Modern History

You are currently browsing the archive for the Modern History category.

‘our last natural recovery to full employment’

December 8, 2009 in Modern History, National Politics by admin | No comments

Harding inherited an absentee presidency [Wilson had been incapacitated by a stroke for the last 17 months of his second term] and one of the sharpest recessions in American history. By July 1921 it was all over and the economy was booming again. Harding had done nothing except cut government expenditure, the last time a major industrial power treated a recession by classic laissez-faire methods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level. Benjamin Anderson of Chase Manhattan was later to call it ‘our last natural recovery to full employment.’ But the cuts were important. Indeed, Harding can be described as the only president in American history who actually brought about massive cuts in government spending, producing nearly a 40 per cent saving over Wilsonian peacetime expenditure.

- Paul Johnson, “The Last Arcadia” in Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties

Sample Chapter – Famous Men of the 18th Century

December 4, 2009 in children's books, Colonial Period, Modern History by admin | No comments

Peter the Great, born 1672, Tsar of Russia 1682-1725

Below, I have linked in a sample chapter from my current writing project, Famous Men of the 18th Century.

Like the previous Famous Men books, this one will include about 30 short biographies of key figures whose lives will collectively, tell the story of the period from 1700-1800. The target audience is students in the 6th-11th grades. In our scope and sequence, we’d recommend parents use this book with their sixth or seventh graders, and then again in the junior year of high school.

Comments and feedback will be most appreciated. This chapter began as part of the original series by Poland and Haaren, but if you compare their text with mine, you will see that I have made large alterations and added a great deal of additional material.

My target is to finish these chapters by the end of next summer. I’m looking forward to taking a crack at the American founders as well as key figures from Britain and France. Though I must confess that I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how interesting Peter and King Charles XII of Sweden have turned out to be.

- Rob Shearer

Famous Men-18th Peter the Great

Paul Johnson on Sigmund Freud

October 26, 2009 in book reviews, Modern History by admin | 1 comment

“. . . his methods of therapy have proved on the whole, costly failures, more suited to cosset the unhappy than cure the sick. We now know that many of the central ideas of psychoanalysis have no basis in biology. They were, indeed, formulated by Freud before the discovery of Mendel’s Laws, the chromosomal theory of inheritance, the recognition of inborn metabolic errors, the existence of hormones and the mechanism of the nervous impulse, which collectively invalidate them. As Sir Peter Medawar has put it, psychoanalysis is akin to Mesmerism and phrenology: it contains isolated nuggets of truth, but the general theory is false.”

- Paul Johnson, Modern Times, p. 6

The reading assignment for the Year Four students at the Schaeffer Study Center this week is chapter one, “A Relativistic World.”

Tags: Modern Times, Paul Johnson, Sigmund Freud

They’ve always been like this

September 24, 2009 in Modern History by admin | No comments

“During a congressional committee hearing in the late 1960s, as a Census Bureau official told it, a congressman was questioning statisticians from the bureau about the projected scope and costs of the 1970 census. The tenor of his questions was highly critical. Why did the bureau need to ask so many questions? Did not the projected questions constitute an invasion of individual privacy by the government? And why did the census cost so much?

Bureau officials responded patiently to each question, although it was clear that the congressman was unconvinced. Why did the federal government have to get so involved in collecting statistics in the first place, the congressman asked. After all, he continued, whenever he needed statistical information, he just went and looked it up in an almanac.”

- quoted from The American Census: A Social History,
by Margo J. Anderson, 1988

Giant government program that serves millions can’t meet its pension obligations

September 24, 2009 in Modern History by admin | No comments

I received a copy of one of my specialty magazines today, MAIL.

There are two headlines on the cover:

USPS To Discount First-Class Mail 20% To Boost Volumes

and

Post Will Default on Retiree Payment to U.S.Treasury

About the first – I doubt that the bulk use of First-class mail is all that sensitive to price-discounting. The program will only be available to mailers who mailed 500,000 or more pieces in the fourth quarter of each of the past two years. Not going to affect me (or Greenleaf Press), I can assure you.

The 2nd headline is more disturbing. Postal Service retirees have their healthcare covered by the US Government. The Postal Service is obligated to fund the cost of its retiree’s healthcare. Their obligation for September 30, 2009 is to pay $5.4 billion to the US Treasury in order to pay those healthcare expenses. They don’t have the cash. Guess who will wind up paying the expenses? The taxpayers of the United States.

Why does anyone believe that a federal government can figure out how to run the entire healthcare sector of the economy? They can’t figure out how to pay for the healthcare of retired postal workers?

Tags: healthcare, post office, retirees

That “dead orthodoxy” is pulsating with life

September 23, 2009 in Modern History by admin | No comments

In no branch of science would there be any real advance if every generation started fresh with no dependence upon what past generations have achieved. Yet in theology, vituperation of the past seems to be thought essential to progress. And upon what base slanders the vituperation is based! After listening to modern tirades against the great creeds of the Church, one receives rather a shock when one turns to the Westminster Confession, for example, or to that tenderest and most theological of books, the “Pilgrim’s Progress” of John Bunyan, and discovers that in doing so one has turned from shallow modern phrases to a “dead orthodoxy” that is pulsating with life in every word. In such orthodoxy there is life enough to set the whole world aglow with Christian love.

- J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 1923

Tags: Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen

Admiring Jesus is not the same as having Faith in Jesus

September 22, 2009 in Modern History by admin | No comments

The truth is that when men speak of trust in Jesus’ Person, as being possible without acceptance of the message of His death and resurrection, they do not really mean trust at all. What they designate as trust is really admiration or reverence. They reverence Jesus as the supreme Person of all history and the supreme revealer of God. But trust can come only when the supreme Person extends His saving power to us. “He went about doing good,” “He spake words such as never man spake,” “He is the express image of God” – that is reverence; “He love me and gave Himself for me” – that is faith.

