by Jim Bratt. This post originally appeared in The Twelve: Reformed Done Daily on January 15, 2016. Although Martin Luther King’s birthday was actually yesterday, the United States will mark the occasion next Monday. Once more we’ll hear the familiar quotations rehearsed in respectful tones. We’ll see footage from the “I have a dream!” speech on the …
Continue reading Let Us Now Quote Famous Men
by Ron Wells. The issue of flying the Confederate flag has revived a spirited debate here in the South. What follows is my contribution to that debate. Fair disclosure first. I am a US-born child of immigrants. My parents, born in a British Crown colony, became US citizens as soon as the process allowed. While …
Continue reading One Flag for One Nation
The blog has been on hiatus for the summer. Most of the department faculty have been away on research trips or vacation, or buried deep in research. Summer is also a good time to catch up on reading, though; over the next few weeks, we'll be featuring brief recommendations on great books and articles that …
Continue reading Summer Reading: On Politics and Puritans
by Eric M. Washington. I, too, am a Son of the South, but of a different sort than Dylann Roof, the accused murderer of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. According to an op-ed published in The Chicago Tribune, one of Roof’s classmates stated that Roof “had that …
Continue reading I, Too, Am a Southerner
by Bob Schoone-Jongen. It’s no secret that the United States has had its fair share of financial scandals. Ferdinand Ward fleeced Ulysses Grant in 1881. Samuel Insull bilked thousands of people out of millions of dollars invested in his utility schemes in the 1930s. More recently we’ve seen Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay, Bernie Madoff, all …
Continue reading William Duer: America’s First Wall Street Villain
by Bob Schoone-Jongen. About the time when Spring Break arrives I hit the line in the HIST 152 syllabus calling students to consider the 18th-century Enlightenment and its offspring. Of course this leads to political liberalism and the notion that we should trade kings and queens for politicians who won their place through innate ability rather …
Continue reading Enlightenment and Elections
Historical Horizons 