Kevin Cragg

Professor of History

Co-Coordinator, Christianity and Western Culture (CWC) program

B.A., Wheaton College

M.A., University of Chicago

Ph.D., University of Michigan

e-mail: crakev@bethel.edu

Courses Taught

Christianity & Western Culture
Medieval History
Near East and Greek History
Roman Civilization
History and the Human Environment

Publications

Books

(with Paul Spickard) God's Peoples: A Social History of Christians (Baker, 1994); reissued as A Global History of Christians: How Everyday Believers Experienced Their World (Baker, 2002)

(as co-editor, with Paul Spickard and James Spickard) World History by the World’s Historians (McGraw-Hill, 1998)
History and the Human Environment: How the Environment Shaped Human History (Class text, Bethel College, revised 2001)

Book Chapters and Articles

"The Churches and War," Eerdmans' Handbook to Christianity in America, eds. Mark A. Noll, et al. (Eerdmans, 1983)
Review article on Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Trinity Journal (1983)
Plus numerous book reviews in Christian Scholar's Review and Fides et Historia

Interests & Activities

I am fascinated by people in their cultural and geographic contexts and the variety of ways they have organized themselves politically and socially. I am also intrigued by the way the past is both the root of current culture and "another country" -- alien and mysterious. In the classroom I have the most fun talking about the topic of the day (unless it's the Investiture controversy).

Books that have especially shaped who I am as a historian include:

Herodotus
Homer
Plutarch
Luke and Acts
E. Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: Climate since the year 1000
W.H. McNeil, Plagues and Peoples
J. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
anything by A. Crosley
J. Donald Hugles, Ancient Ecology
David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940

If I could give one piece of advice to a prospective college student I would encourage you to read omnivorously and voraciously, habitually, obsessively, thoughtfully, comparatively at a speed appropriate to the genre, with a dictionary. Erasmus wrote, "When I get some money I get some books. If I have some money left I buy food."