Well, gee, that’s kind of a pointless cheap shot. Okay, then, December, fine with me, converse amongst yourself from now on.
No offense taken here, but could it be that your history teacher just so happened to coach football on the side? For example, my gf is an intelligent credentialed high school social science teacher who busts her ass to teach. Oh, by the way, she happens to be a soccer coach because she has coincidentally enjoyed playing and coaching soccer since she was a young’n.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by december *
[li]Of the roughly 200 panels at the American Historical Association meeting, there was virtually nothing on subjects such as the American Revolution, the Civil War or America’s involvement in the two world wars[/li][/QUOTE]
I would thing that interest in such topics would wax and wane over the years. Besides, at a large annual meeting of an immense organization, wouldn’t those holding the presentations and hosting the panels really want to talk about their particular field of interest? I think it’s naive of Thompson to assume that because the Revolution, et. al. were such important events, everyone should be ready and willing to talk about them at any moment.
Besides, according to The American Historical Association website, the organization exists
, and not neccessarily AMERICAN history.
This, of course, hinges upon how one should view history. There are two schools of thought: 1) history is propelled by large individual events that markedly alter the world or 2) history is a slow progression of change; a thousand little events that create great umbrella changes (The American Revolution, I believe, wasn’t just the war; it was the social, economic, political, etc. factors which lead to the war, the wart itself, and the formation of the United States afterward).
I must disagree with Thompson on this point. As much as the discussions about the political manuvering that ended Reconstruction are interesting, so is the condition of the poor black sharecropper or white immigrant city dweller of the same time period.
Others have previously posted cites disproving Thompson’s claim that Harvard no longer offers courses on the American Revolution, so I will not repeat what has already been said.
When I was in high school, I was taught both that the “Founding Fathers” were the men who were the catalyst for change in America and also about their hipocrisy regarding freedom. Of course, that came with the notation that most aristocratic people of the same time held the same racist, classist, and sexist views. George Washington, like everyone else, didnt’ believe that freedom should have been applied to the slaves because, like everyone else, he didnt’ come from a society that regarded everyone as human or equals (and when I say everyone else, I mean most people; there was still a contentious debate about slavery at the time of the Revolution, if what the play 1776 says is true. grin).
A historical persons beliefs must be taken in context and, if what Thompson describes is true (that they are being falsely labelled as racist, sexist, etc. using modern day morals and ideas), then I agree with him. It is my experience, however, that this isn’t true. Where you were educated and your age will, of course, give you different experiences.
Doesnt’ this just seem like Thompson is bitching about a lack of heroes whom we can look up to? I dont’ neccesarily think that our lack of heroes is a result of a politically motivated agenda as much as it is a better and fuller understanding about the past. Did Lincoln free the slaves because he championed the rights and freedoms of everyone person or did he free the slaves because of political pressure from his party and the belief that freed slaves would cause an uprising, enlist in the Union army, and destroy the South’s economic base for the war? It is because questions like the one I just asked exist that we dont’ have “heroes” to idolize any longer. Thompson should realize that inquiry into history should be objective and shouldn’t champion the cause of one individual over the other. Sure, we could learn about Edison’s ingenuity; should we also learn about his shrewd business tactics that undercut his competitors? Historical admiration must be taken with a grain or three of salt. Couldn’t it also be said that we should admire Hitler for his organizational ability and devotion to his country?
Also, Thompson says that “American history was taught as a grand story of epic scale and heroic accomplishment. America’s history was the history of freedom”. To me this just sounds like centrism. Why can’t American history be taught objectively, with neither the need to emphasize America’s failings or its glories? To say that our nation’s history should be taught with an emphasis on the grand epic scale of our past is to turn history into nothing more than feel-good patriotic propaganda which sacrifices the truth for the sake of political manuvering. Thompson is no better than the imagined anti-American fervor he describes, except for him the fervor should be going the other way.
