It’s a pretty good rundown of the fight between Keynes and Hayek, conducted mostly after Keynes’ death in economics classrooms and central banks world wide.
An Obama guest, Lin-Manuel Miranda, pushes the envelope on gangsta rap, and history teaching:
You can’t use that in the classroom, teachers? Why not?
More:
Wikipedia notes of Miranda:
He is working on a hip-hop album based upon the life of Alexander Hamilton, entitled The Hamilton Mixtape.[5] He recently performed “The Hamilton Mixtape” at the White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word on May 12, 2009. Accompanied by Alex Lacamoire. [12]
KERA Television has a marvelous short film profile of Jack Kilby, who won the Nobel in physics for his invention of what we now call “the computer chip.”
Late in his life, Jack Kilby holds his first integrated circuit, which is encased in plastic. Photo via Texas Instruments, via Earth & Sky
Teachers should check out the film and use it — it’s a great little chapter of Texas history, science history, and U.S. history. It’s an outstanding explanation of a technological development that revolutionized so much of our daily life, especially in the late 20th century. At 8 minutes and 37 seconds, the film is ideal for classroom use.
2009 marks the 50th anniversary of Kilby’s filing for a patent on an integrated circuit. He’s been honored by the Inventor’s Hall of Fame. Despite the stupendous value of his invention, Kilby’s name is far from a household name even in North Dallas, home of Texas Instruments. Robert Noyce, who came up with almost exactly the same idea at almost exactly the same moment, is similarly ignored.
Shouldn’t today’s high school students know about Kilby and Noyce? Not a class period goes by that I don’t use a device powered by Kilby’s invention; nor does one pass that I don’t have to admonish at least one student for misuse of such a device, such as an iPod, MP3 player, or cell phone. It’s difficult to think of someone whose invention has greater influence on the life of these kids, hour by hour — but Kilby and his invention don’t get their due in any text I’ve seen.
It’s a great film — original and clever animation, good interviews, and it features Kilby’s charming daughter, and the great journalist and historian of technology T. R. Reid. Don’t you agree that it’s much better than most of the history stuff we have to show?
Texas history standards require kids to pay brief homage to inventors in the 20th century. Kilby is not named in the standards, however, and so he and his invention are ignored as subjects of history study. You ought to fix that in your classroom, teachers.
Pleasant to watch, this time-lapse composition highlights the light pollution aspect of increasing urbanization across the United States. The photographer, a Dutch architect, notes that each streak of light represents a city, as he flies across the American Midwest to touchdown in San Francisco (SFO). It’s a visual definition of urbanization, isn’t it?
On my night time flight back to SF from Amsterdam, I noticed that the lights from cities were making the clouds glow. Really spectacular and ethereal – it was really seeing the impact of urban environments from a different perspective. Each glow or squiggle represents one town or city!
Luckily the flight was half empty, so I was able to set up an improvised stabilizer mound made up of my bags, pillows, and blankets for my camera to sit on.
We were around the midwest at the beginning of the clip, and there were fewer cities once we hit the rockies. the bridge at the end is the san mateo bridge.
Technique: 1600iso; beginning – 1 (30sec) exposure / 45secs; end – 1 (4sec) exposure / 10 secs; total elapsed time: around 3 hours?
First I’ve heard of this film: “759: Boy Scouts of Harlem,” a film by Jake Boritt and Justin Szlasa.
Have you seen it?
2010 is the 100th anniversary of Scouting in the U.S. This film is not officially a part of that celebration — but expect to see more like it. This film was produced independently, with approval from one Scout council, but entirely independent from Scouting otherwise.
Would this make a good recruiting device for your troop? Why or why not?
Perhaps one of the Scouts in your troop, working on the cinematography merit badge, might be inspired to make a film like this about your troop.
Hidalgo himself was captured by the Spanish in 1811, and executed.
Statue of Father Hidalgo in Dolores, Mexico.
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?
Update for 2008: Glimmerings of hope on the video front: Amateur videos on YouTube provide some of the sense of what goes on in modern celebrations.
The Grito de Dolores (“Cry of/from Dolores”) was the battle cry of the Mexican War of Independence, uttered on September 16, 1810, by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a Roman Catholic priest from the small town of Dolores, near Guanajuato, Mexico.
