Scouring sources for good history books for the list of all-time great history books, I was looking at the New York Times reviews, of course.
The list from the Times of “notable” history books just for 2006 is lengthy, and impressive. (The paper thoughtfully includes similar lists back to 1997.)
What do you think, Dear Reader? Are some of them worthy of the All-time list? (Notice that The Worst Hard Time is included in the list.)
History books listed below the fold.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
It is the day before Thanksgiving, a holiday generally associated with the English colonists of New England. What better time to re-run a piece on the Mayflower Compact and its religious implications? Originally, this desultory ran here, on July 26, 2006.
Dispatches from the Culture Wars features a set of comments on an interview right-right-wing pundit John Lofton did with Roy Moore, the former chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court who lost his job when he illegally tried to force his religion on the court and on Alabama. This year Moore ran for governor of Alabama, losing in the primary election.
One of the grandest canards in current thought about U.S. history is that the Mayflower Compact set up a theocracy in Massachusetts. Lofton and Moore banter about it as if it were well established fact — or as if, as I suspect, neither of them has looked at the thing in a long time, and that neither of them has ever diagrammed the operative sentence in the thing.
The Mayflower Compact was an agreement between the people in two religiously disparate groups, that among them they would fairly establish a governing body to fairly make laws, and that they would abide by those laws. Quite the opposite of a theocracy, this was the first time Europeans set up in the New World a government by consent of the governed.
That is something quite different from a theocracy. Read the rest of this entry »
10 Comments | America's founding, Bad Quotes, Bogus history, Good Quotes, History, History Revisionism, Religious Freedom, Thanksgiving, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Week 94 of the Carnival of Education, up at EduWonks. Nearly two years ago, who foresaw so much good stuff on education?
Tip of the scrub brush to The Reflective Teacher.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
We can still read the Gutenberg Bible. It was printed in 1455, 551 years ago. I have a few books in my library older than 80 years, and they are still quite usable. I have books from my undergraduate days that I consult regularly — though more than 25 years old, they work fine.
So while books carry on, it’s a bit of a shock, to me, to see that VHS is dead. Daily Variety carried the obituary last week, but I just heard this morning, “VHS, 30, dies of loneliness”:
After a long illness, the groundbreaking home-entertainment format VHS has died of natural causes in the United States. The format was 30 years old.
No services are planned.
The format had been expected to survive until January, but high-def formats and next-generation vidgame consoles hastened its final decline.
“It’s pretty much over,” concurred Buena Vista Home Entertainment general manager North America Lori MacPherson on Tuesday.
VHS is survived by a child, DVD, and by Tivo, VOD and DirecTV. It was preceded in death by Betamax, Divx, mini-discs and laserdiscs.
Although it had been ailing, the format’s death became official in this, the video biz’s all-important fourth quarter. Retailers decided to pull the plug, saying there was no longer shelf space.
VHS is an acronym for “vertical helical scan,” which means little to most people. It’s obscure enough that when some advertising writer suggested it stands instead for “video home system,” that explanation replaced the truth in many histories of the format.
Wikipedia says the format was launched in September 1976, the month that Orrin Hatch won an upset victory over Jack Carlson in the Utah Republican primary on the strength of the only endorsement then-former-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan gave to anyone. Hatch went on to defeat three-term incumbent Ted Moss with a vastly underpaid press secretary. On November 7, 2006, 72-year-old Orrin Hatch won a sixth six-year term to the U.S. Senate. But VHS is dead. Hatch’s career in the U.S. Senate will outlast VHS.
In late 1978 I purchased a high-end cassette tape recorder to convert my vinyl records to a format that could play in my car. I had avoided the 8-track boom, and I thought cassettes would be the format for a long time to come. That cassette recorder wore out; I have two other high-end machines I use only occasionally. I have a few hundred cassette tapes that are too decayed to play. It turns out that magnetic recording tape only lasts about a decade before it becomes unusable. Fortunately I kept the vinyl records, and now I have software to convert them to digital, for conversion to CD or MP3 formats. It is difficult to find needles for the record players these days. Cassette players still show up in autos. VHS, on the other hand, joins Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the “seriously dead” column.