Those are just my thoughts, anyways. I’m not good at these long posts so there might be some errors and such.
–greenphan
I can’t speak for TheeGrumpy, but at my highschool, the basketball and soccor coaches were there for their coaching abilities, and not their academic poweress. I had the aforementioned basketball coach and while the man was smart and fair, he was terrible at handling the procedure and rigors of being a teacher. He was a good coach though.
Now, it should be noted, after retiring as both coach and teacher, he writes a very interesting and amusing opinion article in the paper once a week. The man’s not as dumb as he was just a bad teacher.
There was also the girls’ basketball coach who taught algebra. But he was a smart teacher and terrible coach. I think he just ended up as the coach somehow.
So, in summation, it all depends.
–greenphan
I think one of the greatest problems with history courses over the last few decades has been the notion that presenting American history as a parade of paragons of virtue will make children love their country. Instead of the desired patriotism, these courses instead made kids hate history. By making our leaders into sinless heroes, they made them boring.
The fear has been that if kids are made aware that our Founding Fathers were not perfect, it would lead kids to question authority, sass their parents, and turn into flower-power hippies. Actually, the oppisite can be true. When a person starts independently reading, and studying history without the whitewash, it can make them angry and bitter that the truth was withheld for so many years. Nothing makes a person question authority more than finding out that those in authority have been lying to them for twelve years.
The study of history should be a quest for the truth. The fact that our Founding Fathers were fallible is what makes them human. A child feels no connection to a perfect, faultless person, but can identify with someone who has flaws just as they do. Our Founding Fathers accomplishments don’t seem all that awe-inspiring because are presented as gods, with no human frailties to hold them back. The concept that admiration can come from realizing that a hero overcame normal, human flaws in order to accomplish great things seems to have been ignored.
There is no reason that a person cannot both admit that mistakes were made in the past and still love their country. Knowledge and patriotism are not mutually exclusive, though you’d think they were from the way history has been presented to generations of children.
Now, the history profession is slowly trying to inject the truth into our classes, and have come up against a wall of outrage that they would dare profane the memory of our Sacred Forefathers with the truth. People much prefer the comforting old myths, and deeply resent any efforts to make history more reaslistic. But, as the saying goes, “The dogs may bark, but the caravan passes on.”
We should not edit history to make it more palatable, plain and simple. Knowing the truth will not make children “ashamed” of America, but will give them a deeper appreciation of where we have come from and the strides we have made to make this an amazing nation.
From what I can find out on a quick Google search, C. Bradley Thompson is an associate professor in the history department and in the political science department at Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio. He also directs a think tank, the John M. Ashbrook Center. This is the Yahoo regional report on that:
John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs - an academic forum for the study, research and discussion of the principles and practices of American constitutional government and politics. The Ashbrook Center’s programs are directed to the scholarly defense of individual liberty, limited constitutional government and civic morality.
Professor Thompson apparently is an expert on and groupie for John Adams, (he of the Alien and Sedition Act) and spends a fair amount of time proclaiming that American Education is going to hell in a hand basket.
I think Lissa is dead on here. I think december is dreaming of an age that never existed: a decline from what? When have American kids ever had a good grasp of mythical history, let alone real history? We’ve never taught history very well in public school systems.
The U.S. has undergone several periods in which some people (usually non-historians) decided that we as a nation don’t have enough pleasing of self-aggrandizing myths. Amazingly, people that point out that these things are myths are lambasted as “revisionists!” (usually by more non-historians).
History has to be taught to kids not necessarily by focusing on any particular body of facts or myths, but by teaching them what the heck REAL history is like. It’s contentious. It isn’t a listing of rote facts. It’s trying to prove things of varying quality of evidence to make a larger case. If kids we’re taught that the study of history is an energetic, colorful, angry, political subject, I have no doubt they’d be more interested in it. It’s interesting because it matters so much: because of people and debates that we have on this very board all the time. We draw on history to find example and evidence for use in the present. That’s what can make the subject seem vital.
greco_loco raises a good point. Bradley seems to be pining for the “good old days” of historiography. History isn’t taught or researched the same way it was fifty years ago. Neither is anthropology or sociology. Like these disciplines, the study of history has changed and evolved. History is not a static discipline.
