing.  Here is a taste: 

Let’s set the scene: The house is empty (significant others are gone for several hours).  The house is spic-and-span clean.  The laundry is washed, folded, and put away.  The garage is organized and the gutters have been cleared.  The yard is mowed and the bills are paid.  You have snacks.  You have hot coffee.  You are wearing your most comfortable clothes.  Your hair is pulled back off your face (if you are like me, anyway).  The room temperature is a perfect 76 degrees (F).  Your research is where you can reach it.  Your pencils are sharpened and your pens work.  You have paper.  You have removed all distractions from your workspace.  You have settled down to write.

It’s then—when the conditions to write are perfect—that you start to think about your child’s soccer game, retrieving that obscure book that only one library in the nation holds, emailing an administrative assistant about a travel reimbursement, picking up your dry cleaning, applying for a national grant, updating your bibliographic software, or buying pretzels for next week’s party.  It’s a problem that all writers face:  how to tame those intrusive thoughts, especially when those thoughts are important.

One way to tame an intrusive thought is to put it on sticky note and put that note in a place where you won’t lose it.  Jot down these important ideas so you don’t forget, then get back to writing.  That sounds easy enough, but putting them on a simple sticky note might not be enough.  How might you organize those intrusive thoughts so that you can (1) get back to writing and (2) eventually accomplish the sticky note task?  You might want to try “the Falling Tree Method.”
The Falling Tree Method is a way to rank those sticky notes on a chart so you can get back to your writing.  Will the task take you a lot of time?  Is it important to your work?  Some of these tasks can be easily delegated (eventually to those absent significant others in your household, for example).  Some are important to your career, and can’t be delegated.  The point here is to write down the thought, rank it in some manner, and get back to work.

Read the rest here. My only concern is that philosophizing about how to chart my sticky notes will distract me from writing!

Today: WORD -FM and Pennsylvania Chautauqua

At 5:10pm EDT I will be a guest (again!) on the John and Kathy Show on WORD-FM, a Christian talk radio station in Pittsburgh. (You can listen live here).  I will be discussing my recent Patheos article "The Mis-Education of Evangelicals" and probably talking a bit about the role of the study of history in society.  (We will see what direction John and Kathy take the conversation).

After the interview I head out to Lebanon County to speak at  the Pennsylvania Chautauqua in Mt. Gretna.  7:30 in the Hall of Philosophy. (Pictured above). I hope to see some of you there.

Richard Mouw on Baloney Sandwiches with John Stott

At his blog "Mouw's Musings," Fuller Theological Seminary president Richard Mouw describes a meal he shared with the late John Stott.  Here is a taste:

It was the late 1980s and I was teaching a summer course at New College Berkeley. During that two week session John Stott visited the campus for a few public presentations. I attended his first talk, eager to see and hear in the flesh this man who  had so influenced me through his writings. When I arrived at the lecture hall, I had a difficult time finding a seat—the place was packed. And my hope for a chance to shake his hand afterward was not to be fulfilled. Long lines of people formed to meet him and have him autograph the books folks were clasping. So I left and went back to the room where I was staying, to work on my class lecture for the next day.

About two hours later, someone knocked at my door, telling me I had a phone call. It was John Stott. He had been told that I was in attendance at his talk, and he was sorry he missed meeting me. Was there any chance, he asked, that  we could have lunch together the next day? “Oh, yes!” I replied. “I would love to take you to lunch!”  No, Stott said, the  lunch had to be on him. And then he identified a time when we could meet, at a New College classroom.

Before we met, I checked out a few Berkeley restaurants, fully intending to override his offer and pay for the privilege of spending some time with him. When I arrived at the appointed place, though, John Stott handed me one of two small paper bags, and led me into the empty classroom. We sat facing each other in the little desk-seats, and he prayed a blessing over the lunch he had prepared for us: baloney sandwiches, apples and orange juice. I came to see that event as a kind a eucharistic feast!

Chris Beneke's Book Reviewing Decalogue

Last week we posted about Robert Pinsky's "golden requirements for book reviews."  Today Chris Beneke, writing at the blog of The Historical Society, has trumped Pinsky with his own book reviewing "Decalogue" for historians.  Beneke's 10 rules are both humorous and true.  Print these out and tack them to the bulletin board above the desk where you write book reviews!

1. Thou shalt not use the review to tell us about your own scholarship.

2. Thou shalt not tell readers that “the definitive history of such-and-such remains to be written” when you are the person who intends to write it.

3. Thou shalt not tell us too much—or really anything at all—about the supposed religious beliefs or political commitments of the author whose book is being reviewed.

4. Thou shalt not treat the omission of your own book from the endnotes as a personal affront, punishable by withering historiographical criticism.

5. Thou shalt not use the review to suck up to powerful and/or beloved members of the profession. (Corollary: Thou shalt honor thy dissertation advisor, but not in your review.)

6. Thou shalt not use the review as an occasion to advance a specific political agenda.

7. Thou shalt not tell readers—either explicitly or implicitly—that the book under review does not deserve serious consideration. That shalt be told to the editor, privately, before the review is written.

8. Thou shalt not submit the review six months after the due date, especially when the book was published three years ago.

9. Thou shalt not use the review to expose your utter ignorance of the topic.

10. In reviews of edited collections, thou shalt tell a little something about each contribution.

Dipatches from Graduate School--Part 34: HISTORY TO THE PEOPLE

Cali Pitchel McCullough is a Ph.D student in American history at Arizona State University. In this Dispatch she calls our attention to a new initiative in public history that she is getting off the ground. For earlier posts in this series click  here. --JF

I recently read (an all too familiar) article on Slate.com about the current state of higher education in the Humanities. William Pannapacker, a professor at a liberal arts college, laments the plight of the untenured Ph.D.—underpaid, overworked, and inexperienced—teaching high volume undergraduate courses while the increasingly small cohort of advanced researchers pen monographs from their comfy chairs.

He paints a grim picture of my potential future, one of joblessness and severe debt. In fact, Pannapacker recommends graduate school in the humanities only “if you are independently wealthy,” or possibly “well-connected in the field you plan to enter (e.g., your mom is the president of an Ivy League university).” He offers six solutions to the problem, perhaps the most provocative being to simply walk away. Essentially, he’s advocating for a strike, a walk out. He advises not “to return to school this fall,” despite the fact that “the academic labor system depends on it.”

