I dearly love Mel Brooks as a comedian, but I do have some quarrels with him as a historian. In explaining that remark, I’ll return to the point I made recently about teaching European history to Americans, and some of the basic and quite counter-intuitive ideas you need to get across at a very early stage. In the 1983 film To Be Or Not To Be, Mel Brooks plays a Polish vaudeville star in the months leading up to the... Read more
Why historians and biographers must often tell stories imaginatively, on the basis of relatively little evidence. Read more
I have often taught courses focused on Europe, or in which Europe plays a substantial role (for instance, about the Second World War). Through the years, I have identified common themes where students need some help and additional explanation, and I usually introduce these in my first couple of sessions. I offer some of the lessons I have learned here. If they might be useful for you, please feel free to borrow them. One of the hardest points for Americans... Read more
One of the greatest Celtic saints was Colmcille, or Columba, who lived from c.521-597. About a century after his death, the scholar Adomnán of Iona composed a Life of the great saint, which is a treasury of information about the society and religious life of the time. Here, I want to explore one particular story, which tells us a great deal about church attitudes to marriage and sex in that time. It really raises some questions about historical context, on... Read more
Ervin Beck, a folklorist at Goshen College, recalls growing up in a Mennonite congregation where his bishop once said from the pulpit, “People ask me why I never smile. The Bible never says that Jesus smiled. It says that ‘Jesus wept.’” Given the decidedly unfunny persecution narratives that have characterized Mennonite history in the last half millennium, the bishop’s comment is not entirely surprising. But things have changed. Mennonites are now fat, happy, and relatively tolerated in the United States.... Read more
On December 24-25, 1914, soldiers on both sides of World War I put down their weapons and celebrated the birth of Christ. But as moving as the story is, the Christmas Truce actually exemplifies that "history is impossible but necessary." Read more
A big day is nearly upon us. Not as big as Christmas, but not small either. December 11 marks the 200th birthday of the state of Indiana. Some Hoosiers have been celebrating all year already, but the rest of the country might whoop it up too. If you weren’t thinking that a state bicentennial was anything much to celebrate, two misconceptions might have gotten in your way: a general under-appreciation of American states as political entities and a particular under-appreciation of... Read more
Why are most biographies about men with political and military power? How do we decide whose lives are significant enough to warrant such attention? Read more
At a recent Sunday service, my church sang the hymn “Come thou fount of every blessing,” with its line “Here I raise my Ebenezer, Hither by thy help I come.” This is a classic example of a line that made wonderful sense to a Biblically-literate audience, who knew that Ebenezer was a “stone of help” erected by the prophet Samuel. (The hymn dates from 1758). Other news stories that I read shortly afterwards underlined for me the growing oblivion into... Read more
What does the future hold for corporate evangelicalism? Read more
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