Month: October 2015

How Columbus Day Fell Victim to Its Own Success – The Atlantic

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Yoni Appelbaum, writing for The Atlantic, reminds us of the original purpose of Columbus Day: “It’s worth remembering that the now-controversial holiday started as a way to empower immigrants and celebrate American diversity.”

It’s too bad that Columbus became the symbol of American diversity. His heroic status can only be sustained if we ignore the real Columbus. However, this option dishonors history as well as the victims of his ignorance, greed, and violent temper.

 

Thanks for the pointer George Jones!

Read the entire article here: How Columbus Day Fell Victim to Its Own Success – The Atlantic

“No, Carly Fiorina, a degree in medieval history doesn’t qualify you to fight Isis” | David M Perry | Comment is free | The Guardian

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Last week Carly Fiorina stated that her “degree in medieval history and philosophy has come in handy, because what Isis wants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally.” Knowing the relevant history is helpful in understanding the current events in the Middle East, but it’s not enough, especially if your understanding comes from a single period of time and which you studied at the undergraduate level forty years ago! And as David M. Perry points out, “While the Middle Ages do in fact shape contemporary events all the time, Fiorina unfortunately almost always gets the lessons of history wrong.”

And what is more troubling in Fiorina’s statement is that she’s using “medieval” in a particular way that it not constructive in dealing with the present situation. As Perry explains, “When we use the word “medieval” to characterize something we don’t like, be it Isis, the Ferguson Police department or Russia’s driver’s license regulations, we are trying to impose chronological distance between ourselves and things we find unpleasant. Thinking of distasteful or evil aspects of the modern world as belonging to the past makes it harder, not easier, to understand their causes and fight them.”

Read the entire article here: No, Carly Fiorina, a degree in medieval history doesn’t qualify you to fight Isis | David M Perry | Comment is free | The Guardian

Academic Freedom Is Ultimately Tied to the Right to Vote

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Please read this post with commentary from Jesse Jackson, Sr. on the latest attempt in Alabama to make it very difficult for African Americans to vote!

martinkich's avatarACADEME BLOG

Cecil Canton, my colleague on the CBC Executive Committee, has passed along this “Weekly Commentary” from Jesse Jackson, Sr., about the erosion of voting rights in Alabama. Very ironically but very predictably, once the Supreme Court ruled that the states subject to federal monitoring under the Voting Rights Act had moved beyond the need for such oversight, their state governments have quickly resurrected many of the strategies that they had employed to suppress the African-American vote during the Jim Crow period.

And as Cecil states in his e-mail, “Clearly, as academics we justify protecting what we do by saying that we teach our students to be able to more effectively participate in our democracy. If that is true, then we need to be first in the fight to protect the most essential part of that democracy: the franchise! Especially in those places where it is most under attack and for…

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NOVA: “Secrets of Noah’s Ark”

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If you haven’t already watched NOVA’s “Secrets of Noah’s Ark” I would recommend doing so. NOVA is always great, but if you’re interesting in the connection between the Sumerian/Babylonian flood myths and the Biblical flood myth you’ll find this fascinating. I don’t want to give away any details so here’s the link to NOVA (PBS): http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-noahs-ark.html

Noah's Ark NOVA

“How Gun Control Came to Britain” | History News Network

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The historian Luke Reader offers hope for a path to gun control through the British example. He recognizes that in Britain “there has never been a domestic gun culture. Nor has there ever been a right to bear arms [there hasn’t been here either until the Supreme Court declared (falsely) that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms],” but he points out that it’s possible to change the momentum in favor of gun control through popular movements.
He’s right. Even if it looks bleak at the moment, we have to keep trying. We majority of Americans support gun control. So we have the power to defeat the NRA; what we’re missing is the will.

Read the entire article here: History News Network | How Gun Control Came to Britain

guns

“Jefferson’s Later-in-Life Fascination with Jesus” | History News Network

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M. Andrew Holowchak makes the case that there were three main reasons why Jefferson was fascinated with Jesus (the human being). Read his essay here: History News Network | Jefferson’s Later-in-Life Fascination with Jesus

Framing a Legend

“The Medieval Chastity Belt – Myth or Reality?” | History News Network

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Albrecht Classen, author of The Medieval Chastity Belt, claims that “it is a joke, nothing else, as the context and the monstrosity of the metal cage indicate. This joke obviously appealed to a number of satirical writers and artists in the following centuries, who fully understood the great value of the chastity belt for their own purposes to entertain their audiences. Indeed, the literary examples that I could uncover consistently belong to the genre of satire, while the chastity belt never appears in serious texts or art works.” If it was nothing but a joke, it was a pretty sick joke. Just thinking about it makes me cringe!

Read the entire article here: History News Network | The Medieval Chastity Belt – Myth or Reality?

Stephen Singer: How to Create Failure and Destroy Public Education

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dianeravitch's avatarDiane Ravitch's blog

Steven Singer, who teaches in Pennsylvania, explains the planned insanity behing standardized testing, rigged for failure. He likens the situation to a video game that he played with his friend as a child, where the questions and answers might suddenly and arbitrarily change.

In Pennsylania, the privatization movement started with deep budget cuts. Then comes a new standardized test. Too many students did well, so the tests were made more “rigorous.” Now, most students “fail.”

Did they get dumber? No. Did he become a worse teacher? He says no.

So what’s up? The students are set up to fail. The teachers and schools are set up to fail? Why? It clears the way for charters and vouchers.

One hopeful sign in Pennsylvania: Governor Tom Wolf wants to help public schools, not destroy them. Unlike his predecessor, Tom Corbett.

Singer writes:

“In my home state, the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment…

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Why the Second Amendment is not an individual right

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The false belief that the Second Amendment confers an (absolute) individual right continues to prevent us from regulating guns, with tragic consequences. Yes, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority (5), declared that it was an individual right based on an original intentist interpretation of the amendment. Therefore, we must abide by this interpretation as long as Heller is in force, but that does not mean that Scalia’s interpretation of the history is correct. One of the problems, among many others, with original intent as a method for interpreting the Constitution is the fact that justices are not historians.  Too often original intent has been used to mask the individual preferences of the particular legal scholar. After spending years studying the history of the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment this fact has become all too clear.

If we are ever going to significantly decrease the senseless killings (as well as the large number of accidental deaths and suicides) that are made possible by the unregulated gun market, we need to debunk the Second Amendment myth that gun ownership is an individual right that can never be infringed. Gun regulation will not completely eliminate gun violence, but it can significantly decrease the violence (as it did in Australia).

Therefore, I want to include a few links by two prominent historians and one legal scholar who show why the Second Amendment fundamentalists are wrong:

  1. “To Keep and Bear Arms,”: This essay by Gary Wills is long, but worth it. He carefully and comprehensively destroys the arguments of what he calls the “Standard Model” school (i.e. the Second Amendment dogmatists who insist that the amendment confers to them an absolute individual right).
  2. The brief from the Pulitzer Prize winning historian Jack N. Rakove in the Heller decision.
  3. “How the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment,” written by the author of The Second Amendment: A Biography, Michael Waldman. This essay deals more with the political movement that created the Second Amendment orthodoxy that now plagues us.

Please read and share these links!

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