I most appreciate solution number five: train students for real careers. Dr. Fea strongly advocates for this position (make sure you check out his series of blog posts on what you can do with a history major). I really like what Pannapacker has to say here: 

Graduate programs must stop stigmatizing everything besides tenure-track positions at research universities that almost no one will get. They should cultivate an "alternative academic" sensibility by redesigning graduate school as professional training, including internships and networking opportunities, and working with other departments and programs, including partnerships with other institutions, granting agencies, government, and business to cultivate humanists who are prepared for hybrid careers in technology ("the digital humanities"), research, consulting, fundraising, publishing, and ethical leadership. They should cultivate new ways for people with humanities sensibilities to build entrepreneurial projects outside of traditional academe, and make these alternative paths the norm, without shame. Successful programs should be celebrated as credible alternatives to traditional programs with poor academic placement records.

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I have taken it upon myself to start thinking more seriously about my future. Would I love the aforementioned tenure-track position at a small liberal arts college in Grantham, Pennsylvania (hint, hint)? Of course, but I also need a reorientation of the way I think about this Ph.D. Rather than envision a career outside of the academy as the runner-up, I want to celebrate the skills and training I’ve I received that can translate anywhere—classroom or cubicle.

Enter: History to the People: Helping you think historically since 2011.

Earlier this week I purchased historytothepeople.org from GoDaddy. I had been thinking about the name for a few months and after reading Pannapacker’s article, I decided to spring for the $70 URL. (Some people call me compulsive, I prefer easily excitable with a strong propensity for launch.)  I have pretty grand visions for this project—k-12 resources, regular blog posts, videos and podcasts, perhaps some book reviews, and certainly a store for History to the People swag like coffee mugs and canvas tote bags.

Most of this is conception at this point, but the gist is this (and I know Dr. Fea can attest to his own interest in this subject): the walls between academic history and “the people” needs to come down. Fostering a sense of historical thinking in all people is crucial to making the world we live in a better place. In Dr. Fea’s own words, “when taught correctly, history will teach the virtues necessary to end the culture wars, transform our ways of thinking about others, and, in some small way, bring meaningful change to the world.”

What better way to do this than to bring history to the people? Free of cost and jargon, historytothepeople.org will be a place for people like my dad to engage in dialogue, to ask questions about the past, and to walk away with a greater understanding of how a more intimate knowledge with the past makes for a better future.

The possibilities are endless, and I respect and appreciate this community tremendously. But now I’m going to ask something of you. I need your feedback. What would you or your friends and family like to see on historytothepeople.org? Are you interested in contributing? Do you know a K-12 teacher that might want to help us think about our resources page?

Any thoughts or suggestions help. We want to make this the best it can be and can only do so with the support of people who already have a deep passion for the study of history.

What is the Most Important Sermon in American History?

Scot McKnight asks this question over at Jesus Creed, but his audience is mostly interested in theology. (So far they have suggested sermons by contemporary preachers Rob Bell and John Piper, to name a few).   I want to hear what historians and students of history think.

What is the most important (in terms of historical influence) sermon in American history?  The sermon must have been preached in either colonial America (defined broadly) or the United States (1776 to the present).

GO!

P.S.  Sometimes the conversation is better over at Facebook.  Feel free to "friend" me to get in the mix or at least read what others have to say.  Of course you are always welcome to respond in the comments here as well.

Randall Balmer on the Death of John Stott

One of our foremost chroniclers of modern evangelicalism shares his thoughts on the death of one evangelicalism's brightest stars.  Here is a taste of Balmer's piece at Religion Dispatches.

...The other remarkable characteristic of Stott was that he was no sectarian. As a priest in the Church of England, he chose to remain there rather than head off in a separate direction in search of some chimera of evangelical purity. In many ways the defining moment of his career came back in 1966 when Stott was chairing the National Assembly of Evangelicals. In the course of the proceedings, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, another prominent evangelical, made the case that evangelicals within the Church of England should defect and start their own group. Though not slated to speak, Stott, as chair, eloquently rebutted Lloyd-Jones, and most evangelicals chose to remain in the Church of England.

In contrast to many American evangelicals, Stott also supported the ordination of women.

Without any question, American evangelicals have profited from the life and work of John R. W. Stott. His book Basic Christianity, first published in 1958, remains something of an evangelical classic. But evangelicals could appropriate much more from this extraordinary man: his views on social responsibility, his attitude toward women, his aversion to sectarianism and, most of all, his gentle and irenic manner.

Teaching War

Dwight Simon teaches history to middle-schoolers at Epiphany School in Boston.  In this very thoughtful essay at The Smart Set, he reflects on "the seductive stories of mankind's battles."

...as a teacher of history, as a teacher of wars, imagine the knotting of stomach and tightening of chest that occurred when I encountered, seven years late, Drew Gilpin Faust’s article ‘“We should grow too fond of it’: why we love the Civil War.” Faust writes:

War is, by its very definition, a story. War imposes an orderly narrative on what without its definition of purpose and structure would be simply violence. We as writers create that story; we remember that story; we provide the narrative that by its very existence defines war's purpose and meaning. We love war because of these stories. But we should ask ourselves how in the construction of war's stories we may be helping to construct war itself.

Amplified in her recent Jefferson Lecture and supplemented by her Bancroft Prize-winning This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, the last decade of Faust’s scholarship forces historians into the uncomfortable work of reassessing their assumptions about war, how war stories are told, and how the very study of war by a disproportionate number of historians may in fact serve to perpetuate it.

But surely historians aren’t the only ones at fault here. While Faust asks hard questions of her own profession, let me present the same fearful possibility to the teachers of America’s millions of primary and secondary school students. Have we — by the curricula we accept, the readings we assign, the stories we tell, the movies we show — glamorized war, infused it with meaning, and made it normal and respectable for future generations to wage?

By structuring curriculum in certain ways, we shape the next generation’s perception of past reality. Indeed, it is possible — likely, even — that for many in times and places past, war was a priority, so by making it a priority in our classrooms we simply reflect what once was. But I fear, with Faust, that our project is much more creative. That by making war a priority in our curriculum – organizing teaching units around it, surrounding ourselves with gripping stories about it – we actually make war a priority in ways that it wasn’t. We construct a past that never was, and in doing so construct a future that need not be: a world in which war is a constant presence, a fellow traveler. A world in which war is normal. Operating out of such a norm, might our students move on to build such a world themselves? “Our narratives are not just modeled from war,” Faust insists, “they become models for war.” 

