Mining the Internet Archive: Tobacco, history and controversy

May 22, 2007

European Union rules require member states to do something about indoor air pollution. European states are banning smoking in public places. Gone soon will be days when we can joke about Britons and their Player’s cigarettes, or the French and their Galois habits.

Every once in a while as I recount the great Tobacco/Health Wars, my kids remind me that they never saw a cigarette commercial on television. Once, we caught a showing of past ads, and I was truck nostalgic by Fred Flintstone’s testimony for Winston cigarettes — the kids gasped: “Fred Flintstone used to smoke!”

Everybody smoked, once upon a time, it seemed. 1940s and 1950s magazines have ads in which doctors and athletes claim cigarette smoking is either unharmful, sheer pleasure, or even health promoting. Got a cigarette cough? Switch to menthol cigarettes! Mouth burns? Try a filter cigarette.

Today, kids wonder why Virginia did so well selling tobacco to Britain — who in their right mind would have smoked? they ask.

The Internet Archive has an abundance of film material on tobacco. The films come from the University of California – San Francisco: Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | Business Ethics, Current History, Dissent, Economics, First Amendment, Free market economics, Freedom - Economic, Geography - Physical, History, History Revisionism, History video sources, Hoaxes, Movies, On-line education, Politics, Public health, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Interactive disaster maps for geography

April 15, 2007

Would tracking disasters add more than a little interest to your geography units?

Cliotech, a blog by a Pennsylvania social studies teacher, gives pointers to Alertmap, a group based in Budapest (hey, that’s a geography lesson right there!). Alertmap charts disasters — fires, floods, earthquakes, etc. — and what student is not interested in disaster?

Be careful not to unnecessarily scare students — but do point out that the world is full of danger, and natural and man-made disasters continue to plague mankind the world over.

2 Comments | Classroom technology, Current History, Disasters, Economics, Environmental protection, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Lesson plans, Maps, Public health, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Travel, War | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Crank science makes crank politics

February 14, 2007

I’ve never seen a pro-breast cancer post before. That post is easily as crazy as the kid I had in class who said he’d never let his “baby mama” breast feed his son, because he didn’t want his son to be “homo.” That was from a kid steaming to be a high school dropout.

Nuts. Why don’t people just stick to the facts?

1 Comment | Accuracy, Freedom - Political, Hoaxes, Politics, Public health, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Pork producers agree to reason on breast feeding

February 6, 2007

Humor would be impossible without the newspapers, but a lot of really funny stuff happens that never makes it there.

Shortcut: The National Pork Board is working for a happy solution with The Lactivist, who had previously been threatened with legal action for promoting breastfeeding with a t-shirt that says: “The Other White Milk.”

When I taught in a program that included the district’s teen pregnancy courses, I had a kid who one day, out of the blue, insisted that he’d never let his “baby momma” breast feed his son, “because I don’t want him growing up to be homo.”  When such eruptions of ignorance and bigotry occur, what is to be done?

As luck would have it, he was studying the Progressive Era, and we had a lengthy discussion on public health issues, and how to improve the health of the population overall.  We found several websites (which, if available through the district’s filters, were non-objectionable) discussing the value of breastfeeding in giving kids a head start on health and brain development.   My student was skeptical.

In the face of that kind of health-threatening ignorance and such bizarre hoaxes, one quickly comes to understand that radical campaigns to promote breastfeeding are required — even those that depend on humor.

You will get a few laughs, and eventual hope for a happy resolution, following the story of Lactivist’s tussle with the marketers at the Pork Council, with a special tip of the old scrub brush to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.

Leave a Comment » | Hoaxes, Humor, Public education, Public health, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Student project sources: Influenza in Alaska

December 21, 2006

Here’s a post with a ready-made student project in it: “Alaska and Eskimo data in 1920 British report,” at Grassroots Science (Alaska).

This would be a good AP History project, or a cross-discipline project for history and biology.

The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed millions, between 20 million and 40 million people by good estimates — it is estimated that 16 million died in India, alone. Soldiers returning from Europe and World War I carried the plague to hundreds of towns and villages where it might not have gone otherwise. The flu was a particularly deadly one for some people, striking them dead within 24 hours of the onset of symptoms.

Public health issues are largely disregarded in most U.S. and world history texts. This story, of the 1918 flu pandemic, needs to be told and studied carefully, however, because of the danger that such a thing could occur again. Small villages and towns need to be ready to deal with the effects, to try to prevent further spread, and to handle the crisis that occurs when many people in a small community die.

Leave a Comment » | Capturing history, Creationism, Evolution, History, Influenza, Lesson plans, Public health, Science, Student projects, World War I | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

More atomic history: Uranium tailings

December 20, 2006

DOE installs permeable reactive barrier in MonticelloPhoto at left shows work to install a permeable reactive barrier (PRB) to help clean up contamination from arsenic, molybdenum, nitrate, vanadium and uranium wastes at an EPA Superfund Site managed by the U.S. Department of Energy near Monticello, Utah. The cleanup was done under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), the law better known as Superfund. (DOE photo)

GOAT, the blog of High Country News, carried a short story that brought me nasty flashbacks.

Families in Monticello, Utah, wonder whether there is a connection between local clusters of leukemia the old, abandoned uranium works at the edge of town.

“Each depth had its own color. If the sun was just right, it was really pretty.” That’s how Steve Pehrson described the ponds he and his friends swam in as kids, as told to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. He and other Monticello, Utah, kids commonly cooled off in the tailings ponds at the uranium mill that sat on the edge of town. The kids also dug into the tailings piles, and the tailings were used in gardens and even sandboxes. Now, people in Monticello are looking into the link between these habits and cases of leukemia and other diseases that have cropped up amongst the citizenry.

If you follow that link to the Grand Junction (Colorado) Daily Sentinel, you find more stories, and more horrifying stories. Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Accuracy, Atomic Bomb, Boy Scouts of America, Cold War, Current History, Environmental protection, History, Public health, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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