schoolinfosystem.org
Stephen Miller: Some observers today object to teaching dark material to high-school or even college students because they fear it will be psychologically damaging. In one case, I read about a Virginia mother’s push to get her son’s high school to ban a novel about slavery that gave him nightmares. I was struck that such […]
Felicia Fonseca Boarding school survivors also might be hesitant to recount the painful past and trust a government whose policies were to eradicate tribes and, later, assimilate them under the veil of education. Some have welcomed the opportunity to share their stories for the first time. Haaland, the first and only Native American Cabinet secretary, […]
Josepha Da Costa, age 16 The rich history of La Follette Basketball began in 1977. They finished 4th in the Big Eight conference that year. While the team finished the regular season with an overall record of 17 wins and 8 losses, they managed only 10 wins against 8 losses during the conference season. Nonetheless, […]
David Bernstein: Conventional wisdom has it that there are only two sides in the culture war over kids’ instruction on race and racism in America. Those on the right want to impose state-level bans on teaching critical race theory in public schools. Some also want to remove particular books from libraries and curriculums. On the […]
Uchronia: Uchronia: The Alternate History List is a bibliography of more than 3400 novels, stories, essays, collections, and other printed material involving the “what ifs” of history. The genre has a variety of names, but it is best known as alternate history. In an alternate history, one or more past events are changed and the […]
C Bradley Thompson In the first two essays in this series on the relationship between government and the education of children (“How the Redneck Intellectual Discovered Educational Freedom—and How You Can, Too” and “The New Abolitionism: A Manifesto for a Movement”), I established, first, how and why the principle of “Separation of School and State” […]
Stephen Moore: The tally for how much the federal government spent to combat COVID-19 is now estimated to be $5 trillion. It is more than the combined costs of World Wars I and II. The Left is celebrating that politicians in Washington saved us. Really? From what exactly? Two years later, it is time for […]
Zachary Stein: The need to rediscover and reinvigorate education as the deeper codes and sources of culture is aided by Zak’s skilful reviving of the spirit of John Amos Comenius, an educator of world-historical importance. But why education exactly? Because education is not just children in uniform with their feet under desks holding pencils expectantly while […]
George Will: The 1619 Project, which might already be embedded in school curricula near you, reinforces the racial monomania of those progressives who argue that the nation was founded on, and remains saturated by, “systemic racism.” This racial obsession is instrumental; it serves a radical agenda that sweeps beyond racial matters. It is the agenda […]
How Reserve Currencies Have Evolved Over 120 Years via @VisualCap #GlobalSystem #Velsig pic.twitter.com/Mm1WJfWwVF — Velina Tchakarova (@vtchakarova) December 11, 2021 Reserve Currency notes and links.
D60exposed: “A Decrepit School District Plagued by Corruption and Incompetence Turns to Ideological Indoctrination” During the summer of 2021, I had enough. Having witnessed a decade of dysfunction in one of Illinois’ worst public schools and the implementation of their ideological program rooted in Critical Race Theory, I created a blog called Chalkboard Heresy and […]
Good Optics: A few years ago at a party I was explaining some interpretive debate about Marx to a friend. Marx, I was saying, might have believed A, or he might have believed B, and there is evidence on both sides. My friend objected: what does it matter? Surely we should talk about whether A […]
Joanne Jacobs: Daniel Buck describes how he teaches “real” American history — no white-washing — in National Review. There’s no need to teach “anti-racism” to get real about slavery, writes Buck, who’s denounced the “ubiquity and radicalism” of critical race theory. His students read Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, which “paints in every graphic detail the torn-skin […]
Zay: Funding America’s New Education John D Rockefeller donated over $100 million dollars (equivalent of over $3bn in today’s dollars) to establish the General Education Board in 1902, and also to fund universities and teacher’s colleges across the nation. Andrew Carnegie chartered the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1905. Both organizations had the explicit […]
If you are going to teach slavery in America, you have to teach something like a brief version of the complete history of global slavery; in all time periods. It’ll take about one week. The point is to prevent students from defining it as “something that happened to Black folks” — Black Parent’s Guide To […]
Oscar Schwartz: While Franglen’s main motivation was to make admissions processes more efficient, he also hoped that it would remove inconsistencies in the way the admissions staff carried out their duties. The idea was that by ceding agency to a technical system, all student applicants would be subject to precisely the same evaluation, thus creating […]
🚨Hey parents!!! You have options when it comes to your child’s education! Don’t settle! I’m a 5th grade teacher in a private Catholic classical school. Here is what I use to teach American history the right way 🇺🇸 #classicaleducation pic.twitter.com/bhzDPldEb9 — Chelsea Niemiec (@classicalchels) November 4, 2021
Website: A virtual interactive exhibit being developed for the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City