“My Children, a new dispensation comes to us today…Will you free yourselves? Will you recover the lands stolen 300 years ago from your forefathers by the hated Spaniards? We must act at once.”
Although many mistakenly attribute the Cinco de Mayo holiday as the celebration of Mexican independence, Sept. 16 was the day the enthusiastic Indian and mestizo congregation of Hidalgo’s small Dolores parish church took up arms and began their fight for freedom against Spain.
Portals to the World contains selective links providing authoritative, in-depth information about the nations and other areas of the world. Resources on Mexico include information on the country’s history, religion, culture and society to name a few.
September is also a notable month for Hispanic culture with the celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month Sept 15 – Oct. 15. Sept. 15 is significant because it is the anniversary of independence for Latin American countries Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In addition to Mexico’s independence day on Sept. 16, Chile recognizes its independence day Sept.18. Also, Columbus Day or Día de la Raza, which is Oct. 12, falls within this 30-day period.
The theme for the 2009 Hispanic Heritage Month is “Embracing the Fierce Urgency of Now!” To coincide with the celebration, the Library and several partners present a website honoring Hispanic culture and people.
Specifically on the Grito de Dolores, see the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project:
Cry of Dolores
My Children, a new dispensation comes to us today…Will you free yourselves? Will you recover the lands stolen three hundred years ago from your forefathers by the hated Spaniards? We must act at once.Cry of Dolores, attributed to Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, September 16, 1810.
Early on the morning of September 16, 1810, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla summoned the largely Indian and mestizo congregation of his small Dolores parish church and urged them to take up arms and fight for Mexico’s independence from Spain. His El Grito de Dolores, or Cry of Dolores, which was spoken—not written—is commemorated on September 16 as Mexican Independence Day.
Father Hidalgo was born into a moderately wealthy family in the city of Guanajuato, northwest of Mexico City, in 1753. He attended the Jesuit College of San Francisco Javier, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Mexico in 1774, and was ordained into the priesthood in 1778. He soon earned the enmity of the authorities, however, by openly challenging both church doctrine and aspects of Spanish rule by developing Mexican agriculture and industry.
In 1803, Hidalgo accepted the curacy of the small parish of Dolores, not far from his native city of Guanajuato. Between 1803 and 1810, he directed most of his energy to improving the economic prospects of his parishioners. He also joined the Academia Literaria, a committee seeking Mexico’s independence from Spain.
In September 1810, Spanish authorities learned of the group’s plot to incite a rebellion. On September 13, they searched the home of Emeterio González in the city of Queretaro where they found a large supply of weapons and ammunition. Warned of his impending arrest, Hidalgo preempted authorities by issuing the ElGrito de Dolores on the morning of September 16. Attracting enthusiastic support from the Indian and mestizo population, he and his band of supporters moved toward the town of San Miguel.
The rebel army encountered its first serious resistance at Guanajuato. After a fierce battle that took the lives of more than 500 Spaniards and 2,200 Indians, the rebels won the city. By October, the rebel army, now 80,000 strong, was close to taking Mexico City. Hidalgo, fearful of unleashing the army on the capital city, hesitated, then retreated to the north. He was captured in Texas, then still a part of the Spanish empire, and executed by firing squad on July 31, 1811. After ten more years of fighting, a weakened and divided Mexico finally won independence from Spain with the signing of the Treaty of Córdoba on August 24, 1821.
Learn more about Mexico:
View the Huexotzinco Codex, one of the Top Treasures in the Library of Congress’ American Treasures online exhibition. The codex is an eight-sheet document on amatl,a pre-European paper made from tree bark in Mesoamerica. It is part of the testimony in a legal case against representatives of Spain’s colonial government in Mexico and dates to 1531, ten years after Mexico’s defeat.
Read the Today in History feature on the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo, which celebrates Mexico’s defeat of French troops at the town of Puebla in 1862. This event is also widely celebrated by Latinos in the U.S.
Hispanic Heritage Month.gov, from the Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, National Endowment for the Humanities and several other federal agencies and institutions
To locate resources for the study of Mexico and its history, search the Handbook of Latin American Studies, an online bibliography of works selected and annotated by scholars of Latin American history and culture, or visit the Hispanic Reading Room, which also offers a portal for online information on Mexico.
