News and History from Heritage Hall
This week I thought it might be interesting to see what was being discussed 50 years ago in Chimes, the student newspaper of Calvin College, now Calvin University. As I scanned the 5 March 1971 issue of Chimes, several articles caught my eye. Two stories …
I don’t train teachers, at least not in the way the education department and the history and social studies education majors do. But this week I’ve been thinking about training teachers. I’m teaching the capstone course in the history major, and history education and social …
During the early spring of 1911, leading Dutch Reformed folk in Chicago and Michigan were fighting about a professor. The issue was not, as you might think, unorthodox theology or dangerous ideas. It was who should be the new professor of Dutch history, language, and …
“The influenza played havoc with everything run to schedule in our village and vicinity. Churches, Schools, Movies, even Poolrooms were promptly closed in the beginning of the dreaded disease, even before it had really reached us, and by the time the Flu caught us in …
“What’s happening is unprecedented!” I keep hearing people say that about Covid-19 (a coronavirus). Some seem to mean that a pandemic like this is unprecedented. Others mean that the public health response—shutting down schools, sporting events, perhaps eventually churches, etc.—is unprecedented. Neither is unprecedented, really. …
In November 1918, young George Faber sent a postcard home to Michigan from Russia. He was part of the 339th Infantry Regiment and American Expeditionary Force, North Russia that intervened in the Russian civil war after the communist revolution of 1917. It was known as …
Calvin “University” is about five months old. The idea of a “Calvin University” goes back almost a century, to the founding era of Calvin College as a four-year, bachelor’s degree-granting school. In 1926 to mark Calvin’s fiftieth anniversary, supporters published the Semi-Centennial Volume: Theological School …
The current Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary campus–named after the “Knollcrest” farm, purchased in 1956–is the fourth for two institutions. Earlier Calvin campuses, going back to 1876, were on William Street, Madison and Fifth, and Franklin Street. This rephotography post focuses on the Madison …
Garrett Heyns (1891-1969) died five decades before the Calvin Prison Initiative was born, but it is a part of his legacy. Heyns was a Christian educator whose vocation took an unexpected turn in 1937. Things started conventionally enough for the Calvin alum. He was born …
Origins Online? Why? I am a digital person. I have a blog and several social media accounts. But I remember when life was analog. I learned to type on a manual typewriter in the early 1980s. In college I wrote papers and an undergraduate thesis …