Category Archives: history

An Important Five Minutes

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Let’s just start with the most interesting thing of all: Noam Chomsky has a Facebook page. And an active one at that with lots of  interesting and intellectually demanding content to explore.

Then, let’s move to this five-minute interview with Chomsky in which he speaks from an historical perspective when it comes to technology. Yes, we are experiencing amazing changes, he says, but they pale in the light of past changes. His first example is startling: the move from the sailing ship to the telegraph. Messages went from weeks and months to moments. A sharp intake of breath in the recognition that we may not be living in the most interesting of times.

His remarks on education make the all important point that it isn’t the technology and it isn’t even the scholarship that are important. The innovative thinkers are able to identify what is significant and use it as a frame for all the rest. Helping our students define a frame to use is an essential part of helping them access and learn from the Internet.

In poking around Chomsky’s FB page, I discovered that he has connections with Alice Walker, who writes about her image of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky playing tennis. It brings her hope for the world.

Reminiscing

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I’ve been tinkering with the web since the late 1990s. In October 2001, as part of a grant project, I started a monthly newsletter that included resources for teachers. I’ve left them up as an archive but am not actively updating them. Every so often, I get an email from someone who has found a broken link and has suggested links for me to use. I got such an email this morning. The writer pointed to a link in the December 2002 newsletter. It turns out about half of the links are broken. I’m in the process of updating the whole website and may end up taking them down.

Except they provide an interesting snapshot of what was going on in the web. Google images was a relatively new feature. And I was already benefiting from the work of Tim Stahmer, linking to his top 100 websites.

I clicked on that link and discovered that Tim has one of the most helpful and elegant 404 pages I have ever encountered. And also that he predates me on the web by just a couple of years.

I’m glad I was there near the beginning along with people like Tim. Having the long view helps put all the new, “earth shaking” changes in perspective.

For the record, I am in the middle of a website overhaul. There are still some gems on my site but they are hard to find and everything just needs reorganized and brought into my wordpress installation.

Sometimes It’s the Journey

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I was prepared to write a blog post recommending Ted Bell’s Nick McIver series as great reads for middle schoolers…historical fiction with a little time travel thrown in. Maybe a little violent but in the swashbuckling tradition. They are set on the Guernsey Islands at the start of WW II but take us back to other great historical battles. In Nick of Time, we meet Lord Nelson just a few weeks before Trafalgar, and in The Time Pirate, we stand with George Washington at the Battle of Yorktown. The second volume would be a great addition to an American history class.

There’s the recommendation…here’s the journey. Along with the review, I was going to post a list of links related to WW II and the Revolutionary War as part of my Diigo posts. I’m still going to do that but as you browse the links, you’ll see the  journey I took from checking out these animated maps to learning about the Battle of Gallipoli (which, for the record, is a WW I battle but was the brain child of Winston Churchill) to checking out even more interactive maps to thinking about the definition of genocide.

The interactive maps are examples of the way media can bring history alive. As I was reading about Gallipoli, I was thinking how useful a map would be and was a little relieved to discover that I wasn’t going to have to create it myself.

But the definitions demonstrate a much more profound use of the Web: opening the world of ideas and debate to our students. As I read about Turkey’s plan to keep Australian officials from attending the 100th anniversary, I thought about the treatment of native peoples’ around the world. Why wasn’t that genocide? Turns out there is disagreement about the definition and its application despite the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted by the United Nations in December 1948.

Meanwhile, how did I know I had reached the end of my journey? It took me here.

 

 

 

Just In Time for Easter

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In the spirit of Tom Woodward’s Internet Detritus, I thought I would share this article that arrived in my inbox from The Public Domain Review. It seemed appropriate as it is “bunny” time of year: Mary Toft and Her Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbits:

In late 1726 much of Britain was caught up in the curious case of Mary Toft, a woman from Surrey who claimed that she had given birth to a litter of rabbits. Niki Russell tells of the events of an elaborate 18th century hoax which had King George I’s own court physicians fooled.