For many of my students, war is a video game, war is a Hollywood movie. Many boys, socialized neatly into aggression and weaponry just as society seems to have wanted it, use their video game experiences of war and combat to situate and understand their classroom study of war. Admittedly, this is often helpful. Students bring a sort of first-hand knowledge of the strategy and boots-on-the-ground experience of war that could hardly be possible without such innovative virtual tools. Even more, it’s worth noting that while video games are easy fodder for the declinists of each generation, there is still much disagreement about whether a person’s behavior in the virtual world of gaming encourages corresponding actions in real life. While several of my students seem to spend every waking weekend hour sniping Nazi zombies and other enemy combatants in the sprawling Call of Duty franchise, this has thankfully not caused any of them to actually become snipers, their non-virtual time much more innocuously spent debating new colors of skinny jeans or engaging in the hopelessly Darwinian struggle that is middle school lunch and recess.  

And yet I wonder. Faced with these very fears that Faust brings up, I endeavored to make my eighth graders’ study of the Civil War more reflective, with qualitative and quantitative data on the deadly costs of the war. Faust’s This Republic of Suffering helped here. Culling statistics and quotes from her book, I sought to confront my students with the terrible pain and suffering that accompanies war. The handout I eventually distributed — a proud achievement, I thought — included a quick-fire compendium of devastating statistics and provocative reflections from soldiers, the enslaved, and observers of all kinds, alongside several grim photographs of Civil War battlefield dead. At the end, I asked students to reflect: “Was the war worth it?” Forced to balance the overwhelming statistics of dead and wounded — of battlefields flowing with blood and piled with bodies — with the prospect of slavery abolished, most students seemed relatively unconflicted: the war was worth it.  

Read the rest here.

The First British Report of American Independence

When did the British hear the news about the Declaration of Independence?  According to Rag Linen, an "online museum and education archive of rare and historic newspapers," the first mention of American independence appeared in the August 10-13, 1776 issue of the London Chronicle.  Here it is:

Advice is received that the Congress resolved upon independence the 4th of July; and, it is said, have declared war against Great Britain in form. 

Well I Got This Guitar and I Learned How to Make It Talk

Will you be anywhere near Belmar, New Jersey this summer?  If so, stop by the corner of 10th Avenue (as in "10th Avenue Freeze Out") and E Street (as in the "E-Street Band") and see the eight-foot high replica of Bruce Springsteen's Fender Esquire guitar.  Here is a taste from the Springsteen blog at the Star Ledger:


The guitar was made by Bob Mataranglo  of Lakewood and commissioned by the Belmar Tourism Commission.

"We worked on it for over a month. It was supposed to be installed in May but that was delayed," said  Mataranglo. "Then when Clarence Clemons died, we decided to wait a little longer."

Two years ago, Mataranglo painted an E Street mural on the second floor of a building on the northwest corner of Main Street and 10th Avenue in Belmar.

"After doing the mural, the Belmar Tourism Commission approached me about doing something on the corner of 10th Avenue and E Street, on the library lawn," he said.

The intersection has been long associated with Springsteen since it is the E Street that Bruce got the name for his E Street Band. It has been a photo-op for years for Springsteen fans from around the world.

Original E Street Band keyboard player David Sancious lived at 1105 E Street in the 1970s.  Many believe that it's the 10th Avenue from "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" but others, including myself, believe that song refers to 10th Avenue in Manhattan.

"I saw the guitar on the cover of  'Born to Run' and thought that would be something to work on," said  Mataranglo. "There was a group of us and we brainstormed about the imagery.

Graduate School Life

Keith Harris, a Ph.D in American history (Civil War) from the University of Virginia, has set his sights "on becoming one of the most recognized Internet historians out there."  His home base is a blog called Cosmic America.



It seems to me that Keith is off to a good start.  In a post blending humor and wisdom, he offers a prospective graduate students some advice about the doctoral program at UVA and graduate school in general.  Here is a taste:


Do you have an extra job besides your full-time commitment to school?

HAHAHAHAHA – but sadly, yes. Most students are assigned graderships in their first year and then teach sections from then on. I also picked up a little gig at the special collections library to fill my “spare” time and make some extra money (turns out, this was a good thing. I managed to simultaneously do on-the-job research for my MA). The University places limits on how many hours one can work each week – the logic being: you will not get distracted by work and will be able to focus on your studies. The reality is that the few hours permitted to prepare for section discussions or even grade a stack of 120 mid-term essays is entirely unrealistic. Do not expect to get much sleep.

Are you pursuing any research-related opportunities this summer? Is this typical?

Dude, my advice to you is to go to Cabo. But since you are a glutton for punishment – as evidenced by your desire to actually pursue an advanced degree in the humanities given the current state of affairs – you won’t. Yes, many students, myself included, seek research opportunities during the summer (and holidays breaks as well). There are plenty of them out there depending on your topic, many are funded…some generously (check out Gilder-Lerhman – they made my life very easy when I was researching for my dissertation).

HT

Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? Kindle Edition for $3.99

Amazon is offering this great deal on the Kindle edition of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction. 

John Stott, R.I.P.

One of the great leaders of 20th-century evangelicalism passed away today.  Stott meant a lot of things to a lot of people, but I will always remember  him through four of his books that I read in college and divinity school:

Personal Evangelism

Basic Christianity (which I still recommend to anyone who wants to understand the Christian faith).


Your Mind Matters: The Place of the Mind in the Christian Life.  Stott was calling for an "evangelical mind" over twenty years before Noll's famous Scandal.

The Cross of Christ.

I haven't read much of Stott in recent years, but I do remember when David Brooks, writing in the midst of the culture wars, introduced Stott to a host of New York Times readers who had never heard of him.  Here is a taste of that piece from November 30, 2004.

There is a world of difference between real-life people of faith and the made-for-TV, Elmer Gantry-style blowhards who are selected to represent them. Falwell and Pat Robertson are held up as spokesmen for evangelicals, which is ridiculous. Meanwhile people like John Stott, who are actually important, get ignored.

It could be that you have never heard of John Stott. I don't blame you. As far as I can tell, Stott has never appeared on an important American news program. A computer search suggests that Stott's name hasn't appeared in this newspaper since April 10, 1956, and it's never appeared in many other important publications.

