*Confessing History* wins recognition

Congratulations to Dr. John Fea for receiving national recognition of his edited work Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation (The University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).   Confessing History was chosen last week as a finalist for the Lilly Fellows Programs in Humanities and Arts Book Award, which seeks to award imaginative works that exemplify the principal ideas of the Lilly Fellows Program, including questions of faith and learning, vocation, and the relationship of the university to religious culture.  As the website notes,

Works considered for this year’s award addressed the historical or contemporary relation of Christian intellectual life and scholarship to the practice of teaching as a Christian vocation or to the past, present, and future of higher education.

Confessing History, which John Fea co-edited with Jay Greek and Eric Miller, includes an interesting piece by Fea himself on teaching American history, as well as a chapter by Jim LaGrand on the dangers of ‘preaching through history’. 

At the publisher’s website, the work is described in the following way:

The contributors to Confessing History ask how the vocation of historian affects those who are also followers of Christ. What implications do Christian faith and practice have for living out one’s calling as an historian? And to what extent does one’s calling as a Christian disciple speak to the nature, quality, or goals of one’s work as scholar, teacher, adviser, writer, community member, or social commentator? Written from several different theological and professional points of view, the essays collected in this volume explore the vocation of the historian and its place in both the personal and professional lives of Christian disciples.

The department of history faculty and students will be reading and discussing parts of this collection later in the year.  Look for more attention to Confessing History on this blog.

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A summer in review with Dr. Pettegrew

One might picture a summer for a history professor as being locked away in an archive or library. However, the summer of a history professor might not be as research intensive or dry as one might think. To disprove this, Dr. Pettegrew agreed to discuss his experiences during this summer and the types of research that he has been actively pursuing. Dr. Pettegrew recounted his summer as being incredibly eventful, going on several trips and accomplishing a few projects along the way. He recalled that the first part of his summer entailed leading nineteen students on a may term trip to Greece and Albania to engage in ancient Greek historical sites. The focus of this may term trip was to immerse students in ancient antiquity. Research based trips did not end in Greece for Dr. Pettegrew. After his first trip, he traveled to Cyprus to continue his work on the Pyla Kousopetria archeological site. Dr. Pettegrew’s historical research is currently focused an ancient trade route in known as the Diolkos within the isthmus of ancient Greece. Dr. Pettegrew ended his summer spending a week in London with his wife and son James. He explained that he and his family visited a number of tourist sites; some of these sites included boating on the Thames River and seeing Buckingham Palace.

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Check out the Civil Rights 2011 Blog

Friends,

I, along with 4 employees of Messiah College are currently on a Civil Rights pilgrimage. We are currently in Memphis TN. But in case you wish to check out our blog visit it at

http://blogs.messiah.edu/2011_civil_rights_tour/

hope the summer is proceeding well for all of you.
bernardo

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Celebration of John Fea’s “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?”

Students, join us today in the Library Athenaeum  congratulate Dr. Fea on his recent publication of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction.  Come and go for coffee and cake any time between 3:30 and 4:15. John’s book will be presented to the library at 3:45.   Hope to see you there!

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John Fea to appear on C-SPAN Book TV

Our own Professor Fea will appear on C-SPAN BOOK TV on Sunday at 2:00 PM.  If you’re a late night person, you can see it  rebroadcast on Monday morning at 2 AM.  Fea will be speaking about his recently released publication Was American Founded as a Christian Nation? Here are the details from the booktv website:

The 2011 Virginia Festival of the Book Panel: “The Founding Fathers and Religion”

“From the 2011 Virginia Festival of the Book, a panel on the American Revolution and role played by religion in the founding of the United States.  The participating authors are: Barbara Clark Smith, author of “The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America,”  John Fea, author of “Was America Founded As a Christian Nation?,” and John Ragosta, author of “Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia’s Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty.”

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Anne Marie Stoner-Eby in the Harrisburg Patriot News

Dr. Stoner-Eby’s First Year Seminar, “Half of Our Family Earns $2 a Day,” is discussed in today’s Harrisburg Patriot-News.  Here is a snippet from the article, entitled “Monsters, UFOs Join College Curriculums.”

Messiah also offers “From Hollywood to Timbuktu,” a course that examines how Africa and Africans have been depicted in film from the African and Western viewpoints; “Strengthening Families Through Play,” about how sharing play and leisure activities strengthens families; and “Half of Our Family Earns $2 A Day,” a Christian look at poverty.

Anne Marie Stoner-Eby, Messiah associate professor of history, teaches the latter course.

“As Christians, we believe we are the global body of Christ,” she said. “We have to ask ourselves, What is our responsibility to other Christians? We have a huge economic divide that has gotten wider over 30 years. We may be rich in money, but others are richer in faith, community, family and culture. Half of our human family earns $2 a day.”

Stoner-Eby said she hopes that her capacity class of 18 students “thinks about all of this. My goal is to develop awareness why we have poverty and what people can do about it in the global Christian family.”

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Summer in Review

The history department is gearing up for another academic year that will begin on Monday with our orientation for new history majors. Over the last week, as we gathered for meetings to discuss our plans, I asked my colleagues how they passed their time this summer. Yesterday Bernardo posted on his research at the British Library. Here is what others had to say.

Jim LaGrand spent some of this past summer moving into and remodeling his family’s new home near the campus. There, he built a desk for himself at which he finished writing an article on Progressive-era urban reform and continued reading for a project on American nationalism and its uses. He was also busy with several church responsibilities, including preparing to teach an adult Sunday School class on the Reformation (N.B. as a complete interloper-novice). And he enjoyed trips with his family to see relatives in Georgia and Michigan, and watching the World Cup with his son.

