Fresno Pacific University History Program

Happy August 11 (5138?)! Glad for my student, now colleague, Alfredo Ramirez -- because of him, I have thought about the long-count calendar: Wikipedia, "The Long Count calendar identifies a date by counting the number of days from a starting date that is generally calculated to be August 11, 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or September 6 in the Julian calendar (or −3113 in astronomical year numbering). There has been much debate over the precise correlation between the Western calendars and the Long Count calendars. The August 11 date is based on the GMT correlation."

TLDR: Did the world start on August 11?

Mesoamerican Long Count calendar - Wikipedia The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is a non-repeating base-20 and base-18 calendar used by several pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, most notably the Maya. For this reason, it is often known as the Maya Long Count calendar. Using a modified vigesimal tally, the Long Count calendar identifies a....

The perfect pangram today was instantaneous for us Romanists.

FPU Student Colleagues: please be sure to apply for Private Donor Scholarships! We don't want you to miss them because of their mid-summer release!
Scholarships.Fresno.Edu

I did a review of Bregman's _HumanKind_ for the next _Pacific Journal_ -- please read the book if you have time this summer. If you are also a child of the end of the last millennium, it is likely to shift your paradigm as much as it did mine. Here is a wordcloud of the review; thanks to the amazing Chris for turning me on to the scholar and the work. I have been so busy arguing against concepts like the "perfectibility of man" and the "end of history" that I didn't examine my own assumptions enough.

https://www.amazon.com/Humankind-Hopeful-History-Rutger-Bregman/dp/0316418536

The annual plaques are inscribed for another year and displayed in the Honors Hall: congratulations to Jan, Jasmine, Joseph, and Bre!

The Minoan site that has been excavated near where the new Cretan airport will be gives us another chance to gently rib our Archaeologist friends for resorting to religious ritual when we have insufficient evidence. Lucky for us, Classicists and Philologists never assume major literary connections based on a few, possibly random, verbal similarities. Anthropologists never construct a whole civilization based on one questionable artefact.

I hope it will be a meaningful Juneteenth for all of us. I appreciate my friend John posting this flyer as a clear “lest we forget.” As Julie Roys posted yesterday, “Leading up to Juneteenth, historian
urges taking time to remember the crushing reality & sorrows of slavery. ‘Many people in U.S. are quick to gloss over the unpleasantness of human bo***ge & simply celebrate the freedom that came afterwards.’"

Time for my annual reminder to you all that one reason to live the life of the mind is that you get rich!

Today is Veronica Day! Our friend Vero is the cover and five pages of Pacific Magazine! Thanks for leavening our world, VIMG. I'm so fortunate to have been part of your journey.

I hope it is a meaningful Memorial Day for you, friends! And I hope you have amazing heroes in your family like my Uncle’s Brother, Charlie Carr – check out the Serpens Monument if you are ever at Arlington Cemetery. And I don’t think you’ll find a better small-town memorial to our heroes than Jackson’s Veterans Park, just a block from the McKibben House.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/middleeast/egypt-pyramids-nile-river-lost-ahramat-branch-scn/index.html

Newly mapped lost branch of the Nile could help solve long-standing pyramid mystery | CNN A now-extinct stretch of the Nile River once flowed close to Egypt’s Great Pyramid and likely played a key role in the construction of ancient monuments before disappearing, according to new research.

Speaking of Teachers' Day, here is an example of how we are reconsidering almost everything about best practices in teaching by our friend Dr. Diddams.

Plato Would Have Never Given Aristotle an A: Reconsidering the Costs of Grades for Holistic Christian Education - Christian Scholar’s Review In this cultural moment in higher education, when everything appears to be up for grabs, perhaps it’s time to think more deeply about how grades might hamper holistic student development....

You may hear our message on KVPR today—we are thankful for our FPU Student Colleagues! “Drs. Pam and Marshall Johnston, the Pairadocs, are so proud of the class graduating today at Fresno Pacific! They began their college career during a global pandemic, and they finished as a mutually supportive community that will change the Valley and the world! May the Fourth be with you!”

In case you had not noticed the interesting effect that has transformed Athens this week...my guess is that Central Valley air is still worse.

Our double-Highest-Honors Student Colleague Izaiah in the spotlight today: with Dr. Pam at the Honors Banquet, accentuated with a great globe photo by Brooke, and then we see him this week as he addressed the Scholars' Lunch.

Very proud of our Humanities Honors students, and sad that this may be one of the last pictures I get to be in with Profesora.

Happy 2,776th Birthday, Rome!

FPU Research Night 2024 was, in my view, the best, and certainly the largest, ever. Having three of the venues in the CAC did not hurt! What a great event to show off our student talent at a time when the Provost candidate was visiting! We had three presentation panels, spread across campus, and the four categories of posters are pictured in the auditorium in the first image. The awards gathering is in the second, and I could not leave out a reminder of the ways our Student Colleagues are special in the last picture: we all agree we are a unicorn; just how much of one is the debate.

Our old friend Meg continues to be used prominently in FPU Publicity -- here to remind students of the plethora of scholarships that are available! Perhaps she would have been a better Sock Model than me?

[A] new [NYT] report cites several promising strategies for lifting diversity, such as:

Reduce so-called merit aid, which tends to go to affluent students, and direct scholarships to students who demonstrate both academic excellence and financial need. Boston University has recently done so.

Recruit more transfers from community colleges, where top students from modest backgrounds often start. Central Florida, Dayton, George Mason, and the University of California all emphasize community-college transfers, and Princeton recently started a program.

Help students navigate higher education. Its bureaucracy can be so maddening that it keeps students from graduating. In response, Baruch has created an office called BOSS — Baruch One Stop Shop — where students can get help enrolling in classes or filling out aid forms. The college has also created cohorts of first-year students who take classes together and can help one another.

(I am pleased to say that FPU is doing versions of each of these; I did of course have to add the Oxford comma.)

I'm thankful to our friend Michael for posting this piece, and even more thankful that FPU seems to be much better than the norm for policies toward adjunct colleagues!

On this Ides Of March, I hope you will not meet your demise by political assassination or by inhalation of fine silica dust!

Per NYT: Happy Pi Day: The mathematical ratio is the perfect symbol for our species’ long effort to tame infinity.

We're celebrating another History Day on FPU campus! This year the theme is "Turning Points." Dr Pam is judging documentaries, and I am evaluating performances. There are some stunningly good ones! And it is always pleasant to see many former students who are now teachers themselves!

Fascinating new interpretation of a site that has long been excavated: it's why we think they were called "Phoenicians."

This Ancient Factory Helped Purple Reign Archaeologists in Israel have revealed a production site for one of history’s most luxurious, and smelliest, colorants.

A meaningful Shrove Tuesday to you (the alternate identity of the last day of Carnevale).

Shrove Tuesday | Definition, History, & Traditions Shrove Tuesday, the day immediately preceding Ash Wednesday, celebrated as the last day before the Lenten fast. Once associated with the confession of sins before Lent, the day acquired the character of a carnival in many places and is commonly associated with the eating of pancakes or other sweets.

Join us to celebrate Steve and Rod, if you are in town on the 11th!

The first Senior Project Presentation of Spring will be Danya Gonzalez, HRSS Outstanding Graduate, presenting her work on the AIDS epidemic. She won first place in History at the Alpha Chi Convention for her work. Join us if you are able: Thursday the 27th at 12:45, NOH 125.

Our ultra-talented Alumna Meg won a SACA Award for Outstanding Performance in a Musical -- for Cabaret!

Congratulations to our alumnus Russel Laforteza, who has still another feather in his cap as he prepares himself to be an educator in our beloved Valley!