Yet, as Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center notes, if evangelicals could elect a pope, Stott is the person they would likely choose. He was the framer of the Lausanne Covenant, a crucial organizing document for modern evangelicalism. He is the author of more than 40 books, which have been translated into over 72 languages and have sold in the millions. Now rector emeritus at All Souls, Langham Place, in London, he has traveled the world preaching and teaching...

Not Falwell, but Stott.

Good News for the Separation of Church and State

According to the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, 67% of Americans believe that the First Amendment teaches "a clear separation between church and state."  Here is a taste from the report summary:

It’s been a good month for the much-maligned, often misunderstood principle of church-state separation.

A whopping 67% of the American people agree that the First Amendment “requires a clear separation of church and state,” according to the 2011 State of the First Amendment survey released July 12 by the First Amendment Center.

This is somewhat surprising given the decades-old culture-war fight over the meaning and scope of separation.
For decades now, Christian-nation advocates have tried to convince Americans that “separation of church and state isn’t in the First Amendment.” They have peddled a revisionist account of a “Christian America” that should (at best) tolerate other faiths to reside here.

Apparently, the American people aren’t buying the propaganda.

It’s true that the actual words “separation of church and state” aren’t in the Constitution. But as the majority of Americans understand, the principle of separation clearly is.
The establishment clause of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) prohibits government entanglement with religion — a principle of religious freedom described by Roger Williams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as “separation of church and state.”

The article goes on to tell the story of how southern Sudan has recently celebrated the separation of mosque and state and it concludes that the "American idea of religious liberty — separating church from state and protecting free exercise of religion — may well be our greatest contribution to world civilization."     Interesting stuff.

New Issue of Fides et Historia

As a Christian who is a historian, I have the privilege of sitting on the editorial board of Fides et Historia, the journal of the Conference on Faith and History.  The journal has been around since the 1970s, but it has recently been revamped by its new editors, Donald Yerxa and Randall Stephens.

In a recent post at Religion in American History, Randall Stephens reveals the table of contents for the Fall 2011 edition. It includes a brief forum on Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation,  a book I edited last year with Jay Green and Eric Miller.

If you are not a member of the Conference on Faith and History, you should be.  I believe that the Conference still offers free membership to graduate students.

From the Editor
Donald A. Yerxa

Forum: Reconciling the Historian’s
Craft and Religious Commitment

Introduction

Mormon History Inside Out
Richard Lyman Bushman

Historians' Metaphysical Beliefs and the Writing of Confessional Histories
Brad Gregory

Coming to Terms as a Christian Historian with F. H. Bradley
Mark A. Noll

Writing Religious History as a Believer
Anthea Butler

The Wrong Question! Please Change the Subject!
David A. Hollinger

A Response to Bushman, Gregory, and Noll
Bruce Kuklick

Reflections on Reconciling Religious Belief and the Historian’s Craft
Paul E. Kerry

Roundtable: Confessing History

Introduction

Confessing History: In Retrospect
Jay Green

Confessing History: Prospect
Eric Miller

Comment
Rick Kennedy

Comment
Donald A. Yerxa

Review Essays:

Catholic Approaches to Faith and History
Christopher Shannon

War’s Providence
Chris Beneke

Media Review:

God in America (WGBH, American Experience, Frontline)
Maura Jane Farrelly

On Teaching with God in America
Randall J. Stephens

Book Reviews

Lord, Thank You For GM Performance Technology and Sunoco Racing Fuel

You can't make this stuff up.  The video says it all.

Norway Will Never Be the Same

Jo Nesbo, a Norwegian writer, reflects on how the recent bombing has changed Norway forever.  Here is a taste:


For many years, it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months, travel the world, through coups d’état, assassinations, famines, massacres and tsunamis, and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle. It was a country where everyone’s material needs were provided for. Political consensus was overwhelming, the debates focused primarily on how to achieve the goals that everyone had already agreed on. Ideological disagreements arose only when the reality of the rest of the world began to encroach, when a nation that until the 1970s had consisted largely of people of the same ethnic and cultural background had to decide whether its new citizens should be allowed to wear the hijab and build mosques.

Still, until Friday, we thought of our country as a virgin — unsullied by the ills of society. An exaggeration, of course. And yet. 

In June I was bicycling with the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, and a mutual friend through Oslo, setting out for a hike on a forested mountain slope in this big yet little city. Two bodyguards followed us, also on bicycles. As we stopped at an intersection for a red light, a car drove up beside the prime minister. The driver called out through the open window: “Jens! There’s a little boy here who thinks it would be cool to say hello to you.”

The prime minister smiled and shook hands with the little boy in the passenger seat. “Hi, I’m Jens.”
The prime minister wearing his bike helmet; the boy wearing his seat belt; both of them stopped for a red light. The bodyguards had stopped a discreet distance behind. Smiling. It’s an image of safety and mutual trust. Of the ordinary, idyllic society that we all took for granted. How could anything go wrong? We had bike helmets and seat belts, and we were obeying the traffic rules.

Of course something could go wrong. Something can always go wrong.

Read the entire piece here.

Green Universities

The Environmental Protection Agency has listed the 20 colleges and universities that have purchased the most "green power."  Pennsylvania dominates the list with the University of Pennsylvania leading the way.  (Carnegie Mellon, Drexel, and Penn State are also in the top ten).  One surprising entry (at least for me) in the top ten was the University of Phoenix.

See if your place of employment or alma mater made the list.

Digital Maps

I am fascinated by this, but I know absolutely nothing about it.  Patricia Cohen has a very helpful article at The New York Times on the way Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is transforming our historical understanding.  I am convinced that any undergraduate or graduate students interested in a career in public history needs to be able to use this technology.  Here is a taste:

Today visitors to Gettysburg can climb to the cupola of the Lutheran seminary, where Lee stationed himself on July 2, the second day of fighting; or stand on Seminary Ridge, where the next day Lee watched from behind the Confederate lines as thousands of his men advanced across the open farmland to their deaths in the notorious Pickett’s Charge. But they won’t see what the general saw because the intervening years have altered the topography. Over the decades a quarry, a reservoir, different plants and trees have been added, and elevations have changed as a result of mechanical plowing and erosion.

