Rebecca Koerselman

Whether or not we are willing to admit it, we are all reformers in some way. Most of us spend a great deal of time and energy fixing problems and attempting to make our lives better in some way. Many…

Historian and international relations theorist E.H. Carr famously defined history this way: “My first answer, therefore, to the question, What is History?, is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his (or her) facts, an…

One of my favorite sounds in the world is the deep laughter of children. A few nights ago, while reading a bedtime story, my two-year-old was clutching her stuffed narwhal, and the tusk somehow managed poke into my nose. My…

I regularly meet with prospective college students and always end up asking the same question. “Out of curiosity, how do you decide where to attend college? How do you make your decision?” I have since learned that I do not…

In twentieth century America, hospitality began to regain some cultural footing. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s and offered soup kitchens, communitarian farms, and voluntary poverty as a way of expressing Christian hospitality.…

Hospitality has a rich history, though the practice of hospitality by God’s people was supposed to differ from the dominant cultural norms of the day. For example, the Quar’an sees generosity as an ethical imperative; Hindus are to treat the…

In the past few decades, professional historians have been in decline in the United States. Historians, professional organizations, and even non-historians have spent a great deal of time wringing their hands and kvetching about this decline.  Historian Gordon Wood identified…

The curmudgeonly journalist H.L. Mencken pronounced Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. In popular culture, the Puritans are generally considered devout and devoid of fun. Yet the Puritans were complicated and complex people, much like…

After World War II, colleges were full of GIs securing the benefits of the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (the “GI Bill”). Benjamin Samuel Bloom, a professor of education at the University of Chicago, worked with colleagues to organize the multiplicity…