We live in an era of hoaxes often perpetuated by the use of Photoshop. But it isn’t digital technology that leads to hoaxes; it is people. And while there is much in this article that would not be appropriate for students, one important discussion point would be why would someone like Mary Toft do something like this? Niki Russell, Chief Library Assistant at Special Collections in the University of Glasgow Library, has her own theory:

As for Mary Toft, the case against her was dismissed, not for lack of proof of guilt, but probably because of the further embarrassment to the establishment that would ensue if the case were pursued any further. She spent a few months in jail then returned to relative obscurity. The question as to why she and her family went to such extraordinary lengths to convince the nation that Mary had the ability to give birth to rabbits is perhaps not too hard to answer. Monstrous or deformed people had been exhibited, at a price, all over Europe for hundreds of years, with poor and wealthy alike equally fascinated. Ironically for Mary, although the hoax was not successful, she did succeed for a while in becoming an object of curiosity.

Many eminent physicians and thinkers were taken in by Mary’s hoax and suffered for their gullibility. William Hogarth, the great satirical artist, had good fun at their expense.

If you haven’t checked out The Public Domain Review, you might want to browse its collections. The articles are written by scholars and the goal of the project is to bring the vast pool of public domain resources to the attention of, well, the public. They have lost their initial funding so I made a little donation to what seems like a worthy and well-done project.

 

 

Serendipity

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A question from a student, some tweets with a colleague, and I realized I had forgotten a good bit of my education history. The question had to do with why more progressive educational practices such as those found in Montessori schools did not catch in on public schools. The colleague suggested that it was the Cold War and A Nation at Risk that squelched progressive ideas. I made a vague commitment to read some history including Diane Ravitch‘s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms.

But it was a vague commitment and the fiction on my shelf was much more compelling. So, I was excited when I saw Bud Hunt’s post about starting an education history book club. He felt as though educators often repeat history because they don’t know enough about it:

So I’m pretty sure that my main objectives for a project like this would be basically encouraging educators and folks who impact education to better understand their history.  In my reading and writing and thinking, I’ve come to discover that people are pretty much ignorant of anything educationally relevant that happened more than ten or twenty minutes ago.  And we keep having the same conversations.  And forgetting the outcomes.  Then doing it again.

So, his suggestion is for a group to read historical documents related to education, beginning with the report of the Committee of Ten from 1892. This committee was created by the National Education Association to develop answers to questions related to what, when and how students should be learning.

I have started the report and am finding it tough going. I had trouble getting past the fact that, even though women made up more than 50% of teachers at that time, the committee included men only and seemed to celebrate that fact:

Six of the Chairmen were college men, and three were school men; while of the Secretaries, two were college men and seven school men (p. 11).

Forty seven of the ninety members of the committee were from colleges and universities but the report assures us that many have had school experiences.  But like many modern day education commissions, there were no practicing teachers on the committee.

Ravitch begins her book about school reform with the Committee of Ten, which was the first national committee to discuss how to standardize education in the United States. According to Ravitch, the one legacy of the committee’s work was the creation of the College Entrance Examination Board that set uniform standards for college admissions.

NB: Part of the reason I’ve struggled with the reading is because it took me some time to find the “right” digital version from the Internet archive. I wanted to be able to bookmark, highlight and annotate. After some experimentation, I found the ePub version to be the best although it has lots of errors that aren’t found in the online or pdf version.

 

Lest We Forget

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Lisa Petrides at Huffington Post suggests that technological and cultural changes in the 21st century are pointing the way to a renaissance in education similar to the capital-R Renaissance that began in the late 13th century.  While I share her enthusiasm about the sense of being on the cusp of something amazing, I worry a little that she is romanticizing the original Renaissance and thus the current one as well.

Indeed, the Renaissance saw a flowering of arts and sciences as well as the rise of the middle class whose increased income allowed for discretionary spending on things like books and art and music.  Newly found leisure time made is possible to enjoy those things as well and perhaps even to dabble in their creation.