I delayed purchase of VHS player until about 1989, when stereo versions were reasonably inexpensive, and when most of the war with Sony Betamax was over. In schools today VHS is almost ubiquitous, finally. My principal had to argue hard to purchase DVD players just two years ago. New VHS machines were installed in many schools in the Dallas area just a year ago.
DVDs launched in the late 1990s, according to Wikipedia. DVD sales surpassed VHS sales in June 2003. Three years later, movie studios announced they would no longer put new movies on VHS for commercial sales, in July 2006.
I may be missing something, or perhaps digital other-than-DVD formats are already eclipsing DVD, but I do not think there is a core of DVD recorders and players available to allow home recording to the extent VHS recorders were used. Or, perhaps TIVO has filled the void.
Remember all the litigation about copyright protection and VHS? Remember the fight GO Video had to make a two-head, reproducing VHS machine? All mooted now.
VHS is dead, but will any format live long any more?
Tip of the old scrub brush to Tombrarian.
* Among other things, Toffler said: “The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
He also wrote: “Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.”
Leave a Comment » | Blu-ray, Classroom technology, Movies, Technology | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Timothy Egan wins awards for his reporting and writing on a regular basis these days, it appears. He was part of a 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter team who reported on racial attitudes in America for the New York Times. Last week his book on the Dust Bowl won the National Book Award for Nonfiction: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton-Mifflin).
This period is not well understood by Texas history students, according to the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) tests of the past few years. Here’s a new book that should be incorporated into lesson plans for 7th grade Texas history courses, who will be coming into the Dust Bowl period sometime after the first of the year on most calendars.
Egan reads an excerpt of The Worst Hard Time for NPR here, and the site includes a link to the first chapter and other NPR stories on the Dust Bowl.
Other sources for lesson planning for this period should include Woody Guthrie’s biography Bound for Glory (book and movie), Steinbeck’s series on the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath (both book and movie), and Of Mice and Men (book and movie and more movies).
Leave a Comment » | Books, Dust Bowl, Great Depression, History, Lesson plans, TAKS, TEKS, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Looking for books to put on my ad hoc list of top history books, for giving or getting, I took at look at the list of Pulitzer Prize winners in the history category, a list of books that dates back to 1917. (You may make nominations for the list here — please do!) Prizes for the past dozen or so years are all books I liked and have found useful. Some of the books, like Acheson’s winner from 1970, grew to be classics in some circles. But I was struck by how many of the books seem to have sunk from view.
Where are they now?
Here’s the Pulitzer website for the prize itself, where you can find lists for all the prizes; I reproduce the complete list of winners in history, below the fold.
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Posted by Ed Darrell
From the History Matters site at George Mason University, a quiz about quotes attributed to presidents — formatted, ready for classroom use. Only three out of the seven are accurate? There are some surprises.
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Bad Quotes, Good Quotes, History, Lesson plans | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Gift-giving time beckons. Hanukkah, Christmas, Ramadan, Samhain, New Year’s Day — with a few exceptions, we will find ourselves looking for gifts for people we know and love, or people we know and work with, over the next few weeks. If you were to give a rather timeless gift, a book of history for the ages, what would it be?
I’m stealing ideas again, this time from Discover, the magazine that recently published its list of the 25 greatest science books of all time (that is a link to the introduction, written by Nobelist Kary Mullis; here is the list itself). (Tip of the old scrub brush to Larry Moran at Sandwalk, too.)
If you were to pick from a list of the greatest history books ever written, what would those books be? I hope you’ll share nominations for the top history books in the comments. Enlighten us to your reasons for picking the book, too.
Thinking out loud here: There would be a mix of old and new. Some books might be very short, some would be thousands of pages, perhaps in several volumes. I think a long-enough list would include some of these:
Well, any list I assemble solo would be a bit quirky.
