The 2026 college football season starts. We start in Atlanta of all places. 2:30 on ABC. How did Atlanta happen? I do not know.
I have avoided thinking much about it. It will be what it will be. Auburn with a new coach, a new regime, with the loose transfer rules now in place, Auburn with a roster turned upside down. I thought the Tigers would go off as a 1 or 2-ppoint favorite. Who knows.
I listen to Coach Golesh pregames. So articulate. So precise in what he has to say. Can't help but be impressed,
FIRST QUAETER
2:30 on ABC from Atlanta.
Auburn receives. One first down and a punt. Baylor starts on their 16. The Bears drive to midfield. They have more pep than Auburn early on. But then their QB fumbles! Auburn on our 30. Quickly across midfield.
We move to 4th & 4. FG good about 43 yds.
Auburn 3 Baylor 0
8:13 in the the first.
FD Baylor. They are running the ball effectively. Their offense looks better, looser than ours.
Then an Auburn pick to stop a Baylor drive! Tigers on our 46. We gotta get the run game going.
We go backwards. No run, no pass. 3rd & 28. 4th and long. Our offense cannot get untracked.
Baylor definitely early on looks sharper than Auburn. Their passing is precise and they find running holes in our defensive line.
Quarter ends,
Auburn 3 Baylor 0
SECOND QUARTER
The Beats miss a 42 yd FG attempt wide right not even close.
From our 25 three downs and out. Good punt and smear on the punt receiver at the 22.
Looks bad so far. Our team is not focused on offense,
Their offense is picking our defense apart. The sharper looking team by far.
Baylor punts from midfield and for some our receiver fair catches just outside the goal line. Poorly coached punt receiver.
The ghost of Hugh Freeze must still be hanging around.
We finally start a drive but alas Baylor intercepts a long pass inside their 5.
Baylor punts from their 5.
Auburn starts on our 43. 5:52 in the second.
Tigers to the Baylor 15. Cobb around the right side for the score.
Auburn 10 Baylor 3:51 in the second.
4th and 3 going for it.
FD completion 2:00 left in the second.
16 yd completion for the end zone.
Auburn 10 Baylor 7 1:30 in the second.
A promising drive goes awry as we take a sack and with 13 second Baylor intercept. The Bears defense rises up with two late defensive stops. Bad feeling so far in this topsy turvy game.
Halftime
Auburn 10 Baylor 7
Bears go three and out. Tigers start an impressive drive that leads to a missed FG attempt. Bad omen
Baylor starts a drive from their 25 picking our defense apart.
They give up the football on failing on 4th & 2 from the Auburn
A promising drive dies at midfield. at 4th and 11.
Baylor at about their 16.
The quarter ends with AU coming up short on fake punt at 4th 5.
Auburn 10 Baylor 7
FOURTH QUARTER
Brown throws a late interception. He is certainly not as advertised. Late tie game.
Auburn 10 Baylor 10
Last Bear possession our defense held them to a FG/
At least our defense came to play.
Auburn driving late with an injury on the field 10-10 4:07 left.
3:21 left Byron runs it in. Good late game drive there.
Auburn 17 Baylor 10
Down to cases.
FINAL SCORE
Auburn 17 Baylor 16
Baylor scores a late TD with seconds to go, goes for 2 after a chess match of timeouts back and forth, but our defense saves the game. Thrilling!
Thursday, September 3, 2026
Using the courts to rein in Mr. Trump’s authoritarian leanings remains essential, but it isn’t sufficient. If the midterms result in the shift of power many expect, it won’t be as easy for the president to trample the Constitution or run roughshod over Congress. But Americans should be clear that there is no cavalry coming. We don’t have the luxury of fantasizing that we are just one legal victory or perfectly poll-tested message away from turning the nation around. Such thinking unintentionally obscures the urgent need for all of us, especially those in relative positions of comfort, to roll up our sleeves, walk out our front doors and make ourselves part of the answer to this crisis.
“What would Howard say?” This question, which Dave Zirin reports being “asked repeatedly” while he was working on his new biography of Howard Zinn, underscores how unusual a figure his subject cut in contemporary American life. Most historians live and die in relative obscurity. But 16 years after Zinn’s death, many people still look to him, not just as a scholar but as a kind of sage.
