Category: The Historical Muse

Thoughts on history and the historical profession. Clio is the muse of history–this category title is a play on that concept.

American Character: John Peter Muhlenberg

  

John Peter Muhlenberg was pastor of a church in Woodstock, Virginia, prior to the American Revolution. His interest in government was evident—he was elected to the House of Burgesses in 1774 and was known as a follower of Patrick Henry. As events unfolded into 1775, a year that saw the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill initiate colonial resistance to British policies, Muhlenberg sensed that as a pastor he had a responsibility to challenge his flock to put… Read more »

Education's Historic Shift (Part VII)

  

Protestant evangelicals, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, sought to set up state-controlled education because they thought they would be the ones to control it, and then be able to keep America fundamentally Protestant in spite of the new Catholic immigration. They looked for a model for how to do this—and they found it. In order to find it, they had to travel to Europe to a country called Prussia, which forms the nucleus of modern-day Germany. Prussia, at… Read more »

Education's Historic Shift (Part VI)

  

A couple weeks ago, I started a history of the shift in education in America from private to government schools. I said there were three groups pushing for this change. The first group was Unitarians, who denied the Trinity and sought to replace church education with education dictated by government. They also believed that education was the answer for all societal ills. The second group was the Owenites, followers of Robert Owen, a communist utopian who emigrated from Britain to… Read more »

Celebrating the Fall of the Wall

  

It was an ugly monstrosity separating a world of oppression from a world of liberty. Erected in 1961 to stop the flood of people leaving communist East Germany, the Berlin Wall sought to keep the people imprisoned within the communist system. The Wall became a symbol of communist tyranny—as long as it stood, it reminded the free world that we weren’t dealing with simply another point of view; we were dealing with a totalitarian entity that was a direct threat… Read more »

Education's Historic Shift (Part V)

  

In a previous post, I pointed out a second group in the nineteenth century that was bent on setting up government-controlled education for its own ideological purposes. Led by Robert Owen, this group sought to educate Americans out of their belief in private property and free enterprise. They set up the Workingmen’s Party to achieve their goal. One of the party’s adherents was Orestes Brownson. Later in life, he defected from the party and his old beliefs, and turned to… Read more »

Education's Historic Shift (Part IV)

  

The somewhat strange-looking man on the left is Robert Owen. He’s the next major figure in my retrospective on how education changed in America. I’ve already noted that Unitarians sought to wrest control of education from orthodox Trinitarian Christians, but although they had some success in Massachusetts, they had little support in the rest of the nation. Owen arrived in America from Britain as a believer in utopian communism. He was also a bitter foe of Christianity. Once here, he… Read more »

Education's Historic Shift (Part III)

  

Unitarians wanted to remove education from the hands of the orthodox Christian churches. They sought to make all education the responsibility of the state; they were able to impose their will on Massachusetts by the 1830s. The first secretary of the state board of education was a man by the name of Mann. Horace Mann was a Unitarian who was placed in control of Massachusetts state education in 1837. He exhibited all the beliefs of the Unitarians with respect to… Read more »