But, there was still a vast population that lived in rural areas, working as serfs or sharecroppers, without access to all the wonders of the Renaissance.  Even in the cities where the great artists and thinkers congregated, poverty kept most people out of this community as they struggled simply to feed themselves and their families. For every Medici who was patronizing artists, there were thousands of unnamed poor people who received no such funding and for whom the Renaissance did very little to change their lives for the better.

So, the original comparison can be and should be expanded and deepened as the disparity between rich and poor is increasing in the 21st century just as it did in the Renaissance. The infographic on the new digital divide from Color Lines reminds us that not all access to the Internet is equal.  And while there are lots of opportunities to learn outside the classroom, studies continue to show that low reading skills correlate with high poverty, and despite the proliferation of media, reading remains a hugely important skill for those who wish to take advantage of open source courses.

I hate to be the negative to Petrides’ optimistic essay as I agree that opportunities for learners are greater than ever, but we cannot forget that while these wonders of education and creativity are more widely available than every before, there are still large parts of our population for whom they remain a distant dream and we won’t achieve a more humanistic and connected world if, in our enthusiasm, we leave them behind.

Steve & Me: Living History

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When we moved earlier this year, I found was my stash of Macintosh boxes, beginning with my first one, a PowerBook 500.   Today, I am writing this on my new MacBook Air. In between was an iBook, a couple of MacBook Pros and a first generation Air.  There is a big Mac Pro sitting upstairs, but I rarely use it as my laptops mean I can curl up on the sofa, sprawl on the porch, or nestle in bed.  Add the original iPod that I used to record all my dissertation interviews, the iPod touch that was my first introduction to apps and now the iPad, and I begin to realize what an impact that Steve Jobs and Apple has had on my own life.

Because these are more than just computers somehow…instead they paved the way to a mobile life that offers the chance to get beyond the cubicle and really work from anywhere and at anytime.  Earlier this week, I as I took a break from a long drive, I sat in a Starbucks.  Yesterday, my office was a chair in the School of Education.  And on and on.  Jobs was doing more than just reorganizing circuitry or rewriting code; he was fundamentally changing the way we connect to the world which means we can also fundamentally change the notion of what it means to work, disconnecting it from a schedule and a location and connecting it to the tasks that need to be completed, the contacts that need to be made.  He didn’t create things like Twitter or Facebook but he made it easier to use them, using his creativity to combine resources from his own and others imaginations, something I think is the true mark of genius.

I am a little sad today as it seems like a particularly bright light has been extinguished.  There is also the sense that I am not old enough that the icons who created the world in which I live are beginning to fall.  But, I smiled a bit at the Toon Off over at Daryl Cagle’s cartoon website.  Maybe you will too as we spend our first day without Steve.

The Wisdom of John Adams

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The horrid events in Arizona are the talk of the Sunday morning news shows. We all pray for Gabrielle Giffords and her family and for all Americans and do hope that it may be the moment when we look for a new way to work together where we can have honest disagreements with others without having to demonize or destroy them.

I’m reading David McCullough’s biography of John Adams and I have new found respect for this great American leader. I find myself marking the pages with quotes and ideas that are still relevant today. He would have been very sad about the state of civility in our country because respect was essential for a successful government:

We may please ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. But there is great danger that those governments will not make us happy. God grant they may. But I fear that in every assembly, members will obtain an influence by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning. By contracted hearts, not large souls…There is one thing, my dear sir, that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we are all undone. There must be decency and respect, and veneration introduced for persons of authority of every rank, or we are undone. In a popular government, this is our only way.

