Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

The Way of Improvement Leads Home is shutting down for the holidays early this year so that I can tend to some pressing family issues, finish the fall semester, and complete my new book manuscript "The Power to Transform: A Reflection on the Study of the Past."  (Hopefully due out at the end of 2012 with Baker Academic).

Thanks for reading this year.  I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

John

P.S.  Don't forget your holiday shopping!  Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction; Confessing History; and The Way of Improvement Leads Home make great gifts for the historians and history buffs in your life!

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things online that caught my attention this week.

The Theodore Roosevelt digital library.

Upheaval at the New York Public Library

National Champions!  Again!

Historypin

The Founders and "In God We Trust."

Liberty Bell curiosities.

Edward Larkin reviews Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World.

David Brooks on Augustine and the Donatists.

CV etiquette.

Yale Labor historian David Montgomery.  R.I.P.

Teaching history through inquiry.

Call for Papers: Conference on Faith and History Biennial Conference.

Historian wins Grawemeyer Award in Religion.

If Only Life Was More Like Sesame Street

Messiah-Wheaton Women's Soccer Showdown

Don't miss it.  Two flagship Christian colleges, Messiah College (ranked#1 in the nation) and Wheaton College (ranked #6 in the nation) will square off tomorrow in San Antonio at 1pm CST for the NCAA Division III Women's Soccer National Championship.

Messiah defeated #2 ranked William Smith in today's semifinals.  Wheaton defeated unranked Ithaca.  

This is Messiah's 8th straight appearance in the Final Four.  They won the national championship in 2005, 2008, and 2009.  They defeated Elms, Skidmore, SUNY-New Paltz, Amherst, and William Smith to get to the final game.

Wheaton won the national championship in 2004, 2006, and 2007.  They defeated Penn State-Behrend, Capital, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Washington University (St. Louis), and Ithaca to get to the final game.

The two teams met in the 2008 national championship game with Messiah coming away with a 5-0 victory.

Go Falcons!

Obama Has Lowered Your Taxes

This is true, according to the award-winning fact-checking website Politifact.  Here is a taste:

Every taxpayer is different, and some "middle-class" Americans may have seen their tax rate or their tax burden go up for one reason or another. But Obama was talking about "the average middle-class family." The changes to the tax code made under Obama and the analyses by the Tax Policy Center show that for the middle 60 percent of the income distribution, both the average tax paid and the average tax rate fell between 2008 and 2011.

Ryan Gossling Seduces You With Public History Theory

Enough said.  Here is the link.

Are Academics Out of Touch?

I recently stumbled upon a blog post on academic elitism written by Marc Cortez of Western Seminary in Portland.  His blog is called "Scienta et Sapienta."

Cortez wonders why academics tend to annoy people. To illustrate the way academics are out of touch with ordinary people, he cites a passage from Peter Leithart's book Defending Constantine:

Every schoolchild knows that shortly after his victory over Maxentius, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, giving freedom to Christians to worship as they pleased."

I will let Cortez take it from here:

Statements like this come from losing touch with that the average person actually knows. And this quote makes it worse by claiming that these are facts known not just by your average adult, but by your average schoolchild. Let’s count all the facts in this one sentence that are not in fact known by your average schoolchild.

1. They have no idea who Maxentius was. They’ll probably be able to figure out that he was a Roman, but only because his name sounds like the guy from Gladiator.
2. They probably don’t even know who Constantine was. They may have heard the name, but good luck getting any details.
3. From the sentence, they’ll be able to figure out that Constantine defeated Maxentius, but they won’t know why or how.
4. They’ve never heard of the Edict of Milan, so they have no idea what it was or what it supposedly accomplished. And, if you’re talking to schoolchildren in America, there’s a good chance they won’t even know where Milan is.
5. I think your average Christian schoolchild will know about the persecution of the early church. So they’ll probably be able to figure out from the reference to “freedom” that the Edict of Milan has something to do with that. But I’m not sure that your average non-Christian schoolchild has heard those stories.