Martin O’Leary: One of the most common simple techniques for generating text is a Markov chain. The algorithm takes an input text or texts, divides it into tokens (usually letters or words), and generates new text based on the statistics of short sequences of those tokens. If you’re interested in the technical details, Allison Parrish […]
Spencer Brown: When students at Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles, California, returned to class this fall, one teacher’s woke decor went beyond the typical liberal bias that’s become commonplace in public schools. Photos sent by a concerned parent to national grassroots group Parents Defending Educationshow one wall covered with hanging LGBTQIA+, Palestine, Transgender, and […]
Peter Wood: Have you ever wondered what American schools teach about 9/11? Here is a partial answer. I’ve reviewed five of the most popular American history textbooks for high school. They are: American History, 2018 edition, HMH Social Studies (no author listed, but Colon is the first name on the “Educational Advisory Panel) United States History and Geography, […]
Joel Hruska The rise of the internet permits the use of new types of nonfinancial customer data, such as browsing histories and online shopping behavior of individuals, or customer ratings for online vendors. The literature suggests that such non-financial data are valuable for financial decision making. Berg et al. (2019) show that easy-to-collect information such […]
Rina Chandran: Concerns that digital IDs and databases can be used to target people Aid groups, government agencies responsible for securing systems Rights groups advising activists on how to delete digital trails Thousands of Afghans struggling to ensure the physical safety of their families after the Taliban took control of the country have an additional […]
Shruti Rajagopalan: Bicycles saw increasing demand as urban populations increased. Steel was government controlled and, given the heavy demand from the construction industry, only limited allotments were made to bicycle manufacturers. To increase their allotment of steel and meet the increasing demand for bicycles, they needed an expansion permit, which was rarely approved by the […]
James Varney: “It’s one thing to name a school of politics after Bill Clinton,” Mr. Steinbuch said about the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service. “It’s another thing to name one at a law school after a guy who had so much trouble with his law license.”
Andrew Sullivan: We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences. Take […]
Joanne Jacobs: Alabama, California, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia have “exemplary” civics and U.S. history standards, concludes a new Fordham report, which looks at quality, completeness, rigor and clarity. Another 10 states were “good” in both subjects, 15 were “mediocre” in at least one subject and 20 states were “inadequate” in both. It’s […]
Reddit: The humanities PhD is still a vocational degree to prepare students for a career teaching in academia, and there are no jobs. Do not get a PhD in history. Look, I get it. Of all the people on AskHistorians, I get it. You don’t “love history;” you love history with everything in your soul […]
The Economist: Academic historians tend to be sniffy about all this. But though their own work may be unsullied by ingratiating ornament, it is also, often, untouched by readers. In one exemplary if extreme comparison, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s exhaustive biography of Thomas Cromwell sold a respectable 32,000 copies in Britain. Ms Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy, which […]
iCivics: As we approach the end of the 2020-2021 school year, we owe our nation’s civics and history teachers our deepest gratitude. This has undoubtedly been one of the most challenging school years in recent memory for all teachers, but amid cascading social and political crises, it has been particularly challenging for those who teach […]
RFA: The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has set up a hotline for people to report each other to the authorities for failing to toe the party’s freshly revised line on matters of history. The Cyberspace Administration said in a post to its official Weibo account on April 9 that people should use the number […]
Joe Hasell and Max Roser: The poverty researcher Martin Ravallion spent decades researching how poverty can be measured and which policies can help us in our fight against poverty. The summary of his work is his monumental book ‘The Economics of Poverty: History, Measurement, and Policy’. The first chapters of this book present a detailed […]
Michael Eric Dyson: The struggles of the Black American narrative — the arc from slavery to Barack Obama — are celebrated, contested and even sometimes disparaged. But there’s no denying that this narrative is well-known. We all grasp the importance of Black history to the American story, even if we argue over the proper emphasis. […]
Parag Khanna: Did we realize in the 1990s that it would be us who turned to shit? Here’s what neither political scientists nor geopolitical scholars sufficiently gamed out as it was happening: The wicked brew of trade globalization and outsourced manufacturing, industrial policy fueled technological innovation, and rent-seeking financial capitalism–and how those forces not only […]
Joanne Jacobs: In a process marked by “ignorance and incompetence,” San Francisco’s school board voted to rename 44 schools, ratifying historical errors and angering parents of “Remote School 1, Remote School 2 and so on,” writes Joe Eskenazi in Mission Local. The board, which is in no rush to reopen schools, spent five seconds confirming […]
Tom Roston: It’s hard to imagine the internet without Wikipedia. Just like the air we breathe, the definitive digital encyclopedia is the default resource for everything and everyone — from Google’s search bar to undergrad students embarking on research papers. It has more than 6 million entries in English, it is visited hundreds of millions […]