Geographic Information Systems, known as GIS, allowed Ms. Knowles and her colleagues to recreate a digital version of the original Gettysburg battlefield from historical maps, documented descriptions of troop positions and scenery, and renderings of historic roads, fences, buildings and vegetation. “The only way I knew how to answer the question,” about what Lee saw, Ms. Knowles said, “was to recreate the ground digitally using GIS and then ask the GIS program: What can you see from a certain position on the digital landscape, and what can you not see?”  

She said her work helps “make Lee’s dilemma more vivid and personal.” Nineteenth-century military leaders relied primarily on their own eyes, and small differences in elevation were strategically important. “Lee probably could not have possibly seen the massive federal forces building up on the eastern side of the battlefield on Day 2 during the famous attack on Little Round Top,” Ms. Knowles said. “He had to make decisions with really inadequate information.”

Understanding Our Fascination with Robert E. Lee

Dwight D. Eisenhower thought he was one of the four greatest Americans. The defenders of the southern "Lost Cause" glorified him. The Southern Historical Society rehabilitated him and managed to get everyone to believe that the Confederate loss in the Civil War was all James Longstreet's fault.  The New York Herald extolled his virtue.  Frederick Douglass complained that he could not find a northern newspaper "that is not filled with nauseating flatteries" of him.  Theodore Roosevelt called him "the very greatest of all the great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth."  Historian Douglass Southall Freeman called him "one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen."

Why are we so obsessed with Robert E. Lee.  James Cobb of the University of Georgia tries to make sense of it all in a recent piece in Humanities.  Here is a taste:

...a 1996 survey indicating that he (Lee) was still admired by 64 percent of respondents in the South and 60 percent of those outside it suggests that, for many Americans, Robert E. Lee remains something of a Teflon icon. Even a reviewer who criticized an NEH-supported January 2011 PBS documentary on Lee for taking it too easy on “a slavery apologist” whose “Old Dominion snobbery and sense of honor” had led him to “back the wrong side for the wrong reasons” had to admit the subject of the film himself was “a whole lotta man.” Not everyone, of course, is willing to grant Lee such benefit of the doubt, particularly African Americans troubled by Lee’s actual and figurative connections with the persecution of their forebears. Understandably, they would prefer to see other, more affirmative icons front and center in a hotly contested public memory that frequently tells us less about a broadly defined past than the aims and sensibilities of those who seem to hold sway in the present. Denying that whites held sole claim to what “the South” means, Natasha Trethewey explained, “I don’t want to take it away from anyone. I just want them to recognize that it’s mine, too.”

So What CAN You Do With a History Major?--Part 34

Work as an editor and writer.

I recently spent some time chatting with Scott Rohrer, an independent historian with a Ph.D from the University of Virginia who works full-time in Washington D.C. as an editor at National Journal.  Though Scott works in journalism, he has also written two excellent works of historical scholarship:  Hope's Promise: Religion and Acculturation in the Southern Backcountry and Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630-1865. (See my review of of Wandering Souls here and Mark Noll's review here).  He is currently at work on his third book, a study of religion, politics, and reform during the era of the American Revolution.

I think anyone contemplating what to do with a history major will benefit greatly from Scott's vocational journey.  Enjoy!  --JF

I grew up in a household of businessmen. My father was a salesman and a business executive; his father was a mechanical engineer. My two older brothers were science majors who ended up becoming salesmen, too, when they graduated from college. Me? I was the odd duck. I hated my science classes and wanted nothing to do with the world of business. No, there was only one subject that engaged me, and that interest in history began at an early age.
 
I could not get enough of Williamsburg as a child, and my mother encouraged me in this regard. She loved all things Williamsburg: the architecture, the furnishings, even the paint colors (the dining and living rooms of our houses always had to be in Williamsburg colors). And then there was my paternal grandfather. He lived in a large Pennsylvania stone house in Germantown, just north of Philadelphia, that he built in 1929. City life was quite a change for him—he was born and raised on a small farm in Lancaster County, Pa. He was a Mennonite, as were my ancestors, until he moved to Philadelphia in 1907 to attend the University of Pennsylvania. He loved to talk family history, and we took many a trip to the family homestead in the 1960s, before Lancaster had become the tourist trap it is today. An unspoiled Lancaster was a step back in time. The Amish in their buggies were enthralling, of course, but it was the tiny, rickety Victorian farmhouse my great-grandfather built with his own hands in the 1880s and the big red barn housing a Model T and dusty farm implements from another century that really captured my interest. These trips, along with some good history teachers, fanned my love affair with history, specifically early American history. As I got older this love of the colonial era only deepened.

As an undergraduate at Syracuse University, I decided to major in history and journalism, but I didn’t have the foggiest idea of what I could do with that B.A. in history. Instead, I focused on my second degree and went to work for a newspaper in New Jersey. Still, history was never far from my thoughts, and I used those first years on my own to read as much history as I could. Then I realized I wanted to attend graduate school to study even more. What to write about? No idea. What to do with an M.A.? No idea. All I knew was that I loved early American history and, specifically, Thomas Jefferson. So off I went to Charlottesville (I still consider getting accepted into the University of Virginia as one of the happiest days of my life, trailing only the birth of my son and the marriage to my wife). I left Mr. Jefferson’s University one year later with an M.A. in American history—and still no idea what to do with my degree.

So it was back to newspaper work, this time in Charlotte, N.C. The pull of history remained, of course—a powerful itch that I was unable to make go away. I tried scratching it by pursuing a history-related passion: My wife, Anne, and I restored an antebellum house in Salisbury, N.C., a vernacular Greek revival that was built by the town banker as a rental house for German immigrants. But historical renovation was a mere hobby (albeit an interesting one), and I continued thinking deeper about what I could do in history. Because of a severe hearing impairment, teaching was not exactly realistic for me. And I was not yet ready to write because I didn’t yet know what I wanted to write about.

So, a bit bored with my newspaper job, I decided to give museum work a shot; one day I got in the car and went knocking on the door at Old Salem Inc., the restored Moravian town in Winston-Salem, N.C., to offer my services as a researcher. They were happy to have me, especially because I was willing to work for free. That decision to get in the car led to a decade of part-time museum consulting. I started out doing small projects, mostly researching house histories, but as Old Salem gained confidence in me, I graduated to bigger and bigger projects, culminating in a project that involved researching the congregational history of a Moravian slave church that Old Salem wanted to turn into a museum. I also did some research for Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest.