History can be inspiring. The Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence give me chills. But to portray Washington, Jefferson, and other vital historical figures as saints is hagiography–not history. If you want to use such figures for that purpose, admit it, but don’t call it history and don’t expect me to teach it.
It was just a little joke; hence the smiley. Sorry to have offended you. I’ll be careful not to do it again.
Hijack time…
Recently, there have been views of Edison that have been less than flattering. Martin Gardner’s Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? in particular did some debunking of myths surrounding Edison, and Gardner referenced other works about Edison as well.
Here freakin here. Good point.
I mean, they’re already on our money; what more do they want? Canonization?
–greenphan
Amazon indicates that this book has a chapter Thomas Edison, Paranormalist. Maybe that’s a clue to Gardner’s debunking.
Coincidentally, I own 3 of Martin Gardner’s books, which had previously belonged to Theodore M. Edison, the youngest son of Thomas Alva Edison. None of the three is Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?
The old canard of Americans not knowing anything about their own history has been trotted out time and again over the past century. The American Historical Association, Social Science Research Council, National Education Association, etc., etc., etc., etc., have all had committees and conferences and publications, ad nauseum, dealing with this “troubling” problem. You’ll always find somone to complain about how kids are taught and how much they know, but the complaint itself is not always indicative of a real problem in the schools and universities.
In 1942 the New York Times conducted a test of about 6,000 American college students and came to the conclusion that Americans were woefully uninformed about their own history. Browse through the NYT in the period April through December 1942 (i have) and you’ll come across dozens of articles about the problems of teaching American history, as well as suggestions from politicians, educators, businessmen, and the general public about what needs to be done to improve the situation.
I worked for 18 months as a research assistant on a professor’s project entitled “American History and its Public Audiences,” and what i discovered while doing that was, much as we might like to believe that there was some “golden age” of history teaching, such was never really the case. Every generation since the late nineteenth century has seen similar anxieties and debates over the role of history in America’s national life, and i’m sure this will continue well into the twenty-first century.
The accusations regarding the AHA Annual Meeting are essentially meaningless. As others have already pointed out, the AHA is the professional organization for ALL professional historians in the United States, whether or not they study the history of the United States. If you look at the program linked to Captain Amazing, you’ll see that most of the sessions did not deal with the United States at all. There are countries other than the US that are worthy of investigation by scholars, you know. Also, the dominant theme of the conference was not “sex.”
The jump to criticize the lack of courses on the Civil War, Revolution, etc., is also ill-informed. As many have pointed out already, American kids are fed this stuff through most of their school lives. Virtually every state (probably every state?) has numerous statutes requiring students to complete a considerable amount of American history before graduating from high school, and most universities do in fact offer courses that deal with the “big” issues that you’re so worried about. Christ, when i moved to the US, one of the first things that struck was the fact that, in many bookstores, the “Civil War” section is bigger than the “American History” section.
I’m not sure if these were Thompson’s words or yours:
The fact that one might be absent and the other present does not mean that the latter was offered “in place” of the former. Also, as anyone who’s set foot inside a university knows, courses may be offered one year and not the next, depending on which professors are on leave or teaching other courses. Even if a particular course is offered only every second or third year, that still gives students in a four-year degree ample opportunity to take the course before they graduate.
The rest of your post is a rehash of standard conservative hyperbole, with accusations of anti-Americanism thrown about with abandon in what often appears to be a concerted effort to circumscribe dialog on the subject. I suggest that you and Lynn Cheney sit down for a chat - at least you’ll each be preaching to the converted.
And your allegation that “many Dopers have contempt for the US” is worthy of contempt itself, especially regarding American Dopers.