Margaret MacMillan: So why do history faculties, which accept the need to study other great forces in history, such as changes in the means of production or systems of belief, shy from war? I suspect that horror at the phenomenon itself has affected universities’ willingness to treat it as a subject for scholarship. Years ago, […]
Jennifer S. Light: Travelers should be sure to visit the curious community in Freeville, New York, where boys and girls were in charge, wrote Baedeker’s turn-of-the-20th-century guide to the United States. This “miniature republic modelled on the government of the United States” was well worth a detour to observe the “legislature, court-house, jail, school, church […]
Brian McGleenon: We will use your email address only for sending you newsletters. Please see our Privacy Notice for details of your data protection rights. The admiral was not an admirer of abolitionist William Wilberforce. Before his death, Lord Nelson wrote that William Wilberforce and his cause were “damnable”. He added in a letter that […]
Timothy Rybeck: Three infamous conflagrations illuminate the pages of Richard Ovenden’s fascinating new history, Burning the Books. The first is the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, which, according to Ovenden, did not go up in a single blaze but was gradually destroyed by repeated acts of arson and plunder, until there was nothing […]
Florence Hazrat: unctuation is dead – or is it? If you’ve ever texted ‘im here’ or ‘its in the car’, you’re in good company. Most of us have, at some point since the dawn of texting, transgressed the boundaries of good grammar, and swallowed one apostrophe or another in the name of speed or convenience. […]
Rick Hess: Well-meaning, white teachers” should “talk about systemic racism,” not stories of individual achievement, advises Robert Harvey, superintendent of New York City’s East Harlem Scholars Academies charters, in an Education Week commentary. “When we neglect to talk about how systemic racism is embedded within American structures — education, justice, employment, housing, and health care […]
Adrian Humphreys: Emergency isolation orders, border closures, social distancing and mandated lockdowns are inconvenient and costly, but, it is hoped, it will at least test theories like never before of why crime really happens and how it can be predicted and reduced. The COVID-19 pandemic is “the largest criminological experiment in history,” according to influential […]
NBC5 Chicago: Leaders in education, politics and other areas gathered in suburban Evanston Sunday to ask that the Illinois State Board of Education change the history curriculum at schools statewide, and temporarily halt instruction until an alternative is decided upon. At a news conference, State Rep. LaShawn K. Ford said current history teachings lead to […]
Walter Stern, via a kind reader: It is an example of repackaging history as myth, and myths such as these hold nations together by constructing a supposedly shared and honorable past. But through their inaccuracy these myths also project an understanding of who does — and does not — belong. They spin a national history […]
Intercepted: Donald Trump is threatening to escalate the violent crackdown on national protests against police killings of African Americans. This week on Intercepted: With the threat of a widespread military deployment in U.S. cities looming, the president is acting as an authoritarian dictator. Keisha Blain, author of “Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and […]
Public Counsel: A historic agreement was reached today between the plaintiffs and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the Gary B. v. Whitmer literacy suit. The agreement will preserve a groundbreaking opinion by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals which held that a basic minimum education, including literacy, is a Constitutional right, and includes an immediate […]
HKSAR Education Bureau: Regarding a question of History Paper 1 of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) Examination which has aroused grave public concerns today (May 14), a spokesman for the Education Bureau (EDB) gives the following response: “The EDB noted that one-sided information has been attached to the question of History Paper […]
Will Fitzhugh, via a kind email: Marcia Reecer, American Educator, [AFT] Winter 1993/1994, pp. 19-23 “Wanted: Essays for a history quarterly devoted to the work of students.” Will Fitzhugh has been putting out calls like this since 1987 when he embarked on the first issue. One of the few magazines that prints only the work […]
Zadie Smith: Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is having the air squeezed out of her by a larger, bare-breasted black woman, who wears a kerchief around her head. To an American audience, I […]
Will Fitzhugh: This Summer, for the seventh year, The Concord Review History Camp will offer a chance for secondary students who qualify, including rising ninth graders, to spend two weeks working with our instructor/coaches on serious history research papers on topics of their own choosing. These papers, when completed, may be submitted for consideration by […]
Alexis Madrigal:: History, as a discipline, comes out of the archive. The archive is not the library, but something else entirely. Libraries spread knowledge that’s been compressed into books and other media. Archives are where collections of papers are stored, usually within a library’s inner sanctum: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s papers, say, at the New York Public […]
Margaret Hedeman and Matt Kristofferson: Yale will stop teaching a storied introductory survey course in art history, citing the impossibility of adequately covering the entire field — and its varied cultural backgrounds — in one course. Decades old and once taught by famous Yale professors like Vincent Scully, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the […]
