Some students really struggle with the idea of the role of religion in the founding and settling of America. Among interesting misconceptions I’ve run into in the past 18 months: Spanish settlers of Texas were Baptists (since so many Texans are Baptist today); the religious fights in England leading to the English Bill of Rights was between “Christians and others.”
Are churches doing their part in teaching the importance of freedom of religion, and especially of the history of religious strife in the western world? It doesn’t appear so. Maybe that list is the 100 top places for educators to visit to ask for help in getting the kids straight on the history of religion.
By the way: Spanish settlers of Texas were Catholic; the religious fights in England tended to be between Catholics and Anglicans, both considered Christian sects, to the surprise of too many students. Oy.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Especially in black and white, the photo is not so macabre as to shock. Pyle looks peaceful, asleep, as Richard Pyle wrote. The value is historical. It’s a reminder that reporters, too, put themselves in harm’s way, to inform Americans about the world, providing the information our democratic republic needs to function well.
Remember to vote in your state’s primary elections this year. Deserve their heroism.
Some guy made this video, a story of the life of Robert Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, for a Cub Scout ceremony (an Arrow of Light awarding). This one features some impressive historical footage of the funeral of Baden-Powell.
First, I wonder why the National Council of Boy Scouts has not seized upon this idea, and put this video on DVD for recruiting and ceremonies.
Second, there are a lot of people out there with enough video production skill to preserve a lot of history — more people should.
I imagine the person who created this was the father of a Cub Scout. It’s a Latter-day Saint ceremony, so there are two references to Mormons, but otherwise this would be a fine video for Scout recruiting.
Here’s another video, professionally produced, from 100yearsofscouting.org:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
In that momentous, often terrible year of 1968, February 1 found the offensive in full swing by the National Liberation Front forces (NFL, or Viet Cong) across South Vietnam. The “General Uprising” kicked off on January 30, the beginning of Tet, the Vietnamese new year celebration (Tet is based on the Chinese lunisolar calendar, shifting from year to year; in 2008 the first day of Tet is February 7). News was just beginning to hit the U.S., in the days before videotape from the field and easy satellite uplinks.
On February 1, 1968, Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams accompanied a South Vietnamese police team trying to clear part of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) of Viet Cong; Adams put his camera up to aim as police chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan put a gun to the head of a man suspected of being part of the NFL, Nguyễn Văn Lém. Adams clicked the shutter coincidentally as the police chief fired the gun, killing the suspect.
The photo ruined the life of Gen. Nguyễn. Adams wrote in Time Magazine:
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.
What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?’
Via Wikipedia and BBC. Wikipedia caption: Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes Viet Cong Captain Nguyen Van Lem: February 1, 1968. This Associated Press photograph, “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon,” won a 1969Pulitzer prize for its photographer Eddie Adams. Film also exists of this event, but owing to the more graphic nature of the film, the photograph is more widely known.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
One of the great joys of history, to me, is the diving into a story and finding that the details of the true story do not correspond well with the popular myths. For example, most sailors of the late 15th century were aware the Earth is a globe, when Columbus sailed — his crew did not fear falling off the edge of the Earth. This fact raises questions about why the great European powers were not more enthusiastic about exploring to the west, and that question is probably more difficult to answer. That means more work for the historian.
The problem is that the leaders of Galileo’s day didn’t think the sun revolves around the earth. My former colleague Thomas Lessl is an expert on Galileo, and from him I learned that virtually every aspect of the Galileo legend is false.
Consider these facts:
1. Neither Galileo, nor any other scientist, was put to death by the medieval Church. Giordano Bruno, a 17th-century Dominican, was indeed condemned by the Inquisition, not for his scientific views, but for preaching a quirky, New Age-ish view called hermeticism, which was only incidentally connected to heliocentrism.
2. The Catholic authorities of Galileo’s day had little trouble with heliocentrism per se. Many of the leading Catholic scientists were actually Copernicans. Copernicus’s treatise on heliocentrism had been in print for seventy years prior to Galileo’s conflict with the Church.
3. Galileo remained a devout and loyal Catholic until the end of his life. He held no animosity toward the Church over his conflict with Church authorities.
4. Most important, the conflict between Galileo and the Church took place in the context of the Protestant Reformation, a context that is almost always omitted from popular accounts of Galileo’s trial. The key issue in this conflict was not heliocentrism per se, but the authority of the individual Believer to interpret Scripture. Galileo’s argument that scientists should interpret the Bible to conform to their scientific views was close to Luther’s view that the Believer should be his own interpreter of Scripture. It was Lutheranism, not heliocentrism, that alarmed the Church leaders.
Galileo, in other words, was caught up in a larger, theological and ecclesiastical controversy. He was not simply a truth-seeking scientists going up against a bigoted Establishment.
Klein urges that we should be distrustful of scientists who invoke the old myths about the Galileo story. He fails to assert the more powerful point, to me: Christianity traditionally supported good science, and therefore creationism is the odd duck — the Bible, and Christianity, are not opposed to good science.
