aarontassano.com

My Dad is fond of telling a story about me getting in trouble in my 8th grade U.S. History class taught by Mr. Callahan. How he’d sit up at the front of the class and spend the entire time reading straight from the book. Me, being a pretty active kid, getting bored and doing whatever I could to disrupt the class.
He was, I think I can say now in fairness some 20 years later, an awful teacher. I can remember our text book, a giant tomb, filled with historical paintings of the civil war and words like “emancipation” in highlighted in bold text and defined in the back. Surely we had to memorize the definitions word for word and write them on some sort of quiz.
I think of things like this; evidence of a relatively poor middle and high school education, when I download lecture series by The Teaching Company.
I’m perpetually trying to compensate for guys like Mr. Callahan–and Mrs. Goddard, my 9th grade World History teacher, who now that I’m older and know about such things, must have been just a year or so away from retirement.
I’m being a bit negative here. What I’m trying to say is that I have a soft spot for history, and especially living over here in Korea, I spend some time thinking about my home country and what makes up its psyche.
The American Mind is a series by Allen C. Guelzo, an esteemed professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. In it he details some of the ideas, some of which are philosophical (many of which are of course theological), that have shaped American history. He gets into the The Transcendentalists, Pragmatism, Conservatism, the influence of the Enlightenment…and perhaps Mr. Callahan’s favorite; emancipation.

It’s good stuff. Guelzo is an expert, even if his lecturing style is a hammy for my tastes. But the info itself is fun to absorb and doesn’t drag, even when discussing people like Jonathan Edwards or the Puritans. One of the better Teach Company series I’ve listened to.