Politico: We aren’t just approaching the end of a very newsy year; we’re approaching the end of a very eventful decade. To mark the occasion, Politico Magazine asked a group of historians to put all that happened over the past 10 years in its proper historical context—and literally write the paragraph that they think will […]
Hannah Adley: Twelve New Jersey schools will begin piloting a new LGBTQ-focused curriculum this month, the first wave of a requirement that will soon be mandated across the state. The pilot sites to be announced by the state Tuesday – including schools in Hackensack, Morristown, Newark and Asbury Park – are intended to be proving grounds […]
Matt Ridley: Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I […]
Matt Ridley: Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I […]
Jarrett Stenman: As young Americans are losing an understanding of civics and American history, they increasingly embrace socialism. An annual poll conducted for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation again found that the younger generations have a far sunnier view of socialism and communism than their elders. Some of the findings from the YouGov survey, released Oct. 28, […]
Laura Spinney: Turchin set out to determine whether history, like physics, follows certain laws. In 2003, he published a book called Historical Dynamics, in which he discerned secular cycles in France and Russia from their origins to the end of the 18th century. That same year, he founded a new field of academic study, called […]
Matthew Gardner Kelly: Background/Context: Dealing mostly in aggregate statistics that mask important regional variations, scholars often assume that district property taxation and the resource disparities this approach to school funding creates are deeply rooted in the history of American education. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article explores the history of district property taxation and school […]
Stephen Kinzer: In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them “double, triple and quadruple” doses of LSD for 77 days straight. No one knows what became of the victims. They may have died without knowing they were part of the CIA’s highly secretive program to develop ways to control […]
Robert Harington: What led to your writing this article about the history of peer review? I think my peer review project started when I discovered something really unexpected about Nature: that it hadn’t employed systematic external refereeing until 1973! When I first learned that, I assumed Nature was unusual, but as it turned out, a […]
John Murawski: The ethnic studies movement has been underway for years and is now poised to enter the mainstream, raising tough questions for educators and policymakers about how to present such material to teenagers. Teachers around the country are already offering ethnic studies classes, units or lessons on their own initiative, citing a growing urgency […]
Olivia Waxman: On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Lauren Hetrick was a 16-year-old sophomore at Hershey High School in Hershey, Pa. Her French class was just about to start when a strange announcement came over the P.A. system: “Attention, teachers: The computer tech is in the building.” The teacher, hearing those words, logged onto […]
Greg Jackson: On the college campus where I have been living, the students dress in a style I do not understand. Continuous with what we wore fifteen years ago and subtly different, it is both hipster and not. American Apparel has filed for bankruptcy, but in cities and towns across the US the styles forged […]
Koby Levin: As Whitmer and the board continue negotiating, observers say the outcome could reshape how Michigan approaches struggling school districts far beyond Benton Harbor that are struggling with rising debts, low test scores, and declining enrollment. “People in Flint are looking at this,” said Eric Scorsone, a former deputy state treasurer and the director […]
Time: The month of July is a time for Americans to look back at the country’s past—specifically to that indelible moment in 1776 when the Second Continental Congress declared independence from Britain. But, while the nearly 250 years since then have been chock full of major milestones, not every moment that shaped the country gets […]
Philip Marsden: The imagination is the subject of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s latest grand sweep of a book. Not a historian to dwell on individual kings, queens or battles, he has identified the creation of ideas as the driver of history, the imagination as their source and the pool of evidence the past 800,000 years. Even this, […]
Diane Ravitch, via Will Fitzhugh: Since 1987, The Concord Review (TCR) has sought and published more than 1,300 history research papers by high school students from 41 countries in 121 quarterly issues. TCR.org. Over the course of these many years, Will Fitzhugh, the founder of TCR, has been turned down by every foundation while seeking […]
Cate Cadell: Beijing on Thursday ordered a suspension of history exams run by a U.S. non-profit for students seeking credit at American colleges, as the ruling Communist Party cracks down on educational material it deems unfriendly. The suspension of Advanced Placement (AP) tests will hit secondary school students looking to ease the academic workload at […]
Morgan Housel: The most important lessons from history are the takeaways that are so broad they can apply to other fields, other eras, and other people. That’s where lessons have leverage and are most likely to apply to your own life. But those things take some digging to find, often sitting layers below the main […]
Ariel Albert-Riger: CityLab’s visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger shares the story of how America’s public libraries came to be, and their uneven history of serving all who need them.
