Publications
Books
- (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
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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."
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