Just in case you wanted to brush up on your Thanksgiving history so you can impress your friends and family tomorrow: History News Network | Thanksgiving, 1621
Have a great Thanksgiving!
U.S. History
History News Network | Oh, No, It’s Happening Again!
In response to the all too predictable backlash against Syrian refugees, Roy E. Finkenbine asks: “Why do Americans suffer these paroxysms of paranoia in times of stress? Why do we so often abandon our collective national values and target ethnic populations in the face of societal evidence to the contrary?”
With no real solution, Finkenbine observes: “As the nation, driven by fear rather than evidence, demonizes the Syrian refugees (and Muslims in general), one wonders how and when our collective sanity and sense of shame will return.” Let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later!
Source: History News Network | Oh, No, It’s Happening Again!
TV Weekly Now | NGC Premieres Two-night Movie Event “Saints & Strangers,” a Story that goes beyond the Historical Account of Thanksgiving
“Goes beyond the historical account of Thanksgiving & the founding of Plymouth Plantation, revealing the trials and tribulations of the settlers at Plymouth: 102 men, women & children who sailed on a chartered ship for a place they had never seen.”
I don’t get the National Geographic Channel but this looks good. For those of you who do, it premieres Nov. 22.
“Kissinger, the Bombardier” | History News Network
Greg Grandin reviews the history of Kissinger’s legacy of endless war and diplomacy via bombs. Despite the clear failure of this strategy, there is no sign that we will abandon it. When will we learn?
Grandin concludes: “Here, then, is a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle. Kissinger invokes today’s endless, open-ended wars to justify his diplomacy by air power in Cambodia and elsewhere nearly half a century ago. But what he did then created the conditions for today’s endless wars, both those started by Bush’s neocons and those waged by Obama’s war-fighting liberals like Samantha Power. So it goes in Washington.”
Read the entire piece here: History News Network | Kissinger, the Bombardier
“Ben Carson States, Wrongly, That Founding Fathers ‘Had No Elected Office Experience’” – Washington Wire – WSJ
How can anyone take this guy seriously?! I don’t understand how he passed med school (or any school for that matter). He also believes that the pyramids were built to store grain. Wow! I guess evidence doesn’t matter when your followers live in the same fact free world as you!!
“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
“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
“How Gun Control Came to Britain” | History News Network
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
“The Founding Fathers: Demigods or scoundrels?” – LA Times
Some words of wisdom from the preeminent historian Joseph J. Ellis: “once we get past seeing the founders as cartoon-like characters, all kinds of lights go on along the line between then and now. Is the paralysis of the current federal government a function of the political architecture the founders designed, which is now anachronistic, or more a product of our own making? Does our own failure to arrest the catastrophic consequences of climate change help us understand why the most gifted political leaders in American history could not put slavery on the road to extinction? Does our enhanced awareness of the depth and resilience of racism in our own time modify our posture toward its virulence within the founding era? At a historical moment when the term ‘political leadership’ has become an oxymoron, how do you explain its flowering at the founding? Such questions constitute a serious conversation across all ages that is blissfully bereft of nostalgia, condescension and utopian delusions. If the founders were not flawed, they would have nothing to teach us. And they do.”
Read the entire article here: The Founding Fathers: Demigods or scoundrels? – LA Times
“South Dakota: Please Reconsider Your Decision to Dump Early American History” | History News Network
John Fea makes the case for keeping Early American history in South Dakota’s K-12 curriculum: History News Network | South Dakota: Please Reconsider Your Decision to Dump Early American History
History Chick in AZ 