history

Instead of glorifying the past, what if we treated the present as precious?

It's odd the way this volume deals with Barack Obama. It's a shame it has to deal with David Barton at all.

“White privilege is your history being taught as a core class and mine being taught as an elective,” wrote a tumblr user in February of 2014. This claim illustrates how education sins in its ignorance.

Latin American liberation theologians taught that sin consists not only of personal misdeeds—it is also embedded in social structures that promote harm and inequity. 

In the midst of a procession of well-known stories is an image marking what's been forgotten. That's most of history, isn't it?

Many will look at the tribal and ethnic tensions that exist all around the world as a problem as old as human civilization. Isn’t this a strong argument for the reality that the racism that was practiced by white/western Europe is indeed just a reflection of what has always been?

For Ben Quash, scripture and tradition are givens. Our task is to discover and reinterpret what we have been given.

Like it or not, Wikipedia is here and it will probably stay. Everybody from third grade history students to graduate level scholars use them. Even when Wiki pages cannot be cited, we still use them. We are forming history on that site. 

If Americans of a certain age know anything about Puritanism, it is probably because they read something by the (atheist) historian Edmund S. Morgan, the great Yale scholar who died July 8. His book The Puritan Dilemma—which used the life of John Winthrop to describe the Puritans’ religious and political project in America—was widely assigned in high schools and colleges. 

I had the good fortune decades ago to take a graduate class from Morgan on American colonial history.

David Barton is what I call a “faux historian.” With only a B.A. in religious education from Oral Roberts University, Barton has written widely on American history, remaking it into his own image. He’s been called upon as an “expert” by the Texas Board of Education, the Republican Party and the likes of right-wing talking head Glenn Beck.

Many conservatives love Barton’s historical revisionism, particularly his arguments that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that the founders did not share our notions about the separation between church and state. Mike Huckabee said he wished every American had to listen to a simultaneous telecast of David Barton lecturing—even if at gunpoint.

Barton’s latest book, The Jefferson Lies, has drawn criticism from a wider group than the usual liberals and professional historians.

Amateurish historians often tell us that we must study the past to avoid repeating its mistakes. Such efforts rarely work out well. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, by contrast, offers an unusual, complex and thoughtful approach to history.