- J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 1923 page 37

Tags: Christianity & Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen

What it is that made the men of past generations so great and the men of present generations so small?

September 21, 2009 in Modern History by admin | No comments

“. . . the condition of mankind is such that one may well ask what it is that made the men of past generations so great and the men of present generations so small. . .”

- J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 1923, page 13

Tags: Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen

Change.org blames Katrina on Bush’s failure to pass Global Warming Bill

August 27, 2009 in 2010 Election, Modern History by admin | No comments

They’re not just blaming the failure of city & state authorities to evacuate folks on Bush, they’re blaming the actual hurricane itself on Bush. Here’s a quote from an email they just sent out today:

President Bush’s short-term failures compounded the suffering along the Gulf Coast in those fateful days. But his dismal failure to lead on global warming has made extreme weather events like Katrina more likely in the future.

And they’re saying we all need to rally around and make sure Obama and Co. pass a “clean energy and climate bill this year.”

We must

“. . .work tirelessly to prevent a future where disasters like Katrina become the norm. A strong clean energy bill is critical to preventing such a future, but we need our President to lead Congress where it needs to go. Tell President Obama to push Congress for bold action today.”

This is, of course, nonsense on stilts. Here are the facts:

A) Global temperatures have been cooling since 1999
B) Katrina was not caused by global warming
C) There has been a DECREASE in the severity of hurricanes over the past several years.

The global warming alarmists have by now reached a mystical level of superstition in which all the bad things in the world are the fault of global warming. And the fact of global warming is unquestioned. Their response to an examination of the data is took stick their fingers in their ears and make loud noises.

Instead of passing the foolish, pork-laden, economy-crushing, job-destroying cap & trade bill, call you congressman and senators and urge them to let it die a natural death. The bill, passed by the house, is languishing because the Senate is reluctant to take it up. Put a DNR order on the bill and instead look for ways to reduce government regulations, reduce taxes, and let the entrepreneurial spirit of American free enterprise put people back to work.

For the record, here’s the full text of the Change.org email which went out today:
changeorg-katrina

Tags: change.org, global warming, Katrina

Official Release: Famous Men of the 16th & 17th Century

August 24, 2009 in book reviews, children's books, Colonial Period, English History, Homeschooling, Modern History by admin | No comments

It’s done! Finished, edited, proofed and approved. And we have copies on the shelves!

The sequel to Famous Men of the Renaissance and Reformation.

Rather than reprinting Famous Men of Modern Times (which is a bit uneven in both tone and selection), we have made the decision to complete the Famous Men biography series with four new books:

Famous Men of the 16^th & 17^th Century (Queen Elizabeth to Louis XIV) – available now
Famous Men of the 18^th Century (Isaac Newton to Robespierre) – 2010
Famous Men of the 19^th Century (Napoleon Bonaparte to Mark Twain) – 2011
Famous men of the 20^th Century (Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan) – 2012

The 17th century was an age of religious wars and revolutions. The French had seven civil wars of religion from 1570-1590. The German Empire had a religious civil war from 1618-1648. The English had a civil war from 1642-1649. It was also the century in which the English and French settlements were founding colonies in North America at Jamestown, Plymouth, Boston, & Quebec. But learning the wars will not convey to students what the times were like. Biographies will. Twenty-eight key individuals are profiled in chronological order:

Birth Crowned Death

1519	1547	1589	Catherine de’ Medici
1553	1589	1610	Henry of Navarre (Henry IV)
1533	1558	1603	Elizabeth I
1540		1595	Sir Francis Drake
1552		1618	Sir Walter Raleigh
1566	1603	1625	James I
1552		1610	Matteo Ricci
1564		1616	William Shakespeare
1580		1631	John Smith
1583		1634	Wallenstein
1594	1611	1632	Gustavus Adolphus
1575		1635	Samuel de Champlain
1564		1642	Galileo
1585		1642	Cardinal Richelieu
1600	1625	1649	Charles I
1599		1658	Oliver Cromwell
1590	1620	1657	William Bradford
1588	1629	1649	John Winthrop
1623		1662	Blaise Pascal
1606		1669	Rembrandt
1608		1674	John Milton
1632		1675	Johannes Vermeer
1630	1660	1685	Charles II
1629	1674	1696	Jan Sobieski
1650	1688	1702	William of Orange (William III)
1632		1704	John Locke
1653		1706	Johan Pachelbel
1638	1643	1715	Louis XIV

I am particularly pleased with how the chapters on the colonial founders turned out. John Smith (Jamestown), Samuel de Champlain (Quebec), William Bradford (Plymouth), and John Winthrop (Boston) all have incredible and fascinating stories. A simple comparison of their backgrounds and their reasons for leaving England and France will give students far more understanding about the founding of the colonies than any textbook can.

I also enjoyed greatly retelling the events of the English Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. These events (with a number of larger-than-life characters) were critical in shaping the political ideas of America’s Founding Fathers – whose stories I am looking forward to telling in Famous Men of the 18^th Century.

I’ve also included accounts of the lives of artists (Rembrandt, Vermeer), a musician (Johan Pachelbel), and writers (Shakespeare & Milton) so that students will become acquainted with more than just the political history of the times.

The reading level is targeted on upper elementary/jr. high, but even older students and adults will find much here that gets left out of the textbook accounts.

Famous Men of the 16^th & 17^th Century is 28 chapters, 228 pages and retails for $17.95, directly from Greenleaf Press.

Get ‘em while they’re hot off the press!

- Rob Shearer, (author and) Publisher

Tags: 16th Century, 17th Century, Famous Men, Famous Men of the 16th & 17th Century

« Older entries § Newer entries »