What sort of criteria should be used to judge the books? Must they all be well-written? Should their effects on history and policy makers be considered? Should they be lyrical? I wonder, for example, about something like Homer’s Iliad. If effect on policy makers is a criterion, does the Bible qualify for a spot? Caesar’s diaries of the campaign in Gaul are famous, but who reads them any more? Do some books, or sets, make the list on the legs of the massive sales they racked up, partly because of a book club promotion (think Will and Ariel Durant)?
Make a nomination, please.
18 Comments | Books, Curricula, History | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I have nothing new or enlightening to add to the discussion about whether George Washington actually added “so help me, God” to his oath of office when he assumed the presidency of the United States. So let me merely point you to History is Elementary, where the issue is covered very well.
Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, America's founding, Good Quotes, History, History Revisionism, Voodoo history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Everyone is for it, no one wants to pay for it. Education reform still hits the wall when we ask “who pays?”
The Seattle Times said funding is the key to reform, in an editorial November 19:
THE education panel Washington Learns proposes a bold approach to injecting every level of education with rigor and accountability.
The elephant in the room, however, is education funding. Sidestepping this massive beast threatens the very underpinning of reform efforts. Gov. Christine Gregoire promised a new way of looking at education and investing in it. The smart, holistic proposals from her committee give us the former. Now, where’s the latter?
This is a critical question that won’t wait. The piecemeal approach to education spending — funding a program here, a program there — hasn’t served schools well and would crack under the weighty intentions of Washington Learns.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Kozol was at the University of Alaska in Anchorage a week earlier, and he pulled no punches:
“They say a good teacher can do OK with 40 kids, but they (those teachers) could work wonders with 18 kids,” he said.
Kozol said that today students are viewed with price tags on their heads and that equality in education is not a current reality.
“In the eyes of God, I’m sure all children are equal – but not in the eyes of America,” he said.
Now, there is an interesting indicator to measure whether God is in the schools: Money.
Both articles, in full, below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), Classroom size, Education, Education reform, Education spending, No Child Left Behind Act, Public education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
94-year old free market champion Milton Friedman died yesterday. Many great accountings for his career will be written, I’m sure — here is the New York Times notice.
Milton Friedman in 1964 – New York Times photo
At the end of the 20th century, it certainly appeared that Friedman was more right than Keynes, and almost diametrically opposed to Marx. There are questions about whether free markets will be able to pull the former Soviet Union out of its economic woes, however, and we have run into a lot of questions about how to establish the free markets that guarantee political freedom in nations in Africa, Asia and South America.
Friedman was the greatest exponent of school vouchers in America, a view that I found had intellectual appeal but which, to me, fails to win any respect in actual practice, especially when the voucher programs hammer away at the foundations of public education (such as the public schools Friedman attended) by systematically choking off funding for public education.
I for one will miss his voice in these debates. It was a well-educated, gentle voice, tempered by reason and a lot of common sense. Free market economists grow almost abundant these days. There will never be another Friedman.
Update: Nice tributes and serious criticism. A friend uses an exercise in class requiring students to write obituaries for famous economists — Friedman’s death offers ample opportunities to collect real obits to use for examples. See some of the comments, such as:
Nothing about Friedman is up yet at The Becker-Posner Blog. If they do anything at all on Friedman, it will be worth the read.
7 Comments | Adam Smith, Current History, Economics, Freedom - Economic, Freedom - Political, Public education, School vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I spent a decade of my life chasing compensation for the downwind victims of fallout from the U.S. government’s testing of atomic devices at the Nevada Test Site — I was working for a Utah politician, and many of the victims were Utah citizens unfortunate enough to live in small towns where, some idiot calculated, the damage from the fallout would be minimized and possible to deny.
Over at Axis of Evel Kneivel, where the Carnival of History 43 is hosted this week, I found this post on the November 5 anniversary of a 1951 atomic bomb test that involved moving hundreds of innocent soldiers to be exposed to radiation in order to test whether they could fight after an atomic exchange.