That’s pretty good. In one short sentence, Leithart has managed to insult quite a large number of people because they don’t know as many as five different things that any schoolchild should know. This is why I think it’s important for academics to interact regularly with those outside their field. We need to be familiar with the “average person” (as if there is such a creature) so we can work to connect our research with their needs and interests. Instead, we routinely imply that they’re not very smart simply because they don’t happen to be experts in our particular fields of interest.

Top Posts of the Last Week

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

1.  Top Ten Most Religious Cities in America
2.  How to Cite Facebook and Twitter?
3.  What's Going on at The Stony Brook School?
4.  Religion in Jamestown
5.  Sunday Night Odds and Ends (November 27, 2011 edition).
6.  "No, You Cannot Be a History Professor"
7.  A Little History Humor
8.  Mormons and Progressive Politics
9.  Analyzing Rejection Letters
10. Barbara Franco Resigns as Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission

This is Why Gordon College is Paying Him the Big Bucks

Michael Lindsay, the new president of evangelical Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, sings the praises of Gerald Arpey, the former American Airlines executive who resigned his post with no severance package because he believes that bankruptcy is morally wrong.

The Arpey story is a refreshing one.  It is good to see that some CEOs have moral principles. I am glad Lindsay pointed this out and I am glad that The New York Times published his piece.  (By the way, I think the Times may becoming more open to evangelical voices on their op-ed page. This is the second op-ed written by a Massachusetts evangelical affiliated with a Christian college that the Times has published in the last month and a half.  Some of you may recall Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson's October 17 op-ed, "The Evangelical Rejection of Reason."  Stephens teaches at the evangelical Eastern Nazarene University).

I also find the op-ed interesting because it is Lindsay's first major venture (at least in writing) into the public sphere since he became president of Gordon.  From what I hear from friends who know him, Lindsay is a good guy.  He is no Kim Phipps, but I imagine he would be the kind of president I could work for.

When Gordon College tapped Lindsay, many evangelicals (my self included) could not help but think that he was chosen because he had a fat Rolodex filled with the names of evangelical leaders who he had interviewed for his successful book, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelical Joined the American Elite.  I am sure this made him an attractive candidate to Gordon. College presidents need to have connections.

With this op-ed, it is Lindsay who is bringing "faith into the halls of power."  His Times op-ed will give Gordon College some national exposure. An piece in the nation's most important newspaper may not change the world, but so far it looks like the decision to hire Lindsay is paying off in Wenham.

Ouch! Ron Paul Shows No Mercy!

Wow--this is an effective political attack ad.  Most of the criticism of Gingrich in the ad comes from conservative sources--Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc... 

Gingrich: "I am the most seriously professorial politician since Woodrow Wilson."

NYU history professor and op-ed writer Jonathan Zimmerman, writing in The Chicago Tribune, blasts Newt Gingrich's claim to be a real historian.  Gingrich, Zimmerman argues, lacks two of the historian's most important virtues:  rigor and humility.  Here is a taste:

...Yet humility — the mark of a real historian — simply escapes Gingrich. Recall his absurd speech last year linking President Barack Obama's worldview to "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior." Or consider his equally ridiculous claim last month that bans on child labor kept inner-city kids in poverty. In both cases, he refused to elaborate or apologize. For Gingrich, it seems, history means never having to say you're sorry.

And he still likes to brag about his academic chops, once calling himself "the most seriously professorial politician since Woodrow Wilson." But whereas Wilson taught at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan — and served as president of Princeton — Gingrich wasn't serious enough to earn tenure at West Georgia College. In 1977, he told the college newspaper that he had decided to run for Congress rather than "publish the papers or academic books necessary to get promoted."

Since then, Gingrich has occasionally mocked so-called academic history for its turgid irrelevance. "I'm not credentialed as a bureaucratic academic," Gingrich said in 1995, after becoming speaker of the House. "I haven't written 22 books that are meaningless."

So now Gingrich gets to have it both ways, invoking the intellectual authority of history even as he flouts its most fundamental rules. And he continues to lob verbal stones at his opponents, while his own house is made of glass.

Tim Tebow: Miracle Worker

I have not really been following the whole Tim Tebow thing.  It looks like he has pulled a few games out of the hat for the Denver faithful, but from what I can see he is a below-average NFL quarterback.  I wish everyone would just leave the guy alone and let him play football. As someone who has always had an affinity for running quarterbacks I find him to be very entertaining to watch. 