Louisa Lim and Ilaria Maria Sala: Remembering the deaths of 4 June 1989 is no neutral task. It is a civic duty, a burden and an act of resistance in countering a state-level lie that risks spreading far beyond China’s borders. On that day the Communist party sent tanks to clear protesters from Tiananmen Square […]
Mike Margeson and Justin Spears: The problem is the monopoly that schooling has gained over education. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, approximately 97 percent of kids go through traditional schooling (as opposed to homeschooling or unschooling), and just over 90 percent of those attend government schools. That is to say, there is […]
Negassi Tesfamichael: Students at Wright Middle School were formally recognized by the Madison School Board on Monday for their success at the 25th annual African American History Academic Challenge. The contest, which is sponsored by the group 100 Black Men of Madison, saw teams of students from across the district compete to see who knew […]
John Pilger: Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and […]
Michael Hiltzik: In 2014, the U.S. Labor Department formally inducted the Chinese workers who helped build the transcontinental railroad into its Hall of Honor, giving them a place in American labor history alongside union leaders such as Eugene V. Debs and A. Philip Randolph and champions of worker dignity such as Mother Jones and Cesar […]
Tony Cheung: Hongkongers should be patriotic, learn more Chinese history and help in the overall development of the nation. Those were the words of the Beijing’s new liaison official as she made her first public appearance in the city on Tuesday. Lu Xinning, the new deputy director of the central government’s liaison office, also promised […]
Victoria Davis: UW-Madison is a “liberal bubble,” according to long-time history professor John Sharpless. “Openly disagreeing with people here is like pooping in the pool,” says Sharpless. “They turn around and give you this dagger look. I had Republican students in my classes who said they white-knuckled their way through discussions in other classes. They […]
Emma Pettit: If the decline of the humanities already keeps you up at night, a new article, published by the American Historical Association, won’t help much. Since the Great Recession of 2008, writes Benjamin M. Schmidt in Perspectives on History, undergraduate majors have been shifting away from the humanities. And of all the disciplines, history […]
Babylon bee: “Wow, a socialist who was elected on her promises to work ‘for the people’ is suddenly telling everyone she’s in charge and they have to listen to her? That’s really weird,” said one man in Portland who dropped his world history class in high school. “I would have thought socialists never suddenly transform […]
Roger Kimball: The news that the University of Notre Dame, responding to complaints by some students, would ‘shroud’ its 12 134-year-old murals depicting Christopher Columbus was disappointing. It was not surprising, however, to anyone who has been paying attention to the widespread attack on America’s past wherever social justice warriors congregate. Notre Dame may not […]
Ryan Mac: Facebook spent most of 2018 embroiled in one scandal or another. But there was a point early on in the year when Mark Zuckerberg thought he could turn down the heat by offering a fix for the public’s privacy concerns. It was just weeks after the news broke that political consultancy Cambridge Analytica […]
Ian Johnson: “Tiger Temple” (Laohu Miao) is the nom de guerre of Zhang Shihe, one of China’s best-known citizen journalists and makers of short video documentaries, many of them profiling ordinary people he met during extraordinarily long bike rides through China, or human rights activists who have been silenced but whose ideas on freedom and […]
Fairbank Center Blog: To commemorate Black History Month in the United States, the Fairbank Center presents a reading and teaching introduction to the history of Black and African Americans’ interactions with the People’s Republic of China. This guide includes blog posts, journal articles, books and book chapters, audio-visual resources, digital archives, and other materials that […]
Mitch Smith: The locations of college campuses can be a reflection of a bygone America. Most universities were founded generations ago, when rural communities were thriving and when traveling across a state to a larger urban campus was more complicated. As people moved toward cities and the Sun Belt, and as cars and planes connected […]
Michael Walsh + Twitter Thread: Cindy Simpson: China has progressed so far in its censoring of history that it now has to teach real history to its censors…so they know what to censor.
