If you want to understand Putin and his motives this piece is very helpful and interesting: History News Network | The Surprising Consensus on What Experts Say about Putin
Month: October 2015
“How Texas Teaches History” – The New York Times
Ellen Bresler Rockmore claims that it is not just the content in Texas textbooks that distort the history of slavery. Grammar, she argues, is also used in ways that downplay and distort the reality of slavery. “Grammar matters, especially when textbooks tackle the subject of slavery.”
Read the entire article here: How Texas Teaches History – The New York Times
“What we can learn about the discovery of Thomas Jefferson’s chemistry lab at the University of Virginia” – Yahoo News
“Workers discovered the ‘chemical hearth’ partly designed by Thomas Jefferson while renovating the University of Virginia’s famous Rotunda.” Very cool!
“The Vital Fact that’s Been Lost in the Debate Over Those Planned Parenthood Videos” | History News Network
Johanna Schoen reviews the history of fetal tissue research in order to inform “[t]hose who want to defend Planned Parenthood and a woman’s ability to make her own reproductive choices” so that they can give it “a full-throated defense. “
Read the entire article here: History News Network | The Vital Fact that’s Been Lost in the Debate Over Those Planned Parenthood Videos
“The Gingrich Revolution and the Roots of Republican Dysfunction” | History News Network
“The person most responsible for injecting that virulent strain of partisanship into the Republican party was another dethroned House Speaker — Newt Gingrich. The firebrand conservative leaders today are Gingrich’s children. Gingrich rose to power in the 1980s as the pied piper of a new assertive conservatism that merged the moralistic rhetoric of the New Right, and the mystical conservative faith in tax cuts, into a powerful ideological message. It was Gingrich who manufactured the hyper-partisanship that defines modern politics.”
I remember the Gingrich Revolution all too well! It happened just as I became interested in politics. It made me so sick that I came very close to swearing off politics forever. Luckily, I realized that cynicism was not the answer. To this day I feel sick every time I see Newt. While I don’t think Newt is solely responsible for the nasty and dysfunctional state of politics today, but I agree with Steven M. Gillon that he bears a large share of the responsibility.
Read the entire article here: History News Network | The Gingrich Revolution and the Roots of Republican Dysfunction
“Japan May Cut Unesco Funds Following Nanjing Massacre Listing” – Japan Real Time – WSJ
“Japan said it may cut its financial contribution to an agency of the United Nations after the organization added documents on the Nanjing Massacre to its International Memory of the World Register last week.” The nationalist government in Japan proclaims that it wants to restore honor to the Japanese people, but its actions (denial of WWII war crimes, etc.) have served only to bring dishonor to the Japanese people. The honorable thing to do would be to own up to their past crimes and work to ensure that their nation never goes down that path again.
Source: Japan May Cut Unesco Funds Following Nanjing Massacre Listing – Japan Real Time – WSJ
Chinese honor guard members march at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in Jiangsu in December 2014. Associated Press
The Historian Alan E. Steinweis Dismantles Ben Carson’s Absurd and Insulting Claim about Guns and the Holocaust
“The Republican presidential candidate’s statements about weapons and Germany trivialize history.” Read Steinweis’s incisive critique here: Ben Carson Is Wrong on Guns and the Holocaust – The New York Times
Doug Chayka, The New York Times
“Did NC legislators rewrite US history?”
“A N.C. bill on teaching United States history has experts scratching their heads.”
More evidence of the American Legislative Executive Council’s influence in state legislatures: Did NC legislators rewrite US history?
“Mike Huckabee’s 1998 Book Is Full Of Fake Quotes From America’s Founders” – BuzzFeed News
This is common practice on the Right. They love the Founders, but only after they’ve re-worked them to conform to their ideological predilections.
Read the entire article here: Mike Huckabee’s 1998 Book Is Full Of Fake Quotes From America’s Founders – BuzzFeed News
Bradley Proctor Debunks the Claim that “Faculty Are Ineffective, Students Are Whiny, and Colleges so Misguided as to Be a Waste of Money*” |History News Network
“Today’s conversations about college costs and cries of political correctness gone amuck misidentify the victims and the perpetrators of very real problems. The result is a message that faculty are ineffective, students are whiny, and colleges and universities so misguided as to be wastes of money. Far too few voices remind us the vital importance for our nation and our world of interrogating how art, science, citizenship, identity, and power work. Real learning, the consensus instead seems to be, ought to happen while on the job at multinational corporations. Everything worth knowing, says conventional wisdom, can be learned through poorly- or unpaid internships and by internet searches. It is that message against public funding, in favor of privatization, and against democracy that is destroying higher education. The American mind is not being coddled, it is being sold down the river.”
Please read Bradley Proctor’s thoughtful piece on the real problems in higher ed (and they’re not the misguided ones currently in vogue in the media): History News Network | Faculty Are Ineffective, Students Are Whiny, and Colleges so Misguided as to Be a Waste of Money*
History Chick in AZ 