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Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
You saw the photo? The one where Obama and Sarkozy are, um, “admiring” the rear end of a 17-year old girl? Shame on Obama, right?
I’ll wager that all the radical right-wing blogs that feature the still photo won’t bother to check out the video. Palin’s woes are nothing compared to Obama’s.
Of course, Obama ain’t whinin’ and he ain’t quittin’.
A few weeks ago I finally got a copy of “Fog of War,” at Half-Price Books. I’ve watched it three times so far.
DVD box for Fog of War, Errol Morris's Academy Award-winning documentary
For a talking head documentary, it’s compelling, and interesting. It may be just that I lived through the time, and hearing former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara explain now what was going on at various points . . . “Fog of War” is like a director’s cut DVD of the Vietnam War with Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg and Wilder all explaining every facet of what the director was doing.
Errol Morris’s interviews over the past few daysare good, too. Morris is the director of the movie. He reminds us that he was making the movie before, and then in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Wrong decisions about war were being repeated.
I was looking to find excerpts that might work in world history or U.S. history classes. I’m not sure there is one, now. It should be a powerful film for an AP U.S. history class, but probably assigned viewing rather than in-class.
For his part, Robert McNamara was never anything less than brilliant, even when wrong. We often forget that he rose to his role as Secretary of Defense because of his being right when others were so wrong — at Ford Motor, McNamara was the one who saw the Edsel as a dismal failure and the wrong path, years before the ultimate failure of the marque, the man who saved Lincoln, the man who pushed the small car revolution in the Ford Falcon, the man who pushed safety packages with seatbelts before they were popular, or required. Even at Defense he was more capable that his predecessors, more careful, and more often right. (Read that Miami Herald piece from Joseph Califano — it reveals the brilliance of Lyndon Johnson, too.)
McNamara’s descriptions of errors in the highest places are also brilliant in their insight.
With the possible exception of Eisenhower’s never-used apology and fault-accepting letter for the failure of D-Day, the Normandy invasion — never used because the invasion worked — have we seen a more forthright mea culpa and warning from any of our warriors about their own mistakes, and how to avoid them?
Is that why it seems like he, almost alone among the architects of that horrible conflict, confessed to error in Vietnam? He was a man who could do almost anything, had done much, but at the most important time could not do whatever it was that was required to achieve a just peace, nor even an end to war. We don’t know yet what the right thing to do might have been.
Here’s the Climate Denial Crock of the Week video on ocean levels, and the denial that they are rising — in line with my post a few hours ago about peoples in the South Pacific and in Alaska losing their homes to climate change:
(Teachers: Note most of these videos are around 5 minutes in length — more than suitable for classroom use, perhaps even as a bell ringer. Notice also that, if you don’t know how to make these videos, as I don’t, you’re behind the curve.)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
It was a reference to the “environmental movement” in government and politics — seniors take the class in Texas. “What does that mean?”
We have maybe ten minutes in the block to stray. No time for discovery learning to get this point across in government.
“The movement, the grass-roots political organizing to express concern for clean air, clean water, preservation of green space, preservation of endangered species, protection from toxic chemicals and poisons. Things really took off after Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring. ”
“That’s a funny title. What’s it about?” I pause. It’s dangerous territory to ask what high school kids don’t know these days.
“Is there anyone here who does not know about DDT and its role in threatening our national symbol, the bald eagle?”
Every hand went up.
How can children get to their senior year and not know about Rachel Carson, DDT, or “environmentalism?”
Comes Frontline on PBS this week. Government and politics teachers, your students should watch and report.
This Week: “Poisoned Waters” (120 minutes),
April 21st at 9pm on PBS (Check local listings)
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For years, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hedrick Smith has reported from the corridors of power in Washington, on Wall Street, and overseas. But these days, he’s worried about something that he’s found much closer to home — something mysterious that’s appeared in waters that he knows well: frogs with six legs, male amphibians with ovaries, “dead zones” where nothing can live or grow.
What’s causing the trouble? Smith suspects the answers might lie close to home as well.
This Tuesday night, in a special two-hour FRONTLINE broadcast –“Poisoned Waters”– Smith takes a hard look at a new wave of pollution that’s imperiling the nation’s waterways, focusing on two of our most iconic: the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound. He also examines three decades of environmental regulation that are failing to meet this new threat, and have yet to clean up the ongoing mess of PCBs, the staggering waste from factory farms, and the fall-out from unchecked suburban sprawl.