I also wish he would quit drawing attention to himself with his public displays of evangelical piety.  He could learn something from the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount:

But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. (Mt. 6:6).

Whatever you think of Tebow, you may enjoy Stephen Prothero's fun take on the Denver quaterback published at the CNN religion blog.  Here is a taste:

As a scholar of religion, I have little expertise in football, NFL or otherwise. But I cannot help weighing in on a few comparisons between TT and JC:

Jesus: turned a ragtag band of 12 apostles into the number one religion in the world
Tebow: turned a ragtag squad of 11 football players into an NFL juggernaut

Jesus: prayed a lot (to God)
Tebow: prays a lot (to Jesus)

Jesus: ran the money changers out of the temple
Tebow: runs the  spread option

Jesus: miraculously saved a wedding at Cana by turning water into wine.
Tebow: miraculously led the Broncos to last-second victories against the Dolphins, the Jets and the Chargers.

Coincidence? You be the judge. As for me, I'm sitting back and waiting for Tebow to do something truly miraculous. Like winning a game without completing a single pass, or running back a punt for a touchdown, or kicking a 50-yard field goal to win a game.

Interview on "Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?"

Here is my recent interview with George P. Wood of the Assembly of God church on Ministry Direct Live.

A Dad's Life

My daughters are obsessed with this video:

Interview with Paul Harvey

No, not THAT Paul Harvey,  He is dead.

This is an interview with one of the deans of the study of religion in the American South.  Paul Harvey (pictured) is the founder and blogmaster of the Religion in American History blog and an accomplished author and scholar who teaches at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.  (As longtime readers of the Way of Improvement Leads Home know, I owe my blogger career to his willingness to take a chance and let me write for RiAH).

Randall Stephens interviews Harvey in the recent issue of Historically Speaking.  The interview deals partly with Harvey's latest book, Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African-American Christianity, but it also covers his thoughts on the field of African-American religious history more broadly.  Stephens has posted some of the interview on the Historical Society blog.  Here is a taste:

Randall J. Stephens: Could you say something about how historians wrote about African-American Christianity fifty years ago and how they write about it now?

Paul Harvey: Historians, at least white historians, mostly didn’t write about African-American Christianity fifty years ago. Black scholars did, of course, and fifty years ago the works of sociologists like E. Franklin Frazier dominated the field. Those scholars tended to be highly critical of what they called “the black church,” a term that was invented by 20th- century sociologists. They often saw “the black church” as either hopelessly other- worldly, peddling enthusiasm and a desperate eschatology rather than substantive improvements in the lives of their congregants, or (in the case of more well-established urban churches) too concerned with protecting bourgeois comforts to address the real issues facing most African Americans. Fifty years, ago, liberation theology and “black theology” were just beginning to take root in works such as Howard Thurman’s Jesus of the Dispossessed, a classic of 20th-century American theology. And of course Martin Luther King’s writings were just starting to enter the public realm, culminating with “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in 1963. But in terms of scholarly works, the broader historical community basically knew nothing about African-American religious history.

Obviously we’ve come a long way since then; the same revolution in social history that affected all other fields of history in the 1960s and 1970s shaped the writing of African-American history as well. The 1970s were the real years of landmark achievements, especially with the publication of Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion (very well known at the time) and Mechal Sobel’s Trabelin’ On (less well known then and now, but a brilliant if sometimes rather eccentric book). Over the next decade or two, studies of religion during and after slavery poured forth, and in my own early work I tried to contribute to that by pushing forward studies of African-American religion in time, focusing on the years after the Civil War. Most recently, scholars such as Curtis Evans (The Burden of Black Religion) and Barbara Savage (Their Spirits Walk Among Us) have challenged us to question the very terms that have defined the field, including “the black church,” which are intellectual constructs of a very particular period rather than historical realities themselves. This kind of challenge really hit the public realm when Eddie Glaude published a short piece called “The Black Church is Dead” for the Huffington Post. Glaude’s piece suggested that contemporary black churches had lost their prophetic voice, and that black parishioners were gravitating toward gospel-of-prosperity preachers that celebrate American capitalism in a way that would shock a figure such as Martin Luther King. That piece generated such a controversy that it hit the New York Times. I begin my book by talking about the piece and the arguments that ensued from it.