But it was Old Salem that engaged me. The complexity of the Moravian community utterly fascinated me, and it reintroduced me to my Mennonite roots. I at last knew what I wanted to write about and study, and I decided to get a Ph.D. in history at UVA, and to make social and religious history my special field. It was one of the better decisions I made. Additional study gave me the knowledge I needed to master my field, as well as the tools to perform the onerous research involved with writing books.

I was lucky in some ways. For years I had no idea what I was doing and had no role models to emulate. I was the first in my family of businessmen to go to grad school, and I didn’t have the foggiest idea of how grad school worked. I had little understanding of what historians did and the types of jobs that existed outside of academia. But I tried things, and that was key. I learned a lot, each step of the way.

My advice to people starting out after college is to cultivate their passions. Don’t worry about money (yet) or let the odds discourage you. Explore different things. I didn’t make a lot of money from my museum work, but it was a rich experience in every other way. I got to meet the most fascinating people—archaeologists, architectural historians, preservationists, and historians—who taught me so much about their fields of work. And my research at Old Salem directly led to my becoming a scholar in religious and social history.

Do ask questions and try different things. Even failure can be valuable. While in graduate school, I tried my hand at historical editing by working on the Papers of George Washington. I hated it. But that was OK: it clarified what I really wanted—to research and write books in my chosen field. Writing is the most important thing to me.

And do cultivate different interests: It can make you a better historian. Historians, for example, can learn a lot from the storytelling techniques of novelists, so I read as much fiction as I can. I am still absorbed by, and benefit from, journalism. Working as a full-time editor makes me a better writer. (I currently oversee copyediting operations for National Journal Group in Washington,  D.C.: our copy desk edits the stories for four publications, including a weekly magazine and a small daily newspaper.) It also gives me the income to pursue history. And the two fields are complementary. Journalists, as the cliché goes, are the recorders of contemporary history. Many of the stories at National Journal dig deeply into a subject and explore the historical roots of an issue. Plus, I’ve been able to parlay my background in history and journalism into a great freelancing job as a line editor and book reviewer at American Heritage. Working with narrative history, in turn, infuses my research and writing.

The list of possibilities for those with a history degree is actually quite endless. Like old houses? Consider preservation work or studying architectural history. Like museums? There’s much work to be done there in research, publications, or interpretation. Enjoy history, old documents, and detective work (i.e., tracking down obscure references in letters)? Then historical editing may be for you. Government is another huge area—many federal agencies and institutions employ historians. Journalism remains a wonderful haven for the history-minded.

All in all, think about what’s a good fit for you and your interests. Then do your research and get to work.

Digital Resources on the Siege of Boston

If you are a teacher (or professor) who has to teach your students something about the Continental Army's 1775 siege of Boston, check out today's post at Boston 1775.  J.L. Bell has provided some great online resources that you can use in your classroom.  Here is a taste:

Yesterday’s posting listed the links we’re using right now in a Massachusetts Historical Society workshop on the siege of Boston. Those all come from the M.H.S.’s own holdings and digital resources. But I think we might want to check other online sources for day-by-day records of 1775-76 to fill those out.

Starting at the top, George Washington’s official papers from the siege are at the Library of Congress, with searchable texts, transcriptions, and document images (taken from microfilm). Their volume can be overwhelming, so I sometimes prefer to start with the University of Virginia’s chronological archive of the early-20th-century edition of Washington’s writings: 1770 through September 1775, and September 1775 through May 1776.

Before Washington arrived in Massachusetts, the general in charge was Artemas Ward. The M.H.S. has digitized some crucial days from Gen. Ward’s orderly book as Washington took over. In the late 1800s, the society published a longer transcription of Col. William Henshaw’s orderly book. Henshaw was Ward’s adjutant, and then top deputy to Gen. Horatio Gates, so this contains useful information about the running of the American army in 1775.

Read the rest here.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown Festschrift on its Way

Randall Stephens, a student of the noted southern historian and author Bertram Wyatt-Brown, informs us of an upcoming Festschrift to honor Brown's work.  Southern Character: Essays in Honor of Bertram Wyatt Brown is edited by Lisa Tendrich Frank and Daniel Kilbride and will appear in the Fall with the University Press of Florida.

If you are a southern historian who can't wait for this book to arrive, check out Randall's audio interview with Brown about his most famous book, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South.

Some New Finds on Religion and the 2012 Presidential Election

The Public Religion Research Institute has just released a new poll tracking the role of religion in the upcoming presidential election.  You can read the entire report here, but in the meantime here are a few of the findings:

--56% of Americans say it is very important or somewhat important for a presidential candidate to have strong religious beliefs.  The number, as you might guess, is higher among Republicans (71%) and members of the Tea Party (72%) than it is among Democrats (51%).  Yet I do think it is significant that the majority of Democrats believe that strong religious faith is important for a presidential candidate.

--Only 40% of Americans correctly identified Mitt Romney as a Mormon.   Republicans and members of the Tea Party are more likely to know Romney is a Mormon than Democrats.  54% of Fox News viewers knew Romney was a Mormon, but only 26% of CNN viewers knew it.

--18% of Americans still believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim.

--When asked whether Obama, George Bush, or one of the current presidential candidates best reflect their own religious beliefs, most Americans chose Bush.

OK pundits--tell me what this all means.

What Would Madison Do?

Over at her excellent blog, My Stories, Beth Lewis Pardoe offers some sane and reasoned historical thinking about the Tea Party Movement, factions, tyranny, and James Madison's (perhaps flawed?) understanding of a republic.  Here is a taste:

Poor James Madison thought he had the risks of republics beat.  He stood Hume’s ideal government on its head in order to prevent tyranny of the majority with the creation of so many electoral units that even if a majority tyrannized one, they could never terrorize the whole.

He failed to imagine that if a mere minority of congressional districts fell victim to the tyranny of their internal majorities, their congressional representatives could hold the full federation hostage.  Whoops!

Read the rest here.

A "Christian A-Team" at the King's College

Journalist Andrew Maratz, writing in New York Magazine, profiles The King's College, a Christian college in Manhattan.  The president of the college is the conservative intellectual Dinesh D'Souza. We have discussed King's College before here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.  Click here and here  to get up to speed.

