Tag Archives: University of Minnesota

Cartoon of a G.I. reading the Bethel student newspaper, The Clarion

Following Up: A Veterans Day Story on the G.I. Bill

Today’s Veterans Day edition of the Minneapolis StarTribune features a story on the 70th anniversary of the G.I. Bill, including some comments from me on that legislation’s impact on Bethel College and Seminary in the years after World War II. Reporter Kevyn Burger contacted me after coming across this blog — specifically, my late June post on […]

Bethel yearbook dedicated to the memory of Olivia Johnson

The “Spanish Flu”

One of the more curious sections of Windows of Memory, the 1961 memoir by Henry Wingblade (Bethel president from 1941-1954, after having taught at the Academy and Junior College for many years), is his chapter on Bethel and world missions (no. 25). Instead of simply telling the stories of five Bethel alumni who entered the missions field, […]

Nursing cadets being sworn in at the University of Minnesota, 1944

WWII on Twin Cities Campuses

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’ […]

Cartoon of a G.I. reading the Bethel student newspaper, The Clarion

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 […]

Gateway from the old Memorial Stadium, now part of the McNamara Alumni Center

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 […]

Archbishop John Ireland reviews St. Thomas cadets in 1917

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 […]