Surprise! Hitler banned Darwin, instead of embracing evolution

October 4, 2006

Nick Matzke at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) advised and coached the plaintiff’s lawyers in the Dover case, and in general has made himself useful tracking down the real history of creationism and intelligent design. He’s at it still, and over at Panda’s Thumb tavern he reports that, contrary to Coral Ridge Ministries’ D. James Kennedy’s claims that there is a direct connection from Darwin to Hitler, Darwin made the list of books banned, and perhaps burned, by the Nazis.

Matzke’s work raises serious issues with Richard Weikart’s claim, in From Darwin to Hitler, that there is a direct link.

Interesting reading. Go look.

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4 Comments | Accuracy, Creationism, Darwin, Evolution, World War II | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Iva Toguri, RIP (Not “Tokyo Rose”)

September 30, 2006

Ima Toguri Aquino (NOT Tokyo Rose) (National Archives photo)

Iva Toguri D’Aquino died this week at age 90. She’s seen here in a file photo being escorted out of federal court after her conviction for treason in 1949. She was later pardoned. AP, via NPR National Archives photo (2-24-2007 blog update)

Scott Simon at NPR’s “Weekend Edition” had a remembrance of a woman from his old neighborhood in Chicago who died this week. It’s an audio report (transcripts are available for a fee from NPR).

As a Japanese American student stuck in Tokyo on December 11, 1941, Toguri was tossed out by her cousins. In order to live, she took a job with Japanese radio, and ultimately was one of a dozen women who read material between songs broadcast to American soldiers, known collectively as “Tokyo Rose.” Toguri refused to renounce her U.S. citizenship, ever. Assigned to work with Allied POWs in Tokyo, she read propaganda notices she said later were so silly that no GI could have believed them, written by an Australian POW for humor.

But at the end of the war, trying to get back to the U.S., Toguri was the only one of the woman broadcasters known. She was detained as a suspect Tokyo Rose for a year, then released — there was no evidence against her. Read the rest of this entry »

5 Comments | Civil Rights, History, Patriotism, War, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Topaz – monument to lack of civil rights

September 6, 2006

National history standards for high school U.S. history courses say kids should demonstrate knowledge about the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II, under Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. Results from Texas’ TAKS test show that most students are not meeting the standards of knowledge.

I found an interesting presentation of photographs and audio interviews hidden away at the Salt Lake Tribune’s website. It is simply titled “Topaz” after the name of the internment camp outside of Delta, Utah.

My mother’s family lived outside of Delta, in Hinckley, Utah, for several years before 1930. It is not a pleasant place to be held captive, she said.

Utah’s Japanese population is quite large, now, and held considerable influence in the 1970s and 1980s when I was active in politics in Utah. Utah’s Japanese community sought the support of Sen. Orrin Hatch for an investigation into the violation of the civil rights of people interned during World War II, and Hatch cosponsored the bill to investigate, and then to pay reparations to victims and survivors of victims.

Some wag at the copy desk of the Provo Daily Herald took sport with our press releases; whenever we’d put “internment” in a headline, they would change it to “burial,” so that “Hatch supports probe of Japanese internment” became “Hatch supports Japanese burial probe.” I didn’t see significant humor in it, but the jest continued through the life of the investigation.

Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 appropriating money to compensate victims. President Bill Clinton signed the official apology from the United States on October 1, 1993.

2 Comments | Civil Rights, History, Japanese American internment, TAKS, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

History in video: Japan’s surrender, 62 years ago

September 3, 2006

I had looked before without success, but not since early this year. Looking for something else, I found this link to videos at the National Archives, available for downloading.

This is a 9-minute newsreel on the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, for one example, aboard the U.S.S. Missouri — on September 2, 1945, 62 years ago yesterday.


The National Archives videos promise to be great sources for classroom teachers.

