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News, events, updates, and tidbits from the Presbyterian Historical Society. Use tags to read related articles or sort by author for similar posts written by PHS staff members and volunteers.

Story of an RNS Photo: The Anniversary of the Liberation of Dachau

April 27, 2020
Last year, PHS completed the Religious News Service digitization pilot project. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we were able to scan nearly 500 photographs from the Religious News Service photograph collection and add them to our digital collection in Pearl.

Early in the project, I scanned photographs from the 1980s. So why, I asked myself, did I find an...

Author: 
Cecilia
Tags: 
Religious News Service, World War II
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Story of an RNS Photo: The Celis and Rotenberg Families

October 22, 2019
RNS photo showing Father Hubert Celis, a prison chaplain in Brussels, Belgium, being welcomed on his arrival in New York City to serve as "grandfather" at the Bar Mitzvah of Norman Wolbrom. Pearl ID: 151705

On June 18, 1965, Father Hubert Celis of Belgium arrived in New York City to be present for the Bar Mitzvah of Norman Wolbrom, son of Regine Rotenberg Wolbrom. Regine and her siblings survived the Holocaust thanks to the Celis family, and Father Hubert was...

Author: 
Cecilia
Tags: 
Religious News Service, World War II
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Sea to Shining Sea: The Story of U.S. Navy Chaplain John E. Johnson

August 12, 2019
John E. Johnson, one officer in the second row, sailed on the USS Idaho, 1939. Courtesy of Merwyn Johnson.

--by Merwyn S. Johnson

Before he sailed the world’s great oceans as a career U.S. Navy chaplain, my father John E. (“Johnny”) Johnson surveyed the “amber waves of grain” in Iowa, the ancestral home where he spent his summers as a youth. Whether on land or on ship, the seas gave him a wide horizon for his entire life. Navigating them for almost 100 years, May 2, 1899 to November 17, 1998, he immersed...

Author: 
Guest Blogger
Tags: 
World War II
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Eisenhower: Peace and Presbyterianism

June 11, 2019

“The business of the church is to put us generals out of business.” 

This quotation from the May 1, 1969 issue of Presbyterian Life comes from none other than Dwight David Eisenhower, five-star general, supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and 34th President of the United States from 1953 to 1961. While initially religiously unaffiliated, Eisenhower became a devout Presbyterian upon ascending to the presidency. Having experienced the horrors of war up close, his newfound religious faith coincided with his...

Author: 
Anthony
Tags: 
Dwight Eisenhower, Presidents, World War II, Building Knowledge and Breaking Barriers
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Music and the Internment of Japanese Americans

November 6, 2017

--by William R. Laws III

At October's Sacramento Archives Crawl (a Northern California open house for history buffs), Heather Lanctot, who is the Archives Coordinator for rural Yolo County, expressed her profound sense of the importance of remembering the tragic...

Author: 
Guest Blogger
Tags: 
American History, Japanese Americans, World War II
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