Whether you're going to the beach, to the mountains, or just to your lunch break, don't forget to bring your books. Some of Calvin's history professors and Honors graduates offer their suggestions for your reading list.
From Professor Will Katerberg
"Big History" has been a vibrant and growing field of inter-disciplinary historical thinking since the 1980s and 1990s. It looks at world history and says, "You're thinking too small." It builds on world history but expands history to include everything from the "big bang" some 13.7 billion years ago. How does history look different if we incorporate the evolution of life, the formation of our planet, the solar system, galaxy, and universe? Another way to look at this project is to compare it to older forms of universal history, such as those traditionally told by Christians, that start with creation and continue into the present and beyond. Big history also raises questions about what the purpose of historical study can and should be. Is it to understand the past on its own terms or to understand ourselves? Can it shed wisdom on how we should live, as individuals and a species. If you like this book and want more, try David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (University of California Press, 2004). To get a quick taste of universal history, watch this 17 minute lecture by David Christian, which takes you from the big bang to Christian with his grandson.
Modern Europe
From Professor David Diephouse
Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 (Basic Books, 2008). This eminently readable portrait of an era deflates any nostalgic impulse to see the early twentieth century as a golden age of stability and prosperity done in by the catastrophe of World War I. Ranging widely across science and the arts, politics, technology, religion, and gender, Blom vividly depicts the creative ferment, confusion, anxiety, and sometimes sheer craziness of those years, when “acceleration without direction” left many people with a serious case of cultural vertigo, “always struggling to catch up with the social realities changing around them.” Not unlike our own times…
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010). A groundbreaking analysis of a heartbreaking topic. The specific “Europe” with which Snyder is concerned is the region encompassing eastern Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, and Ukraine, a region unique for having experienced both Soviet and Nazi domination between 1933 and 1945. More than fourteen million people died here during those twelve years, the victims of mass killings carried out in service of deliberate government policy. (This does not include the millions more who died as a result of military operations.) Snyder provides many illuminating comparative insights on Stalinism and the Holocaust, identifying five different forms that mass killing assumed, some unique to one regime or the other, some shared by both. Both regimes, he argues, ultimately turned people into numbers, and while scholars have a professional duty to get the numbers right, their duty as human beings is to “turn the numbers back into people.” The combination of deep moral passion and scrupulous regard for evidence makes this study as compelling as it is depressing.
Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance (Penguin, 2006). This is journalism of a very high order. Taking as his point of departure the 2004 assassination of flamboyant Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a young Moroccan-Dutch Muslim, Buruma weaves a fascinating fabric of reflections on Dutch national character, religious identity, historical memory, and the future of a multicultural Europe. The book teems with quirky characters and ironic insights; it raises more questions than it answers—a quality most historians should find congenial.
19th-Century America
From Professor Joel Carpenter
Orville Vernon Burton, The Age of Lincoln (Hill and Wang, 2008) "a large-scale history that starkly reassesses the five decades pivoted around the Civil War. The Age of Lincoln presents the period from the 1840s through Reconstruction and the Robber Baron Era as a single unfolding epoch that redefined our nation." Burton, a fellow member of the Conference on Faith and History who teaches at Clemson 
University, has a remarkable eye for people and stories that help the reader understand in more depth the character of this well-traveled period of American history. His section on the Reconstruction era reveals the important political reforms that happened in southern states and exposes the terrorist actions there that ended two-party government and human rights for black southerners. It is powerful and tragic.
