Angelus

Gertrud Berninger (written ca. 1943-5) Das Kinderzimmer gelb und blau, der Mann im Mond, die Nebelfrau und rosenrote Tapeten; zubettegehn beim Angelus den jeder Christ beten muß, den frühen und den späten. Den frühen und den späten: er ruft nicht einen Jeden, das haben wir gelernt. Die Nacht war mit Kometen, mit Glanz und Glück […]

Anne Frank

Mashable reported that The Anne Frank House has just posted the only video footage of Anne Frank on YouTube. You see her leaning out of a second-story window as she watches a bride and groom exit a neighboring address. Here it is: The Diary of Anne Frank was my way in to German history as […]

Question: What’s your New Frontier?

http://annehodgson.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/frontier.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadToday is the 40th anniversary of Armstrong and Aldrin walking on the moon and I’m up there too today, somehow. Kennedy called space the New Frontier, and that was certainly what it felt like 40 years ago. I’m leaving out the Cold War context here to focus on social […]

JFK: We choose to go to the Moon

In the fall of 1962, when the USA was far behind the Soviet Union in its space program, JFK held his rivetting “We choose to go to the Moon” speech at Rice University in Houston, Texas, proclaiming space to be the new frontier. I’d like to highlight two excerpts, with the minutes in the video […]

John Calvin at 500

John Calvin’s (10 July 1509 – 27 May 1564) greatest legacy today may be what Max Weber described in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. According to Weber, Calvin provided the ideological impetus for the development of capitalism. In addition, Calvin also contributed to the development of representative democracy in general and the […]

Clara Boone, pioneer

When I was a child in the late 60s, a family friend, a descendent of Daniel Boone, came round one day for tea. Clara Boone was a teacher at a public school in DC. The local public schools were deteriorating in those days, kids were really tough, and the teachers were struggling to adapt. We […]

China 20 years later

Sorry to break my blog break yet again, but today is 20 years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and I can remember being glued to the TV and mourning. We can’t really blame the young Chinese for their apolitical materialism, can we? Is anyone here thinking about next year, let alone 20 or 40 years […]