Thanks for the chapel program on the ETBU Spanish-language program in Mexico–to continue each summer. Thanks, Mrs. Blanca Jenkins, Dr. Linda Prewett, and Mr. Alan Huesing for the continuing work with the program that is bringing so much benefit to our students and excitement to our Modern Languages programs.
January 22, 2007
January 5, 2007
Trusting the Revealing Past and Present
I am an historian. So I belong to a “faith” of sorts whose adherents do not dwell in the past, as outsiders sometimes think, but who do, certainly, dwell on the facts of the past. We also dwell on the teeming interpretations of the human past, including those interpretations forced on us, and all, by the momentum of recent and contemporary events. For example, how many of us have taken a stronger interest in the history of Islam lately?
I teach courses in the history of world societies. Among the achievements most desired of any given semester is to wrest from the minds of typical American students certain errors of conception or adequacy: history repeats itself / we study history so that we can better understand the present, and so forth. My students will recognize my assertion (I hope they were listening) that history absolutely does not “repeat itself.” (more…)