Category: History

The Killing of Osama bin Laden

October 20, 2015

This was a really interesting article about the story about Osama bin Laden’s death. This investigative piece contradicts the “official” government account of the events and paints a very troubling picture of how the events unfolded and were subsequently reported on.

This story raises interesting questions about how history is written. What actually happened here? Can we ever really know? Whose accounts and reporting can we trust?

With regards to ethics…was this killing ethical? Was the subsequent potential cover up ethical? What if it saved lives? Protected sources? How do we judge?

With regards to language…do we call this an assassination? A murder? Homicide? Or a justified killing in a larger war? What are the implications of each of these terms?

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

Why Scientists and Scholars Can’t Get Their Facts Straight

October 19, 2015

“The ongoing dispute over the authenticity of a scrap of papyrus from the ancient world highlights a larger question of how history is established.”

“Both sides are looking at the same credit-card-sized scrap of papyrus, with the same words in the same hand in the same ink. Both sides are represented by members of the same academic community—those who continue to push for the authenticity of the GJW are highly respected scholars, as are those who are calling it a forgery. Yet the two sides are approaching the papyrus from completely distinct angles, and getting completely different results.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/why-scientists-and-scholars-cant-get-their-facts-straight/404254/?mc_cid=af192e18ce&mc_eid=34e2887073

Earlier article on the same subject

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-curious-case-of-jesuss-wife/382227/

Publisher Promises Revisions After Textbook Refers to African Slaves as ‘Workers’

October 5, 2015

“It talked about the U.S.A. being a country of immigration, but mentioning the slave trade in terms of immigration was just off,” Ms. Dean-Burren said in an interview. “It’s that nuance of language.”

“This is what erasure looks like,” she added.

“This program addresses slavery in the world in several lessons and meets the learning objectives of the course. However, we conducted a close review of the content and agree that our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-revisions-after-textbook-refers-to-african-slaves-as-workers.html

How Textbooks Can Teach Different Versions Of History

July 19, 2015

“Eleventh-grade U.S. history teacher Samantha Manchac is concerned about the new materials and is already drawing up her lesson plans for the coming year. She teaches at The High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, a public school in Houston.

“The first lesson she says she’ll give her kids is how textbooks can tell different versions of history. “We are going to utilize these textbooks to some extent, but I also want you to be critical of the textbooks and not take this as the be-all and end-all of American history,” she imagines telling her new students.”

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/07/13/421744763/how-textbooks-can-teach-different-versions-of-history?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150713

Radiolab Podcast: Mau Mau. Reconstructing history in Kenya

July 5, 2015

“When professor Caroline Elkins came across a stray document left by the British colonial government in Nairobi, Kenya, she opened the door to a new reckoning with the history of one of Britain’s colonial crown jewels, and the fearsome group of rebels known as the Mau Mau. We talk to historians, archivists, journalists and send our producer Jamie York to visit the Mau Mau. As the new history of Kenya is concealed and revealed, document by document, we wonder what else lies in wait among the miles of records hidden away in Hanslope Park.”

What does this podcast tell us about the way in which we construct knowledge in History? What role does corroborating documentary evidence play? Can we solely rely on oral history to construct knowledge about the past?

This podcast also raises many interesting questions about ethics and responsibility. Does Britain’s government have any responsibility, moral, ethical, or legal, to acknowledge past crimes? Does it have to make amends for these actions?

http://www.radiolab.org/story/mau-mau/

The Fallen of World War II

June 12, 2015

A really interesting video giving visual representations of the deaths during World War II. Watching this raises many interesting questions.

How do these visual representations give us a different sense of the war than history books would or simply looking at numbers on a page?

How can we accurately communicate truth?

What does it mean that after a certain point, numbers get so large that that we lose any sense of reality with them?

What is also interesting is that our sense of World War II is painted by our involvement in the war but when you look at the number of people killed, the United States was far from the worst off nation. Because the Soviet Union became our enemy after the war was over, we never really learn about (or care about) how disastrous the war was for them or how much they lost during the war.

How does our historical perspective distort our sense of accuracy and historical truth? What role do our emotions play when it comes to topics like this?

The Cost of Turkey’s Genocide Denial

April 24, 2015

“Such obstinate refusal to come to terms with history’s darker chapters is not unique to Turkey. Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has refused to acknowledge and apologize for what Imperial Japan did during its colonial annexation of Korea or in China in the 1930s and during World War II. Russians agonize over but repeatedly temper their assessments of Stalin’s crimes; Poles and Ukrainians turn away from the brutalities of the anti-Semitic pogroms before and during World War II.

“Americans, Australians and Israelis shy away from confronting the foundational crimes that were committed against those living on the territory that they coveted but which they wanted emptied of indigenous people. It is often forgotten that former victims can easily become perpetrators in their drive to make a nation.”

“Turkey has lost the battle with truth over its refusal to acknowledge the mass killings of Armenians during World War I as genocide, a Turkish academic who helped break a long-standing taboo on the issue said.”

http://news.yahoo.com/turkey-lost-battle-truth-over-armenia-genocide-academic-182428141.html

Another article.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36433114?mc_cid=1e136768f2&mc_eid=34e2887073

The Problem With History Classes: Single-perspective narratives do students a gross disservice.

March 16, 2015

“Perhaps Fisher offers the nation an opportunity to divorce, once and for all, memory from history. History may be an attempt to memorialize and preserve the past, but it is not memory; memories can serve as primary sources, but they do not stand alone as history. A history is essentially a collection of memories, analyzed and reduced into meaningful conclusions—but that collection depends on the memories chosen.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/03/the-problem-with-history-classes/387823/

American Memory of WWI

March 15, 2015

“First, Americans prefer narratives in which they play a central heroic role. The Dwight Eisenhower of the First World War was French, Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Those Americans who cared most intensely about the war found themselves enlisting under other people’s banners. John Singer Sargent painted his great war canvases for Britain’s Imperial War Museum. Edith Wharton volunteered for French relief organizations. Raymond Chandler joined the Canadian army. Ernest Hemingway drove Red Cross ambulances on the Italian front. Henry James forswore his U.S. citizenship and naturalized as British. John Dos Passos, another Red Cross volunteer, later savagely satirized the war as ‘Mr. Wilson’s war’—somebody else’s war, not his. So it has remained. When the great American literary critic Paul Fussell wrote his marvelous “The Great War and Modern Memory,” he focused onEnglish writers. Their American counterparts may have had a lot to say, but somehow Fussell decided it was not an American thing.”

http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/over-there-and-overlooked/387367/