These past weeks have seen me move increasingly from secondary literature into primary sources. In particular, I’ve been paging steadily through the Standard, the official organ of the Baptist General Conference – then Bethel College’s sponsoring denomination – which ran from 1940 to 2002. That year the magazine became BGC World and in 2008 when the denomination changed its name to Converge […]
A few weeks ago I looked broadly at the Evangelical left and Vietnam, focusing particularly on Jim Wallis and the Post Americans. Of course, not all evangelicals who ended up opposing the war would have described themselves as leftists, nor would they have been comfortable with the extent to which the Post Americans critiqued American […]
Because of their widespread pro-German sentiments at the beginning of the European conflict and outspoken support for American neutrality, up to April 1917, the Swedes and other Scandinavians in the United States faced a highly uncomfortable situation, causing many to overreact—or to keep quiet. – H. Arnold Barton, A Folk Divided, p. 248 Both responses — overreact […]
Paging through the July 4, 1966 issue of the Standard, I came across a small article that caught my attention. It’s rather vividly written by a Baptist General Conference navy chaplain, Kenneth Carlson, and describes how Carlson ‘choppered’ between vessels to hold worship services for U.S. Navy sailors. First though, I was curious whether Carlson ever […]
The Swedes have always been considered desirable additions to American citizenry, perhaps for the reason that they leave a less noticeable trace in the fabric of our society than any other non-English-speaking stock. Their spirit, if not their costume and language, is American before they bid farewell to their friends at home. While their love […]
Next week I’ll have lots more to say about how the people of Bethel and other Swedish-Americans experienced World War I, in light of the “100 percent American” nativism of that time. But while I was working on those posts, it occurred me that I could pretty easily visualize just how much of an immigrant […]
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or […]
If you’re coming here via the Bethel News channel, I’d like to encourage you to read about how you can contribute to this project by filling out a survey. Until now, I’ve spent most of my time researching on the Vietnam War. As we move into July, I’ll be focusing increasingly on the War on Terror. […]
In July of 1942 a special issue of the Bulletin of Bethel Institute arrived in the mailboxes of alumni and other subscribers. Here’s a photo of the cover: It isn’t all that surprising that an American college would wrap itself in the colors during a war, especially in the month of July. Now, whether a Baptist […]
A couple weeks ago I looked at how some of Bethel’s neighboring colleges and universities in the Twin Cities experienced the First World War. Today I’ll turn to the Second World War, again pulling some tidbits from Merrill Jarchow’s history of private colleges in Minnesota but here broadening a bit to see how the Twin Cities’ […]
Bethel at War 1914 - 2014 