Zinn first became famous—and, in some circles, infamous—after the 1980 publication of his best-selling work A People’s History of the United States. The book advanced an ambitious and unrepentantly radical reimagining of the nation’s past. Zinn rejected the conventional organization of history around “the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders” and declared, “I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees.” What emerged was a new grand narrative, one that promised to reveal what mainstream history had long concealed and to offer a new moral framework for the past. In Zinn’s telling, the powerful were almost always up to no good, and ordinary people were the heroes of the American story. They courageously built movements for justice and sometimes even won, though it never took long for the oppressors to regroup. The fight was never over.
Unlike most best sellers, A People’s History never stopped selling. Each year during its first three decades in print, it sold more copies than the last. The book’s fans applauded its bottom-up, justice-minded approach to history, while its detractors dismissed it as a leftist morality play masquerading as a story about the past. No one could doubt that it changed the conversation about American history, not to mention the trajectory of Zinn’s life. By the time he died in 2010, he was an archvillain for the right and a secular saint for the left.
Zirin’s fast-paced biography, The People’s Historian, is an answer to the most interesting version of “What would Howard say?” One hardly needs to squint to imagine what Zinn would have thought of the current regime in Washington, and readers curious only about that can put this book down after page 4, where Zirin declares, “Fascist movements taking orders from billionaire insurrectionists were the kinds of struggles that Howard Zinn demonstrated a willingness to fight and, if necessary, die to oppose.” But Zirin himself is after something more. He knew Zinn personally and collaborated with him on projects; he admires him deeply. Zirin believes we need more than Zinn’s opinions today; he argues that we need the deeper wisdom that emanates from his life and work.
Zinn’s many gifts developed in the course of what was, by any estimation, a remarkable journey. He was born in 1922 to working-class Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. In his early 20s he rushed to enlist in the fight against fascism, serving in the Air Forces during World War II. He would long regret his short tenure as a bombardier who dropped artillery shells on behalf of a compromised colonial power—as he would later come to see the United States—from such heights that he could not be sure where exactly they landed. Zinn’s willingness to admit he was gravely wrong is part of what Zirin loves about him. The people’s historian was a radical, but he was also a “happy warrior” who believed that people could change, and so could societies.
As a participant in the civil-rights and anti-war movements, Zinn witnessed such transformations firsthand. He organized alongside his students at Spelman College as well as with famous activists, including Ella Baker and Daniel Berrigan. Together, in the 1960s and ’70s, they fought to change a country whose past and present were steeped in violence and white supremacy. The going was never easy, because, as Zirin tells it—very much in Zinnian fashion—they bumped up against so many villains in power. Sometimes it was the director of the FBI; other times, a reactionary university administrator. But the people could be powerful too. Any given campaign might be stymied, but the march went on. However dreary the news, the hope persisted for a better day.
Zirin argues convincingly that Zinn’s life story vindicates one of his deepest convictions: that ordinary people and “small acts” can change the world. Zinn was right about this, and Zirin concludes the book with a quote from him that draws out the optimistic implications of his faith in bottom-up movements: “We have been surprised before in history. We can be surprised again. Indeed, we can do the surprising.” This is a compelling message for the current moment—and any other. Yet one can agree with Zinn on the power of the people to make change and still wonder whether recent history has revealed the limits of his wisdom.
“Was he wrong to have faith in the people?” Zirin relates that some of Zinn’s devotees—“those politically raised on his ideas”—have asked him this question, in addition to the one about what he might say in any given situation. Zirin takes up the second query but answers it far less satisfactorily than the first. He acknowledges that “in 2024, 77 million voters checked the box for an authoritarian to take power once again,” and moreover that Trump “won masses of white working-class people and, according to political pundits, a not-insignificant number of Black and Latino men.” But Zirin does not wrestle with the meaning of these developments. Rather, he waves them away with invocations of the “tech oligarchs” and “autocrats” who are driving “our global descent into authoritarianism.” This is an homage in a way, a vintage Zinn move—evading tough questions about who “the people” are and what they really want.
A People’s History of the United States appeared the same year Ronald Reagan was first elected president. In later editions of the book, Zinn would cast Reagan—like Jimmy Carter before him and George H. W. Bush after—as a creature of “the Establishment,” elected by a majority of voters but by a minority of the voting population and, hence, hardly the people’s choice. Zinn wrote something similar in 2003 amid the travails of the early War on Terror: “I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over.” The following year, of course, George W. Bush won the popular vote.