According to Marantz, King's, since its move to Manhattan, has been understood by its donors, trustees, and many of its students as both a Christian college and a politically conservative college.  D'Souza, who does not have very deep roots in the evangelical community, but has been a leader of a very strident brand of conservatism which has been especially harsh on Barack Obama, has now made the college's political mission abundantly clear. 

Yet not everyone at King's is happy with D'Souza and his attempt to form a "Christian A-Team" of young evangelicals  ready to engage American culture.  Marantz writes:


If the board of trustees hoped a marquee conservative would help with fund-raising, their gamble could still pay off. Yet signs suggest that the King’s community may find D’Souza more divisive than galvanizing. Some King’s professors are considering resignation next fall rather than pledging allegiance to their new president. “I mean, I’m a conservative,” one tells me. “I didn’t vote for Obama. But I don’t hate him.”


Rynn Reed, a rising sophomore from Dallas with blonde hair and a nose ring, identifies herself as a progressive. “The students and most of the professors are totally smart and open to argument,” she says, but D’Souza can be too strident. “I would hate to see King’s written off as a right-wing breeding ground, but there’s definitely potential for that with him.” Another student who wishes to remain anonymous says of D’Souza, “He’d rather shout at his opponents than listen to them. That kind of aggressive rhetoric gives us no credibility and is not what I thought King’s was supposed to be all about.”

Jonathan Fitzgerald, a writer who grew up Pentecostal and now identifies as a “post-Evangelical,” was an adjunct at King’s for one semester. He was not asked to renew his contract, which he suspects had to do with the fact that he considers himself a liberal. “What you’re supposed to be when you come out of King’s is an infiltrator,” Fitzgerald tells me. “There’s a definite sense of, ‘Imagine what we could do if all the courts were Christian, if all the banks were Christian.’ You know, I grew up around people talking about ‘engaging’ the culture. What does engage mean except ‘infiltrate’?”

Whatever one thinks about the mission of The King's College, it certainly looks a lot different from the school founded by youth worker Percy Crawford in 1938 and brought to prominence in evangelical circles by Robert "walk with the King today and be blessing" Cook, a former president of the National Association of Evangelicals and National Religious Broadcasters.

Yesterday in Fairfax. This Weekend in Mt. Gretna and Ocean City, NJ

Yesterday I gave a talk on Christian America and race at the Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Fairfax, VA.  I welcomed the chance to reorganize some of the material from Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? so that I could center my talk on race and slavery.  I focused on three episodes in American history.  First, I discussed the founding fathers and slavery with a particular emphasis on Thomas Jefferson.  Second, I discussed how the leaders of both the Union and the Confederacy understood themselves to be part of a "Christian nation."  Third, I discussed Martin Luther King's vision for a Christian America through an analysis of his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

Thanks to Henry Brinton, pastor of the Fairfax Presbyterian Church and a writer in his own right, for inviting me to speak.  I also want to thank the members of the Fairfax Church for preparing a wonderful brunch before the talk.

Just a reminder:  If you live in the Lancaster/Lebanon, PA area,  I will be speaking at the Pennsylvania Chatauqua in Mt. Gretna on Friday night at 7:30pm.  The lecture will take place in the Hall of Philosophy.   My topic, of course, will be "Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?"

If you are vacationing at the Jersey shore this weekend, come by the St. Peter's United Methodist Church in Ocean City where I will be speaking on the same subject on Saturday evening, July 30 at 7:00pm.  I will also be preaching (yes you read that correctly!) during the 9:00am and 10:00am services on Sunday, July 31.

If you are at either of these events make sure you come up and say hello.

Traditional Conservatives vs. Contemporary Conservatives

Over at HNN, Caroline Hamilton of the University of Pittsburgh compares the traditional conservatism of Russell Kirk and friends with the contemporary conservatism of Huckabee, Palin, and Bachmann.  Here is a taste:

The anthology reveals a great deal about what we might call (although it seems redundant) “traditional conservatism.”  As the names of Newman, Lewis, and Eliot suggest, old-school conservatives espoused a high-church version of Christianity—Anglicanism/Episcopalianism and Catholicism.  Contemporary American “conservatives,” like Mike Huckabee (whose surname is a corruption of Huxtable), practice a low-church, evangelical, dogmatic version of Christianity.  Eliot and his allies refer to the intellectual work of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Pierre Abelard, and other prominent, quarrelling theologians—figures whose famously hair-splitting debates American evangelicals are surely unfamiliar with.  Of course, some of these high-church conservatives were appallingly anti-Semitic, while fundamentalist conservatives strongly support Israel—but that support stems from various hopes and predictions about the preconditions for a second coming of Christ.

Another difference between traditional and contemporary conservatives is evident in their attitudes toward business.  As supporters and admirers of an aristocracy, whether landed or natural, traditional conservatives regarded “trade” with disdain.  Indeed, their critiques of industrialism and commerce influenced nineteenth-century socialist thinkers from William Morris to Karl Marx.  “The cash nexus is not the sole nexus of man with man,” declared the acidly conservative Thomas Carlyle.  “Conservative” American politicians today, however, regard the acquisition of wealth and the workings of private enterprise as embodying the noblest aspirations and highest achievements of humanity.

Like traditional conservatives, contemporary conservatives look to the past as a model and see the present as an unfortunate falling off from common decencies and past glories.  But as Palin and Bachmann have recently shown, these ostentatious patriots are barely on speaking terms with American history.  Like certain legislators in Texas, they imagine the past as a kind of Disneyland, with an idealized Small Town, a sanitized Frontier Land, a benignly paternalistic Plantation Land, and an immigrant-free Tomorrow Land, all speckled with statuary of the Founders kneeling in prayer.  It strains the imagination to envision Bachmann or Rick Perry curled up with Ron Chernow’s erudite biography of George Washington.

In 20 Years You'll Need a Ph.D to be a Janitor

Writing for the New York Times "Education" page, Laura Pappano wonders if the master's degree has become the new bachelor's degree.  It seems that more and more entry level jobs are now requiring applicants to possess a master's degree.  Here are a few snippets from her illuminating piece:

Call it credential inflation. Once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D. or just a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, the master’s is now the fastest-growing degree. The number awarded, about 657,000 in 2009, has more than doubled since the 1980s, and the rate of increase has quickened substantially in the last couple of years, says Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master’s, about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s or higher in 1960...

...While many new master’s are in so-called STEM areas — science, technology, engineering and math — humanities departments, once allergic to applied degrees, are recognizing that not everyone is ivory tower-bound and are drafting credentials for résumé boosting.