John Fea had a busy summer bringing to completion two books. Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation will be out in late October and Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction will be out in February. He also spent the summer preparing public lectures he will be giving this fall, attending a conference on how to be an effective department chair, conducting workshops with American history teachers in New York City and Raleigh, North Carolina, doing some consulting work for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and blogging at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. In June, he took two current history majors, a history department alum, and his daughter Allyson on a research trip to a small southern New Jersey town called Greenwich. They conducted research for a forthcoming project called “The Greenwich Tea Burning: History and Memory in an American Town.” Sometime in July, he managed to sneak in a family vacation to historic Philadelphia!

Joseph Huffman conducted research (for a book on the history of medieval Cologne) at the Abteilung für Rheinische Landesgeschichte [the Division for Rhineland Regional History] of the University of Bonn for a week in early August, thanks to a generous grant attached to his appointment as a Distinguished Professor at Messiah College. In Bonn he not only met with several German colleagues and graduate students of medieval history but also gathered an extensive amount of archival and library research data. Thereafter, he and his wife Peggy enjoyed a belated 30^th-wedding anniversary weekend in Cologne and Paris, and when in Paris they found Peggy’s original family parish church of St. Étienne du Mont in the Latin Quarter. The remainder of the summer was spent reading for both fall courses and for the book project, and taking on new responsibilities as the director of the Center for Public Humanities.

Anne Marie Stoner-Eby enjoyed camping this summer in Acadia National Park with her husband and two sons, ages 5 and 9, and she also found time for several work-related projects!  She is helping launch the new Peace and Conflict Studies major, an interdisciplinary major with history as one of its three core disciplines.  She has been leading a committee considering partnerships with African Christian colleges, and she began a new research project on the history of the Mennonite mission and church in Tanzania and Ethiopia.

David Pettegrew took seven students majoring in history, art history, and biblical and religious studies to Cyprus in late May to take part in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project field school. He conducted several days of research in the Corinthia, Greece, and found time for vacation with family in Ohio and Kentucky. During the rest of the summer, he finished articles on the “diolkos” of Corinth and Hellenistic towers in Greece and continued working on a book manuscript called The Isthmus of Corinth. He enjoyed making progress on some home projects (like chainsawing branches off his trees!) and spending time with his wife and baby son.

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Working at the British Library can be fun!

In July 2010 I traveled to the United Kingdom to spend 10 days at the British Library to work on the map collections of the English East India Company (1600-1858). The British Library is the state-of-the-art National Library of the United Kingdom and is located in the heart of London. The Library holds 14 million books, 920,000 journal and newspaper titles, 58 million patents, and 3 million sound recordings. The building was the largest public building constructed in the UK in the 20^th century and is made up of 14 floors (9 above and 5 below) with a total area of over 112,000 square meters.

 

The map collection I worked on belonged to the India Office Records—the archival holdings of the East India Company (1600-1858)—pertaining to the survey and mapmaking activities of the Company in the nineteenth century. In particular I examined British maps of the Anglo-Nepal frontier and the Revenue Surveys, both from the nineteenth century. I also examined a number of indigenous Nepali maps lying in the Hodgson Collection (Mss Eur K474, volumes 56 & 59) collected by Brian Hodgson Houghton, the British Assistant Resident and later Resident in Kathmandu (1820-1844). Finally, I unexpectedly came across some old 17^th century Dutch and Portuguese maps of port cities and the western coastline of south India which formed the historical stage for the activities of some branches of my family (I am trying to write a family history as well!). It was a nostalgic moment for me as I wondered about the encounters between these European seafarers and my ancestors who traded along the coast.

I stayed at the nearby Highbury Center (http://www.thehighburycentre.org/) which is a few minutes away on the London tube (or subway). Registering myself as a researcher was quick and painless, and very soon I was on my way to the India Office Reading room on the third floor. A typical work day at the Library would begin at 9.30 am and end at 8.00pm. Requisitioning documents is processed online, and so, to save time, I did most of it the night before from my hotel room (this meant that my work day would extend itself well into the night!!). The availability of wireless in the reading rooms was a new experience as it brought the resources of the internet into the reading room. I found myself navigating online bookstores, archives, and articles in a manner that directly informed the research process.

All in all, the time spent at the British Library was an intellectual feast. The luxurious atmosphere at the library (the state-of-the-art and tastefully decorated facilities, reading rooms, exhibitions, bookstore, coffee shop, and lounges) and the friendly staff added another dimension to the usual excitement of working in an archive. Chance encounters with old friends, and the food and conversations that followed were the icing on the cake. I can’t wait to get back to the British Library, and in the meantime if you are passing through the city of London, please visit the BL on my behalf! Or at least visit the BL online at http://www.bl.uk/

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Faculty and Students Excavate in Cyprus

The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project 2008 field season in Cyprus was great success. For the discoveries of the the excavation and survey at this Late Roman town, see the blog staff and student blogs.

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Humanities Symposium – 2008

School of Humanities Symposium, Feb. 25-29, 2008

The School of Humanities Symposium, “Eyes Wide Open: Engaging Technology with our Humanity,” featured presentations by Professors Bernardo Michael, David Pettegrew, and Anne Marie Stoner-Eby and several History majors (Mary Lee Shade, Dillon Keeks, Jennifer Howell, and Daniel Richards).

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