Musing About History

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I have been doing more blogging over at In One Place, my mostly about reading blog. I’m participating in the 75-book-challenge at LibraryThing so I’ve been reading a lot in varied areas. Two recent books made comments that struck me as connected to ideas about education. These are not fleshed out ideas, but rather gut reactions: thinking out loud. Here’s the first one…

The Age of Chivalryis a National Geographic Book about the middle ages, moving from 300 to 1450 AD. The last essay in the book focuses on the Hanseatic League, which I certainly don’t remember from my history courses. Thank goodness for Wikipedia! There is a photo of the Cologne cathedral, which took nearly 600 years to complete (1248 – 1880) with a 300-year break in the work. I was struck by the sense of history, of shared community over time that led people to finish the work of their ancestors. I was reminded that each day I walk on a 300-year-old campus, literally in the steps of American giants. I’m not sure my beloved institution is joining the 21st century as quickly as I would like but they may feel a responsibility for defending those three centuries of tradition.

And that may not be a completely terrible thing. I don’t think our contemporary culture values the lessons of history or the connections created by shared traditions enough. Instead, we see them as outdated, old fashioned even. The builders in Cologne didn’t tear down the medieval cathedral; instead, they added to it, following the original plans but using updated building techniques. Even into the 21st century, Cologne is preserving history, deciding in 2005 to ban development around the cathedral. I know that some people see it as a monument to an oppressive, unappealing past and would be happy to leave it behind, but tradition and history still has something to offer, including beautiful monuments to the beliefs of our ancestors.

Dumbed Down History?

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I should preface this post by saying that I am not a professional historian. I am an amateur history buff, however, mostly interested in early English history from the Norman Conquest through the Elizabethan era. Right now, I’m also dabbling in American history, specifically the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. I am happy to learn about this history through a variety of medium: mostly books and movies. They can be fiction or nonfiction but they must tell a good story. I think we do a real disservice to historical times by trying to summarize them in textbooks. When I watched the John Adams series with my parents, my mother commented that if she had learned about history in this way, through telling it as a good story, she probably would have found it much more interesting than all the name and date memorizing to which she was subjected. And, at least two of my dissertation study participants who were history teachers complained that the history standards tend to be fact-based and thus seem to sap all the energy and excitement out of what should be very good stories.

As part of my fascination with English history, I’ve been watching the Showtime series, The Tudors. I’ve written about it before on my personal blog, labeling it as a guilty pleasure that plays a bit fast and loose with the historical record. The show’s producers do not deny this and, in fact, encourage viewers to identify those inaccuracies and post them to a wiki. The wiki also has a page devoted to Tudor historians and their impressions of the show, most of which are very bad. They call it entertaining fluff, spiced up with lots of sex, and a dumbed down version of history specifically designed to appeal to ignorant Americans. I would agree with the first two (lots and lots of sex, folks, so be warned) but I’m not sure I agree with the last one.

Henry VIII ArmorThe series does take liberties–Henry, played by the very attractive Jonathan Rys Meyers–never seems to age even though he would have been close to 50 when he married Katherine Howard. In addition, they made the choice not to have Henry get fat, which he certainly did, weighing possibly 300 pounds. Characters are combined together or even made up. There are anachronisms in terms of language and costumes and the sex is mostly gratuitous but this is television after all. However, for a professional historian, I’m sure it’s problematic.

But the essential facts are there: Henry married six wives in his quest for an heir. He had no qualms about ridding himself of advisers like Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell when their views differed from him or he otherwise perceived that they had failed him. He reigned over the English Reformation and began the Church of England. The series spends some time on the development of the Six Articles, which, as Cromwell points out, affirm Catholic ideas such as transubstantiation. Henry brutally put down the uprisings in the North related to his dissolution of the monasteries, something which is also covered in the series. I don’t see any dumbing down there.

Which gets back to my original point…the series tells the very intriguing and exciting story of the reign of Henry VIII. It is interesting enough that it may appeal to people who have otherwise found history to be a dry recitation of facts. And that may lead them to doing some of their own investigating. Luckily, the web is filled with great resources which I’ll share in another post. Does historical accuracy matter so much? After all, in may cases, historians themselves do not agree on the facts as they are relying on sources that may themselves be suspect depending on the point of view and political agenda of the writer. Here’s where good research skills become essential along with the lesson that we cannot always believe everything we hear, see or read.