“The environment has slipped off our radar screen because it’s not a hot crisis like the financial meltdown, war, or terrorism,” Smith says. “But pollution is a ticking time bomb. It’s a chronic cancer that is slowly eating away the natural resources that are vital to our very lives.”
Among the most worrisome of the new contaminants are “endocrine disruptors,” chemical compounds found in common household products that mimic hormones in the human body and cause freakish mutations in frogs and amphibians.
“There are five million people being exposed to endocrine disruptors just in the Mid-Atlantic region,” a doctor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health tells Smith. “And yet we don’t know precisely how many of them are going to develop premature breast cancer, going to have problems with reproduction, going to have all kinds of congenital anomalies of the male genitalia that are happening at a broad low level so that they don’t raise the alarm in the general public.”
Can new models of “smart growth” and regulation reverse decades of damage? Are the most real and lasting changes likely to come from the top down, given an already overstretched Obama administration? Or will the greatest reasons for hope come from the bottom up, through the action of a growing number of grassroots groups trying to effect environmental change?
Join us for the broadcast this Tuesday night. Online, you can watch “Poisoned Waters” again, find out how safe your drinking water is, and learn how you can get involved.
Ken Dornstein
Senior Editor
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Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation. Major funding for Poisoned Waters is provided by The Seattle Foundation, The Russell Family Foundation, The Wallace Genetic Foundation, The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, The Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment, The Merrill Family Foundation, The Abell Foundation, The Bullitt Foundation, the Park Foundation, and The Rauch Foundation. Additional funding is provided by The Town Creek Foundation, The Clayton Baker Trust, The Lockhart Vaughan Foundation, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, The Chesapeake Bay Trust, Louisa and Robert Duemling, Robert and Phyllis Hennigson, Robert Lundeen, The Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, The Prince Charitable Trusts, Ron and Kathy McDowell, Valerie and Bill Anders, Bruce and Marty Coffey, The Foundation for Puget Sound, Janet Ketcham, Win Rhodes, The Robert C. and Nani S. Warren Foundation, Jim and Kathy Youngren, Vinton and Amelia Sommerville and Laura Lundgren.
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FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of the WGBH Educational Foundation.
See a preview, and read more, here. Another preview below. You can watch the entire program online after April 21.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
“A Sense of Wonder” won praise at film festivals over the past few months, and now has premiered in a 100-city tour designed to get some attention for a near-documentary film, during National Women’s History Month.
Actress Kaiulani Lee painted her one-woman show on Rachel Carson on the big screen. The movie tells the story of Rachel Carson and the tremendous growth of environmental consciousness and activism following her 1962 book Silent Spring. Karen Montgomery produced, Christopher Monger directed, cinematography was done by Haskell Wexler (two-time Oscar winner, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Bound for Glory).
(A screening is planned in Dallas on March 31 for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — but it’s a private screening. Only four other screenings in Texas have been scheduled.)
To find a screening near you, go to the “Sense of Wonder” interactive website, and click on “Screenings.” From there, either click on the list of sites, listed by date, at “100-city tour,” or click on the interactive map to find a site near you. You may also sign up to sponsor a screening.
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonderso indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
![Viva la república! Viva el Cura Hidalgo! Una página de Gloria, TITLE TRANSLATION: Long live the republic! Long live Father Hidalgo! A page of glory. Between 1890 and 1913. Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction Information: Reproduction Nos.: LC-USZ62-98851 (b&w film copy neg.), LC-DIG-ppmsc-04595 (digital file from original, recto), LC-DIG-ppmsc-04596 (digital file from original, verso); Call No.: PGA - Vanegas, no. 123 (C size) [P&P] Catalog Record: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsc.04595](http://www.loc.gov/wiseguide/sept09/images/Mexican_A.jpg)
![A street in Guanajuato, Mexico. Between 1880 and 1897. Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction Information: Reproduction No.: LC-D418-8481 (b&w glass neg.); Call No.: LC-D418-8481 <P&P>[P&P] Catalog Record: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/det.4a27131](http://www.loc.gov/wiseguide/sept09/images/Mexican_B.jpg)
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 