January 2025 Archives
Tin Pan Alley Composer and lyricist Biographies
Biographical sketches of the men and women who built the Great American Songbook. Not merely the Tin Pan Alley songwriters, but earlier writers like Francis Scott Key and Stephen Foster as well.
Manuscripts - Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts
A searchable comprehensive database of New Testament manuscripts, with details of each and links to images.
London Calling : Jimmy Perry : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
A radio sitcom written by Jimmy Perry, co-creator of Dad's Army and Hi-de-Hi, about the early days of the BBC, starring Jimmy Perry, Graham Crowden (Waiting for God), Bill Pertwee (Round the Horne, Dad's Army), Roy Hudd (The Crowned Hudds), and Jeffrey Holland (Hi-de-Hi).
BBC Radio 4 - Letter from America by Alistair Cooke
A collection of nearly 1500 episodes of Alistair Cooke's weekly commentaries for the BBC on life in America. The series ran from 1946 to 2004, "the longest-running speech radio programme hosted by one individual." A two-hour program offers highlights from his 1970s broadcasts, a tumultuous period in American history.
The prehistory of online communication in Tulsa. Before high-speed internet, before dial-up internet, there were modems and bulletin board services (BBSes), and you'd dial into someone else's computer to exchange files, play games, and chat. The era ran from 1981 to 2004. Black Gold BBS was one of the biggest and longest lasting. Wayne's World was one of the last. Mike Lester's GalaxyStar evolved into an Internet Service Provider. Some great memories embedded in with this list of northeastern Oklahoma BBSes.
The Bible and the American Founders, by Daniel Dreisbach
Prof. Dreisbach's 2017 talk on the influence of the Bible on government in America's founding era bolsters the case for Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters's push to include the Bible in public education. American history can't be comprehended apart from the Bible.
"How did the Bible inform the founders' political and legal pursuits? I want to get a little bit more specific here. As I've already said, the founders held diverse views, including diverse theological views. Some doubted Christianity's transcendent claims. Some doubted the Bible's divine origins. But I'm going to suggest to you that many in this generation looked to the Scriptures for insights into things like human nature, civic virtue, social order, political authority, and other concepts essential to the establishment of a political society. Perhaps more important, there was broad agreement that the Bible was essential for nurturing the kind of civic virtues that give citizens the capacity for self-government. In various conventions and representative assemblies of the age as well as in pamphlets, political sermons, and private papers, founding figures appealed to the Bible for principles, precedents, models, normative standards, and cultural motifs, to define their community and to order their great political experiments. The Bible, some thought, offered guidance on how to select righteous leaders. They thought the Bible offered guidance on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, including the right to resist a tyrannical government....
"I don't think you can understand the most basic, fundamental features of the American constitutional design -- and by that I have in mind things like limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, rule of law, due process of law and representative government -- without understanding this biblical anthropology, this idea that man is a fallen creature, and where power is given, that power must be checked."