If Santayana was right, if learning history will help us to prevent the bad parts from recurring, it is urgent that you go read that post, and that you vow to prevent the recurrence of things such as a calculated sacrifice of innocent U.S. citizens.
3 Comments | Accuracy, Atomic Bomb, Cold War | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
History Carnival 43 is up at Axis of Evel Knievel. Well, over there they call it “History Carnival XLIII,” but there’s not much Roman history involved.
Without pointing to too many posts, let me just urge you to go take a look. The Carnival lists many good posts, listing history and talking about history. You’ll do well to see for yourself.
I also want to thank D at the Axis of Evel Knievel for the link to the post on this blog about the newly released collection of Dorothea Lange’s photos of the Japanese internment in the U.S. during World War II. The book, and the issue, deserve a wide audience. Especially among Texas high school kids, whose tests show they need to know more about the Japanese internment, and World War II in general. Especially, they need to know more before they march off to war, or march off to court to defend systems that allow our government to summarily imprison people who are otherwise peaceful.
Leave a Comment » | History, Japanese American internment, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
It’s amazing what is not available on video for use in the classroom.
Texas kids have to study the “Grito de Dolores” in the 7th grade — the “Cry from Dolores” in one translation, or the “Cry of Pain” in another (puns in Spanish! Do kids get it?). Father Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo made the speech on September 16, 1810, upon the news that Spanish authorities had learned of his conspiracy to revolt for independence. The revolution had been planned for December 8, but Hidalgo decided it had to start early.
This date is celebrated in Mexico as Independence Day. Traditionally the President of Mexico issues an update on the Grito, after the original bell that Father Hidalgo used is rung, near midnight.
Hidalgo himself was captured by the Spanish in 1811, and executed.
It’s a great story. It’s a good speech, what little we have of it (Hidalgo used no text, and we work from remembered versions).
Why isn’t there a good 10- to 15-minute video on the thing for classroom use? Get a good actor to do the speech, it could be a hit. Where is the video when we need it?
Statue of Father Hidalgo in Dolores, Mexico
4 Comments | Education, History, History video sources, TAKS, TEKS, Texas | Tagged: Education, Father Hidalgo, freedom, Grito, History, Mexico, Mexico's Independence, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Stu Hasic argues that a photo from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) “killed God,” or at least the notion that God played a role in creation.
Where do bloggers get such fantastic, erroneous ideas? My educated guess is that most preachers looking at this photograph of hundreds of galaxies (no, not individual stars), deep in space and therefore deep back in time, would be awestruck — and were they to preach about it, they’d call this evidence of God’s hand in creation, making a leap in logic and faith about equal to that of Hasic, but in the opposite direction. Hasic’s post nicely encapsulates some of the knowledge we get from the photo, but then he leaps to an unwarranted conclusion.
Hasic argues that since the photo is a brilliant refutation of some of the less scientific claims of creationism, it disproves God.
If Man is the purpose of creation, why did it take so long to create Man? And what’s with all the over-the-top elaborate sky decorations? Surely some painted white dots on a big canvas hung around the Earth would have sufficed?
Thanks should go to Hubble for opening our eyes. If only some men would open theirs. Being a Christian or being a Muslim means being different. Being a Human means being the same.
I can’t speak for all Christians, of course, but I’d wager most Christians would agree with Hasic’s last sentence there: Being a human means being the same as other humans. That’s rather the point of much of scripture (see Ecclesiastes, for many examples). I would also note that most Christians like the Hubble photos as much as anyone else. Photos of “star incubators” (see end of the post for an example) are among the more popular images in religious publications in the last decade. Contrary to Hasic’s assertion, the photo offers no challenge at all to any belief of most Christians. Read the rest of this entry »
13 Comments | Accuracy, Astronomy, Current History, Physics, Religion, Research, Science, Science and faith | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
You are currently browsing the Millard Fillmore's Bathtub blog archives for November, 2006.
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 