As a minor side note, Carthage is also one of the very, very few words (I think there’s a handful of them at best) where classical Latin retained the letter K. It is often spelt Karthago in ancient texts (although the variant Carthago also exists).
To revert to your pedigree, one might also add that New New Town, the Cartagena in Spain, in turn gave its name to an even newer town, Cartagena in Colombia, although this time people decided not to add yet another “new”. Instead, they named it Cartagena “of the Indies” (de las Indias).
I might also add that in Frankfurt, Germany (where I live), there is an Old Opera House which is more recent, as it stands today, than the new opera house. The story in a nutshell: The Old Opera House was originally built in the 1870s; destroyed in WWII and not rebuilt. Instead, another opera house was built elsewhere and named accordingly. In the 1970s, it was decided to rebuild the old one after all.
Well, while American undergraduates are required to get a broad education, particularly for the first two years, most do specialize with a major, sometimes a major and a minor, or even a double-major. So the degree isn’t technically “generalist.”
Most universities do offer a “general studies” degree, but very few people follow that track. Notably, student athletes stereotypically take a general studies degree.
Just the very fact that you are required to have a degree in something else before you can go on study things like law or medicine looks pretty generalist to me. At European universities, you start these disciplines right after coming from secondary school.
Yeah, I would reconsider that line of logic. The fact that you have to have a degree before admission to certain professional schools doesn’t make that undergraduate degree itself generalist.
Many people who enter medical school have a degree in pre-medical studies (“pre-med)”. Almost all have a degree in biology or some other science. If I tell you I have a bachelor’s degree in physics, are you seriously going to call that degree “generalist”?
Same with law school. Many people take a pre-law course, but many law schools encourage prospective law students study something else, so that you have some background and expertise in learning something specific. That’s the opposite of generalist.
In my graduate school study abroad, the college I was at pointed out the “new” building- it dated from about 1930, and the next oldest was from 1890. Then a gap of 200-ish years. I was thinking that when they built the majority of the college, where I live was a howling wilderness intermittently populated by itinerant Native American tribes.
That sort of time scale and the thinking @Cervaise describes does explain how ethnic grudges and hatreds are kept alive. I recall when there was that business in Kosovo some 25 years back and there was a bunch of talk about some battle in the 1500s as being a root cause for the animosity. Didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever at the time, but now after some experience and more study, it does sort of make sense. Peoples/nations have long memories apparently.
On the other hand, during our recent trip to Alaska, the guides, etc… talked about some political figures/founding father types, etc… with a degree of reverence that made me feel like these guys were in the distant past. Turned out when I looked them up that most of them were my grandparents’ age or great-grandparents’ age. And in fact, some of them were either still alive, or had just passed away within the last 5-10 years!
The reason is that for most European and also Commonwealth (minus Canada) and Asian countries the basic educational qualification is taken at 16, while in the US, the basic one is High School, which is usually cleared at 18. Outside N America, what is junior and senior year of High School is the basic studies for whatever professional education you wish to pursue. In the US, College takes that role.
Also, in the US, once you are done with professional school, you are considered qualified, while in other countries there needs to be a term of work done under a professional supervisor after you complete professional education. So the actual time spent to fully qualify, isn’t that different.
Yes, yes I know there are a of exceptions, but that’s a general overview.
I would take a lot of this kind of talk with a grain of salt. Political agitators who want to create divisions in society can easily dredge up an ancient reason for animosity that hasn’t actually been the cause of sectarian animosity for year upon year, century upon century. In a lot of these cases, most people forgot about it and got over it until someone decided to get people riled up. Think if it as a kind of retcon.
I recall in the 1970’s the University of Toronto (which mostly is like the American university system, except when it comes to tuition) apparently got fed up with some of the students lingering in the halls of academia. When I first went there, you could take any courses you wanted if you could meet the prerequisites. They then introduced a regimen where a student must sign on for a stream to a specific major - departments published their lists of courses necessary to complete a major, and the student must be taking the core courses that led to that degree. They were free to discuss with a department and devise their own specialty, but then had to follow it. Most streams allowed for one or two additional off-topic courses to vary the interests. It was no longer possible to randomly take “yes, I took the 10 second-year or higher, 7 third year or higher, and 20 courses…” to get a bachelor’s degree.
