Category Beyond Bethel
The G.I. Bill Turns 70
Seventy years ago this past Sunday, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Servicemen’s Adjustment Act of 1944. While World War II still had over ten months to go in Europe, and over a year in the Pacific, the so-called “G.I. Bill” made possible dramatic changes in postwar America. Pres. Barack Obama summarized them […]
War and Americanization at Immigrant Schools: Bethel and Calvin
Not long after the United States entered the First World War, Bethel Academy graduated its class of 1917, fifteen strong. It had been sixty-five years since Swedish Baptist immigrants founded their first American congregation, yet still one in three of the school’s graduates were natives of Sweden or Norway, and almost all the rest had Scandinavian surnames. That last […]
A Bethel War Memorial?
In the last two years I’ve developed an interest in the history of war commemoration, writing about it from time to time at my personal blog and even keeping — very irregularly — a photoblog on the subject. So as I’ve started to research how Bethel and other colleges and universities here in the Twin Cities experienced […]
The Evangelical Left and Vietnam
I’ve spent much of the past week catching up on my Vietnam War history. While the military history of that conflict is interesting, most of my reading has been focused on the domestic crises that Vietnam incited. Surprisingly, I’ve had a fair amount of trouble finding sources that deal squarely with the impact of the war […]
WWI on Twin Cities Campuses
How typical was Bethel’s experience of the century of modern warfare that started in 1914? While we’ll stay fairly close to Bethel for the project itself, early on in my research I’ve been dabbling with the history of some of Bethel’s peers: neighbors in the Twin Cities and other Christian colleges. So today I’ll kick off an occasional […]
Bethel at War 1914 - 2014 