Preachers should be preaching for the truth, not for creationism. Of course, one should ponder when, if ever, preachers have paid attention to economists.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Photo: New York Times photo by James Estrin; Joseph Romito at a press conference announcing the recovery of the Calhoun letter, with a photo of the letter at left.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
On January 28, 1968, Commander Lloyd Bucher and the crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo were confronted by several armed swift boats from North Korea, and after an exchange of gunfire that resulted in the death of one of the Pueblo crew, the North Koreans took the boat and crew captive.
Bloggers are out there looking for the good posts, the real meat of Bloggovia, to serve it up to you in a tight bundle. Here’s where you find such purveyors:
Carnival of Education #155 at Median Sib; it includes such little gems as this: “Daniel Lafleche presents A fascinating clip from the film Malaria Parasites posted at Film and Video Marketplace Blog, saying, ‘Why is it that 30 years ago malaria in Africa was no more serious than the flu? This 5-minute educational video provides an overview on what has happened. Can be a useful resource for related lessons.'” (It’s one more problem that DDT can’t solve, and whose solution is put off by the junk science purveyors who claim DDT is the answer to malaria, or any other problem — I may have to pull this one out for further comment.)
You haven’t checked out the 60th Carnival of History yet? It’s at Victorian Peeper. I didn’t know: “The Library Thing Blog announces that Thomas Jefferson’s library has been added to Library Thing, an online service that enables users to catalog their books. Now Jefferson’s author cloud, tag cloud, author gallery, and stats page are available for all to see. You can also find out how many books your personal library has in common with our third president’s.”
SMU has about an hour of tape of a speech Dr. King delivered at SMU in 1966. While the speech is not particularly noteworthy, it’s a good example of King’s rhetoric of the time. You can put it on your iPod.
It’s a real period piece — King in a southern, formerly segregated town, so soon after the Voting Rights Act. Real history, real people. Very interesting.
SMU has activities running all week long. Things change in 40 years.
(Check out the socks and ties of the men on stage — and where are the women?)
Photos from SMU, from the archives of the campus newspaper, The SMU Campus.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Tony Campolo is an evangelical Christian, a sociology professor and preacher who for the past 15 years or so has been a thorn in the side of political conservatives and other evangelicals, for taking generally more liberal stands, against poverty, for tolerance in culture and politics, and so on. His trademark sermon is an upbeat call to action and one of the more plagiarized works in Christendom, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Coming” (listen to it here).
Rev. Tony Campolo; photo from Berean Research.
Since he’s so close to the mainstream of American political thought, Campolo is marginalized by many of the more conservative evangelists in the U.S. Campolo is not a frequent guest on the Trinity Broadcast Network, on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club,” nor on the white, nominally-Christian, low-budget knock-off of “Sabado Gigante!,” “Praise the Lord” (with purple hair and everything).
Campolo came closest to real national fame when he counseled President Bill Clinton on moral and spiritual issues during the Lewinsky scandal.
His opposite-editorial piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday, “The real danger in Darwin is not evolution, but racism,” is out of character for Campolo as a non-conservative evangelistic thinker — far from what most Christians expect from Campolo either from the pulpit or in the college classroom. The piece looks as though it was lifted wholesale from Jerry Falwell or D. James Kennedy, showing little familiarity with the science or history of evolution, and repeating canards that careful Christians shouldn’t repeat.
Campolo’s piece is inaccurate in several places, and grossly misleading where it’s not just wrong. He pulls out several old creationist hoaxes, cites junk science as if it were golden, and generally gets the issue exactly wrong.
Evolution science is a block to racism. It has always stood against racism, in the science that undergirds the theory and in its applications by those scientists and policy makers who were not racists prior to their discovery of evolution theory. Darwin himself was anti-racist. One of the chief reasons the theory has been so despised throughout the American south is its scientific basis for saying whites and blacks are so closely related. This history should not be ignored, or distorted.
At the time of this writing, it appears the site for the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center has been hacked — an illustration of the need for citizens to stand up for civil rights and human decency, still.
Students learn history best when it affects them directly, or when they can see the stuff close up. The Legacies Dallas History Conferences focus on history in and around Dallas, Texas. This is prime material for Texas and Dallas history, economics and government classes.
If you’re teaching at a high school or middle school in the Dallas area, print this off for every social studies and English teacher at your school, and pass it out to them Tuesday (or Monday if you’re open then).
Many of the conference presentations roll down that alley of a topic most Texas students need more of, the events around World War II. One session dives into Vietnam, one goes back to the Civil War, and World War I is remembered.
Bob Reitz, the public historian who curates the amazing Jack Harbin Museum of Scout History at Dallas’s Camp Wisdom, alerted me to the conference with a plug to his colleague’s presentation. Anita Mills-Barry will present her paper, “Homefront Scouting During World War II: Participation by Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in the Civilian Effort in Dallas County.”
A copy of the web invitation to the conference below the fold.
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 
Is Joseph Romito a Boy Scout? Can we give him a medal?
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