Zinn was hardly the only academic to be thrown by this turn of events. The 2004 election left no doubt that the Reagan Revolution had been more than a blip; in its aftermath, American historians redoubled their efforts to understand the sources of the right’s surprising resurgence. What they have uncovered in the past two decades flies in the face of a central tenet of Zinnian orthodoxy. The sustained success of the modern conservative movement cannot be explained away as the outcome of establishment machinations or a top-down takeover. Its energy and vitality came in no small part from the grassroots: from stay-at-home moms and car mechanics, from the suburbs and the Sun Belt, from evangelicals and Catholics and more. The revival of the Republican Party’s national fortunes at various moments, going all the way back to Richard Nixon, confirms Zinn’s faith in the power of bottom-up movements, even as it confounds his almost mythic sense of “the people” as inevitably on the right side of history (that is, the left side of the political spectrum).
And if ordinary folks are more complicated than Zinn and Zirin recognize, perhaps those who wield power can be too. What made the right’s political comeback so surprising, after all, was that in the mid-1960s the liberal-left coalition was winning not only in the streets but also on Capitol Hill. In those years, progressives leveraged grassroots energy into breakthrough policy change. The leaders of major civic and political institutions were rarely out in front of progressive activists, but at least some of them chose to pull levers that made the United States more equal and just. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed with sweeping bipartisan majorities.
After an outrageous assault by law enforcement on peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon B. Johnson memorably proclaimed—before a joint session of Congress, Cabinet officers, Supreme Court justices, and more than 70 million Americans watching on television—that “it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And—we—shall—overcome.” His invocation of a beloved civil-rights anthem brought a tear to Martin Luther King Jr.’s eye. None of this impressed Zinn. In A People’s History, he framed both the speech and the landmark civil-rights legislation of the 1960s as “concessions.”
Then and now, such unrelenting suspicion springs from genuine patterns of institutional failure and betrayal. Villains are, alas, not just a figment of our collective imagination. And yet, in 2026, with the Democrats on the outside of power looking in, progressives might nevertheless ask whether the Zinnian propensity to demonize anyone and everyone wielding authority has served their cause well. Dismissing landmark legislation as mere concessions can miss the fact that there is no path forward from righteous protest to lasting change that does not run through better—if imperfect—public policy. However “exhilarating” Zinn’s counternarrative can be, it may have encouraged millions of well-meaning readers to be skeptical of the possibility that any good could come through the slow, messy institutional work that is central to pluralistic democracy. Coincidental or not, this much is true: During the same period when Zinn’s influence was rising meteorically on the left, the right became much more adept at channeling populist enthusiasm into deliberate campaigns to reshape the major institutions of American life.
“I wanted to change the world, and I thought history might be helpful,” Zinn liked to say, lightheartedly. His biographer is right to argue that Zinn, an ordinary person, did change the world—though perhaps he didn’t do it only in the ways that either of them hoped he would.
Saturday, August 29, 2026
Petrie graduated with his doctorate from Hopkins intending not to return to Auburn, but he was recruited back to Auburn by President Broun. He did not go to Hopkins intending to be a historian but got turned on to history while at Hopkins understanding how to study history rigorously beyond just memorizing facts.
History people tend to get inspired by historians who are brilliant at their craft and great teachers. What Petrie found at Johns Hopkins and what I found at his Auburn University.
Mike Jernigan - Auburn Man:The Life and Times of George Petrie
Engaging Discussions about Early Christianity
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The Early Life of Jesus
August 29, 2026
I’ve been thinking a lot about the social/cultural/economic/historical context of Jesus lately, and reading a good bit on what we know about Galilee from the time. I’ll be saying more about all that anon, but I thought this might be a good chance to cover some of the basics on the blog – what do we know about Jesus from the time he was born to the time he was baptized as an adult, which is how he begins his ministry in the Gospels.
For stories of his life before that, of course, all we have are Matthew and Luke. I won’t explain here why I don’t think their accounts of his genealogy and birth can be historical. I’ve posted on that a good deal before and you can find them on the blog by doing a word search for “virgin,” “Bethlehem,” “census,” and so on.