“There is a trend toward thinking about professionalizing degrees,” acknowledges Carol B. Lynch, director of professional master’s programs at the Council of Graduate Schools. “At some point you need to get out of the library and out into the real world. If you are not giving people the skills to do that, we are not doing our job.”

This, she says, has led to master’s in public history (for work at a historical society or museum), in art (for managing galleries) and in music (for choir directors or the business side of music). Language departments are tweaking master’s degrees so graduates, with a portfolio of cultural knowledge and language skills, can land jobs with multinational companies...

“There is definitely some devaluing of the college degree going on,” says Eric A. Hanushek, an education economist at the Hoover Institution, and that gives the master’s extra signaling power. “We are going deeper into the pool of high school graduates for college attendance,” making a bachelor’s no longer an adequate screening measure of achievement for employers...

 Not only are we developing “the overeducated American,” he says, but the cost is borne by the students getting those degrees. “The beneficiaries are the colleges and the employers,” he says. Employers get employees with more training (that they don’t pay for), and universities fill seats. In his own department, he says, a master’s in financial economics can be a “cash cow” because it draws on existing faculty (“we give them a little extra money to do an overload”) and they charge higher tuition than for undergraduate work. “We have incentives to want to do this,” he says. He calls the proliferation of master’s degrees evidence of “credentialing gone amok.” He says, “In 20 years, you’ll need a Ph.D. to be a janitor..."


The history department at the University of South Florida has learned that just because a content-rich syllabus includes applied skills (and internships) doesn’t mean students will be hired. “Right now, yes, it’s very hard to get a job” with a master’s in public history, says Rosalind J. Beiler, chairwoman of the history department, noting that the downturn hurt employers like museums and historical societies.

The university is revamping its master’s in public history, a field that interprets academic history for general audiences, to emphasize new-media skills in the hopes of yielding more job placements. “That is precisely the reason we are going in that direction,” she says.

“Digital humanities,” as this broad movement is called, is leading faculty members to seek fresh ways to make history more accessible and relevant in their teaching and research. A professor of Middle Eastern history, for example, has made podcasts of local Iraqi war veterans in a course on the history of Iraq.

American History Now

No, this is not a post about Jim Cullen's excellent blog.

It is a post calling attention to a new book published by Temple University Press for the American Historical Association.  Over at AHA Today, Chris Hale offers a review of American History Now, a collection edited by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr that promises to be an essential overview of American historiography since 1990.  It looks like a must read for all American historians, especially graduate students preparing for comps.  You can read an excerpt from Alan Taylor's chapter on colonial America at the Temple University Press website.  In the meantime, here is the table of contents:


Part I: Eras of the American Past
1. Squaring the Circles: The Reach of Colonial America • Alan Taylor
2. American Revolution and Early Republic • Woody Holton
3. Jacksonian America • Seth Rockman
4. Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction • Adam Rothman
5. The Possibilities of Politics: Democracy in America, 1877 to 1917 • Robert D. Johnston
6. The Interwar Years • Lisa McGirr
7. The Uncertain Future of American Politics, 1940 to 1973 • Meg Jacobs
8. 1973 to the Present • Kim Phillips-Fein

Part II: Major Themes in the American Experience
9. The United States in the World • Erez Manela
10. The “Cultural Turn” • Lawrence B. Glickman
11. American Religion • John T. McGreevy
12. Frontiers, Borderlands, Wests • Stephen Aron
13. Environmental History • Sarah T. Phillips
14. History of American Capitalism • Sven Beckert
15. Women’s and Gender History • Rebecca Edwards
16. Immigration and Ethnic History • Mae M. Ngai
17. American Indians and the Study of U. S. History • Ned Blackhawk
18. African-American History • Kevin Gaines

Deerfield Dispatch #6

Katie Garland checks in from the Historic Deerfield Summer Fellowship Program.  Read the previous volumes of the Deerfield Dispatch here. -JF
 
I love research. History is the ultimate quest.  Although historians will never know the full story, they can strive to get as close to the truth as possible. There is something wonderful about the process of taking sources and piecing them together to tell a story.  There is something amazing about stepping into the shoes of someone who lived in the past and seeking to understand the world from his or her point of view.

One of the major components of the Historic Deerfield Summer Fellowship Program is a research paper.  For the past six weeks I have been busy doing research and this week I finally began to write.  This has been one of the most pleasurable research experiences of my life. The Memorial Libraries associated with Historic Deerfield and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA) have wonderful resources, both primary and secondary.  After talking with the librarians about what sources were available, I decided that I wanted to read the diary or memoir of a person from Deerfield and try to flesh out his or her life.  I looked through some of the options and decided upon the memoirs of Reverend Robert Crawford, a 19th century Congregationalist minister.  To be honest, I chose his memoirs solely based upon his beautiful handwriting!  I had hoped to research something a little bit earlier in time, but Crawford’s neat and legible writing was too tempting to pass up.

Thus, I began to read the memoir.  The research was difficult at first because there was so much to read.  Crawford wrote prolifically and I had to dig through a lot of information before I even found Crawford’s connection to Deerfield.  However, this made the moments when I discovered those connections so much more rewarding.  It turns out that Crawford was an incredibly active and influential man in the community.  Not only was he pastor at the Deerfield Congregational Church for 27 years and then pastor emeritus for 14 more, but he was President of the Board of Trustees for Deerfield Academy (the private school in town), a state senator for a year, a founding member of the PVMA, and more. Despite these contributions to the town, he has largely been written out of the historical narrative.

After reading over 450 pages of memoir (with a couple hundred more pages of memoir and diary to go), I feel like I really know who Robert Crawford was.  I understand what his personality was like, and what he believed in and valued. A few weeks ago, I actually discovered a picture of  Crawford in the PVMA collection.  It was such a surreal experience to look at the face of the man who I had been researching and realize that he looks nothing like I had imagined!

I have truly enjoyed the process of putting Crawford back into the story of Deerfield.  Being an historian-in-training (I do not believe that I earn the title of  “historian” until graduation, if then), is such a privilege.  I have the opportunity to re-tell Crawford’s story so that his life and contribution to the town is no longer forgotten.  While an honor, being an historian in training is also a responsibility.  I hope that I can  tell Crawford’s story with as much integrity as possible.