“I have an idea, when the students can find the nation on a map let them have an opinion about it.”
Bravo!
“the best teachers and instructors are those that teach you how to learn, not what.”
That’s all well and good, but not the issue here. A teacher teacher you HOW to learn by instructing you in a particular subject. You can teach someone HOW to learn in a class on playing checkers. The question is whether or not checker playing is worth class time.
“Now, the history profession is slowly trying to inject the truth into our classes, and have come up against a wall of outrage that they would dare profane the memory of our Sacred Forefathers with the truth. People much prefer the comforting old myths, and deeply resent any efforts to make history more realistic.”
Slowly? This has been going on for decades. What the history profession is doing is letting marginally trained ego-maniacs stand in front of high school students trying to be outrageous and transgressive in a desperate attempt to get the attention of students who are far, far younger than they are. When you speak of our Sacred Forefathers, who do you mean? The men in “The American Pageant: a History of the Republic”? Or the clearly human and flawed men described in a textbooks published even earlier?
-Mhendo
People talking about the state of how history is taught does not reflect on what is taught. I can’t cite this without massive scanner use, but I’ve seen survey’s of high school history test in this century. Same school, same percentage of funding per child, and the tests get easier and easier and easier. On the other hand, more and more people take them.
If I had time someday, I’d like to interview some old old nuns - women who gave tough tests in 1958, easier tests in 1968, still easier tests in 1978, and switched to all multiple choice finals in 1988. Did they lower standards because of increased class size? Did they slack off on giving information in effort to have more general discussion about how the Louisiana Purchase affected women and Jew and cripples in some unique women/Jew/cripple way? Did they just get tired? Were they up all night watching cable porn and couldn’t be bothered to grade long essay exams?
You can also check your local school and school district library archives to review of the incredible shrinking reading list. If we are teaching children a richer and more complex version of history… well, seems like there’d be a book or two involved.
I think in short that it represents the views of an old conservative Ayn Randian whose view of how history is taught is essentially that it should be self-congratulatory propaganda. (Hey, you asked what I thought.)
Well, where you stand depends on where you sit. My first reaction was exactly the opposite of yours, namely: “If history is being taught so badly with an anti-American bias, why are most Americans so blindly patriotic in such a jingoistic ‘America is the best and there is nothing we can learn from other countries (which is good since we don’t know anything about these other countries anyway)’ sort of way?!”
And, I also agree with others that you seem to use a definition of contempt that is something akin to “lack of jingoism”. Thinking that America should represent and project the values of democracy and freedom and human rights and that it often has, but sometimes (maybe not often, but too often) has not…and trying to work to make America’s actions more in tune with its true values is not my definition of “contempt”. I guess we just see the world differently.
Another late night thought on all of this…I think one of the most important ways in which a person, or a nation, can do a reality check is to see if there is a large difference between how they view themselves and how most others seem to view them.
If you buy this premise, then the next question is: Do you think that we view ourselves in a more negative light than most of the rest of the peoples of the world view us? My guess is that, if anything, the exact opposite is true. Obviously, this is a debatable point that it might be interesting to have some hard survey data on, but assuming for the moment that it is true and unless you think like the mother who sees her son marching in a parade and says, “Look, everybody is out of step but my Johnny!” , I think you are forced to conclude that the views of this particular history professor are hogwash.
My experience was that the history I was taught through high school was U.S. centered in the extreme.
My biggest shock in college was when I took a World History course and we got to WWII and the history prof, who believe me was no Marxist or anywhere close to being a leftie, calmly pointed out that the Russians did most of the fighting in Europe.
Our collective jaws dropped on that one. He very calmly explained that no one was going to win WWII by going through North Africa and Italy, and that this was understood from the beginning by everyone to be a sideshow. The main events were the Russian Front and an eventual invasion of mainland Europe through France, which would get you to Germany from the west. According to this prof, Stalin was hitting the roof because he wanted the West to invade France in 1943 and they refused, waiting until they had an overwhelming force in line. Eisenhower’s goal was to keep American casualties to a minimum, and to that end he stalled as long as he possibly could before invading France.