OTOH, with ab Engineering degree, as I recall, one requirement was also taking some arts degree courses to “broaden your horizons”.
That was part of building a national(ist) legend: our ancestors fought off them and founded our nation, so it’s our land, and their people have no right to act as though they own it. And the further back you cast for your legend, the more historical legitimacy you claim.
Rinse and repeat for a great many other disputed territories.
I thought a lot of the animosity was religous-based. Way back when the Turks conquered the area, many people converted to Islam. Others thought that was cowardly and done to save their skins. This I could see as something religiously minded people could get all riled up about. Sadly.
True in relation to divisions between Serbian and Bosnian nationalists (and to a degree between Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholic nationalists), who had substantially overlapping language in common. In Kosovo the difference was accentuated because the Albanian language came into the mix as well.
Why wouldn’t you be able to take courses that you met the prerequisites for? Isn’t that the point of the prerequisites? People sometimes take their time deciding on what major they may want to have in the end, and perhaps even double major if they’re insane enough. Having to sign up for a major earlier in one’s college career puts a damper on one’s ability to explore their first two years. For me in particular, I was out sick for most of my second year but I still had a plan to finish within 2 more years (and would have if I hadn’t gotten ill a different way my last semester), but it meant that I couldn’t do any more exploring and had to pick a major based on only 1 and a third years of college. I wanted to explore more in another field the second half of my second year, but I instead couldn’t.
So I ended up in mathematics, which was rather different compared to a lot of majors; there was one track of classes that were required for most of the upper level courses, but no specific upper level courses were required at all beyond that. You just had to get so many credits in those upper level courses, but were free to choose whichever ones you wanted.
In fact, if you could persuade the professor you could keep up with the course work, they would waive the prerequisite requirement too. But admission to courses went first to those enrolled in the stream for which that was a requirement, then to other students.
The point was you couldn’t just take any old course on a whim. You had to be working toward a specific goal. Yes, you could change your specialty down the road, but not too often. The point was to stop the system being clogged with students who have limited interest in actually learning a specialty, and took extra years or graduated with a “generalist” degree. Obviously, students could do part-time and take only a few courses toward a degree, but the specialty rules still apply. Most streams allowed for a few totally off-topic courses, and often gave a range (“…and take two of the following 6 courses…”)
Several reasons: The university was becoming annoyed at the number of students whose non-specialty degree really mean nothing, they had just taken an assortment of easy-to-pass courses (“Mickey Mouse” courses or “bird” courses. The movie criticism course where they only watched a large number of movies and there was no exam, was notorious.) the concern was these generalists were hurting the reputation of the university. “If you want to learn nothing, go study at York University instead”. York allegedly at the time gave free first year tuition and attracted those who could not get in elsewhere.
Secondly, students cost money. My first year tuition was $685 including activity fees, and that is in Canadian dollars, not real dollars. The story goes that the government paid 5/6 of the cost of a student, and money was becoming tight. By the time I returned to finish my degree 10 years later, the tuition was about $3,000 and allegedly 2/3 was paid by government. (Today I think it’s around $7,000)
Nitpick: I don’t think the objection was that people had converted out of cowardice/to save their skins. That wasn’t necessary because the Ottomans didn’t kill people for not being Muslim. Rather, the objection was that people converted to curry favour, and to secure official preference and social and economic advantage over their neighbours.
It definitely seemed a bit ridiculous to me when I heard it… my thought was that it would be as ridiculous as if Mexico was nursing some kind of grudge about losing Texas, or the UK about losing the US.
That reminds me of the Zimmerman telegram, where Germany suggested to Mexico that it ally to reclaim their lost territory. The Germans thought the territory loss would be grudge-worthy, not knowing just how sparsely it was settled and how little anyone cared about the land; land is worth a whole lot more in Europe.
. As noted it is boiler-plate