3 Comments | Education, Harry Truman, History, History video sources, Teaching, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Joe Rosenthal – Iconic Iwo Jima photo revealed a lot about war and Americans

August 22, 2006

Photo by Joe Rosenthal, Associated Press

 

Joe Rosenthal died. He took the photo of the U.S. flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima that became an icon of the Pacific War, of dedication to duty, and of the deeper, sometimes darker currents of war and life in the U.S.

The Los Angeles Times captured the basics of the story, noting that the photo Rosenthall took was the second raising of a larger flag, a smaller one having been raised a bit earlier. (Other worthwhile stories include those in the Seattle Times, Scotsman.com, and The San Francisco Times.)

Mt. Suribachi, though little more than a large mound on the island, is the highest point there and visible all around the island. The raising of the flag on that spot was a morale booster for U.S. troops and a morale-buster for holdout Japanese troops engaged in one of the nastiest, bloodiest battles of a nasty, bloody war. As the LA Times noted, a third of all U.S. Marines to die in the war died on Iwo Jima: 5,931. Nearly 7,000 U.S. servicemen died, in total — and, fighting to the death from deeply hidden tunnels, nearly all of the Japanese defenders died. Read the rest of this entry »

8 Comments | Atomic Bomb, Famous Battles, Flag ceremony, Flag etiquette, Heroes, History, Patriotism, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

World War II – Stick to the facts

August 9, 2006

Today (August 9, 2006) is the 61st anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, Japan, by the United States. While we in the U.S. commemorate such events with full disclosure of information, sometimes to the discomfort of people who do not want a discussion on the use of such weapons, Japan itself is often reluctant to confront and acknowledge its actions in the war, actions which prompted President Truman to determine atomic bombs were the most humane solution to a quick end of the war.

High schools in Japan are using right-wing history textbooks that tend ot whitewash the role of Japan in World War II. Go see the brief article here, in China’s Peoples Daily On-Line.

Rational discourse and debate on the control of nuclear weapons in order to assure justice and peace depends on our understanding the truth about the use of nuclear weapons. Textbooks which distort the truth, either by omitting facts or selectively endorsing them, tend to keep us away from both justice and peace.

Also see this post, Atomic Anniversaries.

1 Comment | Atomic Bomb, History, Textbook Selection, Textbooks, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Atomic anniversaries

August 7, 2006

This week marks the 61st anniversaries of the U.S. dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9).

This is the only event that occasionally causes me to wish for school in early August. Marking the anniversaries in a U.S. history class could be a useful exercise. Texas’ TEKS require students to know a bit about President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb, and especially his reasoning behind the decision. To get there in an orderly fashion, and to keep kids captivated by this most interesting part of recent history, I think a class needs to lay the background with the end of the war in Europe (especially D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge) with troops hoping to go home to the U.S. and being diverted to the Pacific, the background of the U.S.’s “island-hopping” strategy, especially the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the carnage that was required to take the islands, and the background of the Manhattan Project, from Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt through the secret cities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Trinity Project at White Sands, the training of the bombers at Wells Wendover, Nevada, and the World War I service of Harry Truman himself. It’s a fascinating history that, the Texas tests show and my classroom experience confirms, students know very little about.

As with the misinformation on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which I reported earlier today, this history of atom bombs informs us of policy choices available and necessary in our current dealings with North Korea, Iran, Ukraine and Russia, among other nations.

Japanese foundations sponsor trips to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for U.S. reporters, and there used to be one for high school teachers, too. It’s a history I lived with for a decade trying to get a compensation bill for downwind victims of fallout from our atmospheric nuclear tests in Nevada. I wish more people knew the stories.

5 Comments | Atomic Bomb, Curricula, Harry Truman, History, Nuclear weapons, Science, TAKS, Technology, TEKS, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Recognizing bogus history, 2

August 2, 2006

Bogus history infects political discussions more than others, though there are some areas where bogus history strays into the realm of science (false claims that Darwin and Pasteur recanted, for example).