But both Gospels also have short stories about him as a boy. Matthew describes the circumstances of his “descent to Egypt” with his family to escape the wrath of Herod, which evidently happens a couple of years after his birth, since the wisemen have been following a star for a year or two in order to find him (Matthew 2:1-23). And Luke famously recounts the “Home Alone” episode of Jesus as a a twelve-year old in the temple, inadvertently left behind in Jerusalem for three days after his parents headed back home to Nazareth (Luke 2:41-52). I don’t take any of these accounts to be historical either.
But there are other things we can say almost certainly are historical. How do we decide? How can we determine the difference between the legends and the history?
As you know, historical scholars apply standard criteria to deal with ancient sources to determine what probably happened and what appears to be either exaggeration or invention. I won’t go into any length here, but just look these up in a word search and you’ll see fuller explanations for them in earlier posts, where I both describe them and justify them. Here I’ll simply say these are the same criteria any historian uses in trying to separate fact from fiction in accounts of past events or people, whether trying to reconstruct the life and actions of George Washington, Marco Polo, Socrates, or most anyone else. New Testament scholars tend to give them rather definitive names (which in the end cause about as many problems as they solve):
Independent attestation (sometimes called multiple attestation): if there are a number of sources that relate the same event independently of each other, that makes it more likely historical than if only one source gives it. The more the merrier.
Dissimilarity: if there is a story that runs contrary to the perspective/beliefs/assumptions/views of the persons telling it, then they probably didn’t make it up and so it’s more likely something that actually happened.
HistoricalCredibility: if a source claims something that simply couldn’t have happened (e.g., that Thomas Jefferson got very upset with his microwave) then … it didn’t happen.
Scholars also, of course, consider the dates of the sources, what is known about their authors, the general reliability of claims when they can absolutely be checked against established historical data, the plausibility of what is said (if Alexander the Great is said to have force-marched his army 300 miles in two days, one would be justifiably dubious), etc.
So with that said, what can we say with relatively high levels of probability about Jesus’ life before he was baptized?
Here is what I say about it all in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford University Press, 1999). Most of these are not much debated among Gospel scholars. I have edited the discussion a bit for blog purposes.
This will take two posts; this one has just two of the opening points that seem pretty obvious but nonetheless need to be noted (even obvious facts are important!)
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Raised in Nazareth
Jesus is said to have come from Nazareth in all four Gospels (Matt. 4:13; Mark 1:9; Luke 4:16; John 1:45), and is sometimes actually called “Jesus of Nazareth” in other ancient sources (for example, Acts 3:6). That is to say, the tradition passes the criterion of independent attestation with flying colors. Moreover, Matthew and Luke had to go out of their way to explain how it was that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, since everyone knew he came from Nazareth [I explain that earlier in my book]. To this extent, the tradition passes the criterion of dissimilarity (that is, neither Matthew nor Luke was comfortable with it).
Even more significantly, with respect to dissimilarity, it is difficult to imagine why Christians would have wanted to make it up. Nazareth was a little, unknown, and completely insignificant village. Modern archaeologists estimate its size at around 1500-2000 persons in Jesus’ day. It’s not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, or even in the writings of Josephus, who was in charge of the Jewish military operations in Galilee and had a lot to say about the region in his many volumes of writings.
What would be gained by claiming that Jesus came from a small one-horse town like Nazareth (cf. John 1:45)? If you wanted to speak about the powerful messiah of Israel, surely you’d have him come from the center of power, Jerusalem, or possibly Bethlehem. There is little doubt that the tradition of Jesus coming from Nazareth is so firmly entrenched in the tradition precisely because it’s historically accurate. Jesus grew up in an out-of-the way rural village.
Born and Raised a Jew
There’s probably no reason to belabor the point that all of our sources portray Jesus as Jewish – he came from a Jewish home, he was circumcised as a Jew, he worshiped the Jewish God, he kept Jewish customs, followed the Jewish law, interpreted the Jewish Scriptures, etc. Despite some wild claims by modern ideologues, for example, some Nazis who would have preferred that Jesus was a blond, blue-eyed Aryan (seriously: some of the greatest NT scholars in the world in the 1930s were devoted Nazis), the tradition of Jesus’ Jewish origin and upbringing is firmly entrenched in all of our traditions at every level.
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