American History

I would like you to read and ponder all of these quotes carefully. Select one from each section that interests you most and write your opinion for both.

Section One: The teaching of history

“High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history invariably comes in last. Students consider history the ‘most irrelevant’ of twenty-one subjects commonly taught in high school.” James Loewen

“We see things not as they are but as we are.” Anais Nin

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” James Baldwin

“There is no other country in the world where there is such a large gap between the sophisticated understanding of some professional historians and the basic education given by teachers.” Marc Ferro

“Learning social studies is, to no small extent, whether in elementary school of the university, learning to be stupid.” Jules Henry

Section Two: Indians and history

“What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind and this trade [in American Indian slaves] as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel among them.” Bartolome De Las Casas

“Considering that virtually none of the standard fare surrounding Thanksgiving contains an ounce of authenticity, historical accuracy, or cross-cultural perception, why is it so apparently ingrained? Is it necessary to the American psyche to perpetually exploit and debase its victims in order to justify its history? Michael Dorris

“The invaders also anticipated, correctly, that other Europeans would question the morality of their enterprise. They therefore [prepared] quantities of propaganda to overpower their own countrymen’s scruples. The propaganda gradually took standard form as an ideology with conventional assumptions and semantics. We live with it still.” Francis Jennings

“There is not one Indian in the whole of this country who does not cringe in anguish and frustration because of these textbooks. There is not one Indian child who has not come home in shame and tears.” Rupert Costo

“God has not been preparing the English speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing….He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile people…..And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world.” Senator Albert Beveridge, 1900

The Election

The election is coming and where do you stand on the big political views of our time? I'd like you to look first at this web page from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/candidatequiz/. Take a minute to see how the contenders differ from each other and from you.

When you have a little background, please take the online quiz here: http://www.vajoe.com/candidate_calculator.html and report back to us what you discovered. Did it surprise you? What did you learn? What issues matter to you most?

As this is our first blog, let me set some ground rules. Please comment once without looking at what your peers have shared. Keep it real -- what do you think, feel, like, dislike -- you get the idea. Then, please read the comments of your classmates and offer a second response to someone else. We want to create a dialogue...refer to people by name, ask them questions, respond to them, etc. Sooooo.....that's two entries. If you do it with care, you'll get full credit (please don't even think for a moment that you're graded on your views -- actually you get full credit for HAVING opinions.) Conversely you'll receive no credit (that's a zero folks) for not participating! Give it a shot.....we'll make it interesting.