or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
•
"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
June 09, 2008
Beverly Gage Is Ruining History For Everyone
There is a rule, rigidly enforced in America's classrooms, that history must be mind-numbingly boring. Only by rigorous effort is it possible to drain the lifeblood out of the past, which in reality is fascinating. But the boring-ifying effort must be made; if it's not, students might pay attention and learn from history, and then where would we be?
It's for this reason I'm so concerned about Beverly Gage, a history professor at Stutts. Every time I've encountered her writing, I've found the same grievous flaws. It's not just that she fails to turn history into tasteless pudding. No, it's far worse: she shamelessly highlights what's compelling about the past, and then draws connections to our lives today.
That's why I urge you to avoid her pernicious work, and, at all costs, shield our young from exposure. For instance:
• This New York Times op-ed about the evidence Warren Harding may have been (by America's "one-drop" rule) the first black president.
• Her appearances on the History Channel show Lost Worlds, specifically the "Secret Bunkers" and "Secret A-Bomb Factories" episodes.
• Her Slate pieces on real class conflict, 19th century-style and the problems with Ken Burns' The War.
• Her book The Day Wall Street Exploded, which, although it hasn't been published yet, shows strong signs—with its focus on a 1920 horse-cart bombing in Lower Manhattan that killed thirty-nine people—of the same appalling interestingness she's exhibited before.
—Jonathan Schwarz
Posted at June 9, 2008 04:11 PMDidn't Harding take the Klan oath while in the White House? And I don't mean "while President" - actually in the White House.
Don't have my copy of Freakonomics at hand to check.
Posted by: RobWeaver at June 9, 2008 09:38 PM“Far less well known, as the historian Phillip Payne has noted, is what happened the year before, when a mob of armed white Marion residents drove more than 200 black families out of town, one of a wave of postwar race riots that served to segregate the industrialized north.”
This reminded me of an article I ran across about the so-called sundown towns.
“…Sundown towns are communities that for decades—formally or informally—kept out African Americans or other groups. They are so named because some marked their city limits with placards like the one a former resident of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, remembers from the early 1960s: “Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You In Our Town.” The term itself was rarely used east of Ohio, but intentionally white communities were common in the East, indeed throughout the nation—except in the traditional South, where they were rare.
Independent sundown towns range in size from hamlets like Alix, Arkansas, population 185, to large cities like Appleton, Wisconsin, with 57,000 residents in 1970. Sometimes entire counties went sundown, usually when their county seats did. “Sundown suburbs” could be even larger, such as Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles; Levittown, on Long Island; and Warren, a Detroit suburb.
Sundown towns weren’t always all-white. Between 1890 and 1954, thousands of independent communities across the United States drove out their black populations or took steps to forbid African Americans from living in them. Sundown suburbs formed a little later, mostly from 1900 to 1968…”
http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/90579.shtml
I was having a nice day, and then I clicked through to the links and actually learned
Posted by: bobbyp at June 11, 2008 01:05 AMI was having a nice day, and then I clicked through to the links and actually learned something.
Now I no doubt will go out and purchase that book you so shamelessly promoted. How could you? Have you no shame?
Posted by: bobbyp at June 11, 2008 01:07 AMOh, great. It's bad enough that Republicans want to blame 9/11 on Clinton, with the logic that he emboldened al Qaeda by not responding forcefully enough to their attacks in the 1990s. Now they can blame Woodrow Wilson for not responding forcefully enough to terrorism in 1920...
...and they'll probably figure out some way to blame Iran for the bombing.
Posted by: Whistler Blue at June 11, 2008 05:54 PM