When Did "Small" Become "Horrible?"

Chris Bray, a blogger at Cliopatria (the flagship blog of the History News Network), has been reading Eric Miller's biography of Christopher Lasch and thinking about the writings of Wendell Berry.

His post raises some interesting historical questions.  When did small-scale solutions to social problems go out of fashion?  Here is a taste:

When did the American left, such as it is, abandon scale as a worthy topic? As a historical matter, where can we locate the demise of "small is beautiful" liberal politics? Why is the argument for a devolution of power right wing? Why is the dial on American "progressive" politics stuck on the "massive" setting? None of this just happened. It's a development with roots, and with dire effects.

Thoughts?

100 Notable Books of 2011

This year's New York Times list of notable books includes several titles that readers of The Way of Improvement Leads Home might find interesting.  They are:

1861: The Civil War Awakening. By Adam Goodheart

DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. By Candice Millard.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. By Charles Mann.

HOLY WAR: How Vasco da Gama’s Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations. By Nigel Cliff.

THE INFORMATION: A History. By James Gleick.

INSIDE SCIENTOLOGY: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion. By Janet Reitman

MALCOLM X: A Life of Reinvention. By Manning Marable

MIDNIGHT RISING: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. By Tony Horwitz

THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL ORDER: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. By Francis Fukuyama

A WORLD ON FIRE: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. By Amanda Foreman

CLARENCE DARROW: Attorney for the Damned. By John A. Farrell.

"No, You Cannot Be a History Professor"

This is what Larry Cebula of Eastern Washington University tells his students who want to pursue an academic career in history.  Here is a taste of his popular post:

I know that some of your other professors are encouraging your dreams of an academic career. It is natural to turn to your professors for advice on becoming a professor, and it natural for them to want to see you succeed. Remember though that we 1) mostly have not been on the job market lately and 2) in any case are atypical Ph.D.s in that we did land tenure track positions. To return to the lottery analogy, it is like asking lottery winners if you should buy a ticket. For our part, there is a lot of professional satisfaction in mentoring some bright young person, encouraging their dreams, writing them letters of recommendation and bragging of their subsequent acceptance into a good doctoral program. Job market? What job market?

Your professors are the last generation of tenure track faculty. Every long-term educational trend points towards the end of the professoriate. States continue to slash funding for higher education. Retiring professors are not replaced, or replaced with part-time faculty. Technology promises to provide education with far fewer teachers--and whether you buy into this vision of the future or not, state legislators and university administrators believe. The few faculty that remain will see increased service responsibilities (someone has to oversee those adjuncts!), deteriorating resources and facilities, and stagnant wages. After ten years of grad school you could make as much as the manager of a Hooters! But you won't be that lucky.

Cebula responds to his critics here.

On one level, I think Cebula's advice is a bit harsh.  While I can't help but agree that the job market is declining, I think it is a bit alarmist at this point to predict the end of the tenure-track professoriate in the next twenty years.  There may be fewer such jobs, but there will still be jobs. And if an undergraduate history major, after considering the risks, feels called to pursue a career as a history professor, I will offer my encouragement.

On another level, Cebula's post should be read as a call to reform.  We who lead and teach in undergraduate history departments continue to celebrate the students who want to be professors.  We often deem acceptance into a prestigious Ph.D program as the highest calling our students can pursue.  We pat ourselves on the back for the number of students we send to graduate school each year and we tell their stories at open houses to prospective students.

Why are we doing this?  Does it make sense?  Is it responsible?

Most of our undergraduate history majors do not end up pursuing Ph.Ds. Yet we invest most of our time and energy into these students.  What about the rest of our history majors?  What about the student with the 3.5 GPA who does not want to pursue a Ph.D but may want to use their history major in the marketplace or the non-profit sector or the high school classroom or in a public history setting?  We need to invest the time and energy in these students.  We need to celebrate them. We need to give them a vision for what they can do with a history major and help them to pursue a meaningful vocation.