Tristan Shaw: The conquistadors were Spanish and Portuguese soldiers who explored much of the world during the Age of Discovery. They are best remembered for their conquests and exploration of the Americas. Conquistadors like Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro became legendary for their conquests of the Aztec and Inca Empires, honored as national heroes for […]
James Liebold: China has built a vast network of extrajudicial internment camps in the western region of Xinjiang, where Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are made to renounce their culture and religion, and are forcibly subjected to political indoctrination. After long denying the camps’ existence, the government now calls them benign training centers that teach […]
Colleen Flaherty: History has seen the steepest decline in majors of all disciplines since the 2008 recession, according to a new analysis published in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History. “The drop in history’s share of undergraduate majors in the last decade has put us below the discipline’s previous low point in the 1980s,” […]
Samuel Moyn: At the chilling climax of William S. Lind’s 2014 novel “Victoria,” knights wearing crusader’s crosses and singing Christian hymns brutally slay the politically correct faculty at Dartmouth College, the main character’s (and Mr. Lind’s) alma mater. “The work of slaughter went quickly,” the narrator says. “In less than five minutes of screams, shrieks […]
Alex Carp: What was America? The question is nearly as old as the republic itself. In 1789, the year George Washington began his first term, the South Carolina doctor and statesman David Ramsay set out to understand the new nation by looking to its short past. America’s histories at the time were local, stories of […]
James C. Bennett: The interesting thing to me was the complete absence of anything representing the United States. This was not a coincidence. Columbus, and the holiday celebrating his landing in the New World, are seen throughout the Spanish-speaking world as having to do primarily with the extension of Spanish-speaking, Catholic civilization to the New […]
Diane Ravitch via Will Fitzhugh: This is an exciting time for history education. States across the nation are strengthening their history curricula and expecting youngsters to learn more American and world history. Even the vitriolic controversy over the national history standards serves to remind us that people care passionately about history. Not only is there […]
Jared Diamond: these stories of isolated societies illustrate two general principles about relations between human group size and innovation or creativity. First, in any society except a totally isolated society, most innovations come in from the outside, rather than being conceived within that society. And secondly, any society undergoes local fads. By fads I mean […]
Timothy Crimmins: Explaining the dramatic rise of incarceration in the United States has been surprisingly difficult. Theories abound, but they are continually defeated by the vastness and complexity of the American criminal justice system. For a time, the prime suspect was the War on Drugs, which President Obama described as “the real reason our prison […]
Yuka Hayashi: Parents have a new item to add to their financial to-do list: check their child’s credit history. A new federal law going into effect in September will make it easier for families to combat the growing problem of identity fraud of minors, allowing them to make inquiries about credit files in their child’s […]
Louis Menand: In February, 1989, Francis Fukuyama gave a talk on international relations at the University of Chicago. Fukuyama was thirty-six years old, and on his way from a job at the RAND Corporation, in Santa Monica, where he had worked as an expert on Soviet foreign policy, to a post as the deputy director […]
Cyrus Farivar: As a result of the previously unknown practice, which was first exposed by the Associated Press last week, Google has now been sued by a man in San Diego. Simultaneously, activists in Washington, DC are urging the Federal Trade Commission to examine whether the company is in breach of its 2011 consent decree […]
Mollie Heningway: Following countdown clocks on cable outlets and dramatic claims in the media about what devastating testimony to expect, James Comey sat down before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week. The hearing ended up being a bit of a let-down for critics of President Trump who hoped to get him impeached (or removed via […]