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
“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*
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
John Oliver nicely sums up the idiocy of celebrating Columbus Day! Enjoy!
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
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!
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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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
Read the entire article here: History News Network | How Gun Control Came to Britain
Read the entire article here: History News Network | The Medieval Chastity Belt – Myth or Reality?
History Chick in AZ 