I have no idea about whether Stalin was hitting the roof or not, but it did make me realize the enormous number of casualties the Russians suffered in that war. For that alone he deserves all kinds of credit.
History at the college level should be about more than just mythmaking about America. From my experience, that part is thoroughly covered in the public school system.
Well, it is, sort of. Gardner starts out the chapter by saying (and I’m paraphrasing) “this chapter isn’t about his difficult relations with either of his wives or children, or the exploitive way he treated the people who worked for him, or the allegations that he didn’t invent everything he claimed to invent - to see these allegations, read xxx and yyy.” Xxx and yyy were books that I haven’t gotten around to getting, and frankly forgot - and the book is back at the library, so I can’t look them up.
I know that one of the biggest issues surrounding Edison was the AC vs. DC energy, and the dirty pool Edison did to convince the nation that DC was the way to go. Of course, that subject deals with Tesla, and things get fuzzy around Tesla.
Shucks. I’m envious now.
the US of A has lost all esteem it had with the rest of the world, largely because we can see that the US does not do as it preaches. The US has not stopped waging wars since WWII, and most of those were Wars of Choice. The US did not help Europe out straight away, I might add, but only got involved when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. And even then, as Pantom states, the Europeans were already winning the war. But anyway: most Europeans see the US as a bully. They come uninvited (Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan - the early years,…and so on), bomb a country into oblivion, and then leave. They have caused a lot of violence by supporting coups (look at Chile, where Allende was overthrown with US money, to help Pinochet grab power, cos it suited US policy at the time).
The US might have started of last century being one of the oldest democracy’s, but it has by now completely changed course:
The Bush administration is isolating the US (withdrawing from nearly all International treaties and agreements). It likes to tell other countries how they should govern their people, but cannot abide any mingling in their own affairs.
And even though you say that US history now focuses on “what went wrong”, I find that hard to believe. The impression I get from the US is that they refuse to deal with their sordid history: Slavery, Native American genocide, and so on and so on. The US might have a big influence on other countries, but to say that it is the country that has done most for other countries, is a very naive statement, indeed. It’s the country that has done most TO other countries, if anything. Believe you me, the US always had it’s own interests at heart, whenever it engaged in warfare, or indeed, instigated it.
Read “The trial of Henry Kissinger”, if you want to know what your country has been up to since WWII.
It ain’t a pretty picture.
Omar Bradley gives a rather detailed picture of why N. Africa, Sicily and Italy were valuable as starting points for US entry into the European war in his book A General’s Life. The performance of our Army in North Africa was poor to fair there, from top to bottom. Our top commanders were inexperienced, didn’t know how to manage large armies and were extremely weak in logistical and operational planning. Some of them were just plain incompetent. That had to be discovered and they had to be replaced, especially in the National Guard divisions. Our troops in general were weak in performance at all levels and required a lot of on the job training to finally get with the program. This continued, according to Bradley who was in all of the actions in both places, all the way through Sicily.
In Bradley’s opinion, based on his considerable experience, an invasion of northern France in 1942, or even '43 would most likely have failed because of our inadequacies at the time. This would have seriously compromised any successful operation there. The assault on a defended coast from the sea is one of the most complicated and hazardous of military operations. The ability to mount a second such assault if one is tried and failes is at best problematical.
As far as Stalin’s complaints go, it should be remembered that it took the USSR over a year and defeat after defeat all the way to the gates of Moscow for them to learn how to conduct a war and to find military leaders who knew their business. And they were fighting on their home ground and not at the end of a 3500 mile supply line.
And try as I will, I can’t find a single thing wrong with any effort by Eisenhower to keep US casualities as low as possible.
However, the professor was right in one thing. The Wehrmacht in WWII was largely destroyed on the Russian front.