1. The author pitches the claim directly to the media or to organizations of non-historians, for pay.

Historians are detectives, and they like to share what they find. One historian working in the papers of one figure from history will find a letter from another figure, and pass that information on to the historian working on the second figure. Historians teach history, write it up for scholarly work, and often spin it in more fascinating tales for popular work. Most years there are several good works competing for the Pulitzer Prize in history. Academic historians, those tied to universities and other teaching institutions, join societies, attend meetings, and write their material in journals — all pitched to sharing what they have learned.

Bogus historians tend to show up at conferences of non-historians. Douglas Stringfellow’s tales of World War II derring do were pitched to civic clubs, places where other historians or anyone else likely to know better would not appear (Stringfellow’s stories of action behind enemy lines in World War II won him several speaking awards, and based on his war record, he was nominated to a seat in Congress for Utah, in 1952, which he won; a soldier who knew Stringfellow during the war happened through Salt Lake City during the 1954 re-election campaign, and revealed that Stringfellow’s exploits were contrived; he was forced to resign the nomination). David Barton speaks more often to gun collectors than to history groups. Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments | Accuracy, Bogus history, Voodoo history, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Don’t study war no more

July 20, 2006

Wizbang complains we don’t study wars enough in public schools. That could be correct.

Wizbang links to old posts by education writer Joanne Jacobsen and North Carolina AP history teacher Betsy to support the point. Interesting posts on interesting blogs (this is not an endorsement of the political views, only a judgment that the comments are interesting).

At Betsy’s old post (2004), I put up some comments anyway:

Gravatar The story of Henry Knox carrying the cannons of Fort Ticonderoga overland — 120,000 pounds worth! — in the middle of winter, to give Washington the bluff to win the siege of Boston, is the sort of story that sticks to the intellectual ribs of kids. The story of the “midnight crossing” at Trenton, after Washington got his tail whipped in New York and things looked more dire than they did at Boston, is another turning point battle. The war doesn’t make much sense, otherwise. They can be told in ten minutes, each. If a teacher wants to expand each into an hour-long exercise, with group activities including charts and graphs, it’s difficult — but what is wrong with good old lecture from time to time — especially riveting lecture?

The social effects are parts of longer threads — the continuous and continuing increase in rights, the rise of free and important women, increasing morality, increasing technology, American communities, and the birth and growth of American-style free enterprise.

All of those threads make the whole of history more comprehensible — but they are all interwoven. The Japanese Internments are part of a larger story on xenophobia and immigration, and the growth of civil rights. To treat it as a stand-alone feature of World War II is to slight the Chinese and Irish workers who built the transcontinental railroad, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Amish, the Mormons, all Hispanics and Vietnamese.

The difficulty I find is that the kids don’t come into 11th grade with anything they should have gotten from 8th grade. But I’ve been teaching at the alternative school. Certainly in AP, you can fly, can’t you?

Why not a unit on the top ten major battles in U.S. history? It would take a day. I have a 50-minute PowerPoint on Brown v. Topeka Board of Education that spans civil rights from 1776 to 2007, and links it all.

1 Comment | 1776, America's founding, History, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Quick! Before this history fades away . . .

July 20, 2006

From the Westfield, Massachusetts Republican, we find a story of history teachers getting first-hand history from a World War II veteran. His story is perhaps a bit unusual because he is African American, and he told the story of the irony of defending freedom in Europe, then returning home to have to fight for his own freedom all over again.

These veterans are dying off — this fellow, Raymond Elliott, is 82. Such a presentation to classes brings back to life the events of World War II, and in this case also sets the stage for the civil rights struggles of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s (Brown v. Board, Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Little Rock, the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr., Selma, the March on Washington, “I Have a Dream,” the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, etc., etc.).

The full story is below the fold — fair use copy. Do you have such veterans in your town? Do your classes get to meet with them? Are you such a veteran, and do the teachers in your area know you are available? Do you think many of these teachers got his name and address to invite him to their schools?

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Civil Rights, Curricula, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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