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Search Results for: "History"

Mapping time: The surprising overlaps of history’s most influential minds

Frank Jacobs: It’s wise to reserve judgment on important figures until they’re dead. Only when they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil do their legacies begin to slot into neat categories, assuming their full cultural significance. Yet, those neat categories often obscure as much as they reveal. We look back on famous past lives through the […]

Civics & Free Speech: “The problem is America has the most useless aristocrats in history”

Matt Taibbi: “Most eveyone here has been censored.” Even the French dandies who were marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Hadens, John Brennan’s, James Clapper’s, Mike McFall’s, and Rick Stengel’s who make up America’s self-appointed speech police. In pre-revolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, […]

A Brief History of Accelerationism

Matt Southey: For those who are not terminally online, Nick Land might be the most influential philosopher that they have never heard of. Widely credited as the father of accelerationism, Land’s influence is felt most powerfully across two spheres: the realm of academic continental philosophy, and the tech world. In the 90s, while an academic […]

Today’s Students Are Dangerously Ignorant of Our Nation’s History

By Michael B. Poliakoff & Bradley Jackson When Benjamin Franklin famously said, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” he was, as usual, prescient. This summer, the democratic republic known as the United States of America is 248 years old, and civically minded organizations around the country are already busily working on plans to celebrate our nation’s […]

The History Crisis Is a National Security Problem

Bret Devereaux: The United States is rapidly shedding historians—and the national security implications are dire. Even as it grapples with challenges and conflictsrooted in complicated regional histories, the United States continues a decade-and-a-half-long path of defunding history departments and deprioritizing history education. This threatens to produce a generation of policymakers and advisors whose view of the world is […]

Delong Middle School student makes history winning the first Wisconsin Civics Bee: “focused on the flaws of the education system”

Jeremy Wall  When Rya Mousavi saw a poster for Wisconsin’s first civics bee, she had an idea. “My teacher just had a poster on the board and I talked to her about it. She kind of introduced me to the civics bee and I thought it was a good opportunity,” said Mousavi An opportunity to […]

Speaking of growing debt: “Throughout history, nations that blithely piled up their obligations have eventually met unhappy ends”

Gerald Seib: America is cruising into an uncharted sea of federal debt, with a public seemingly untroubled by the stark numbers and a government seemingly incapable of turning them around. In the presidential race, there’s not much partisan difference or advantage on this subject. Donald Trump and President Biden have overseen similar additions to the nation’s accumulated […]

The case of the angry history postdoc

Noah Smith: But that is not what got Twitter — or X, as it’s now officially known — in a tizzy today. Instead, it was Walsh’s declaration that his failure to get a tenure-track academic job is due, at least in part, to the fact that he is a White man: When a (nonwhite, female) […]

The Free State of the Congo, a hidden history of genocide

Ramon Marull: The Berlin Conference (1884 – 1885) recognised the sovereignty of King Leopold II of Belgium over the Free State of the Congo. The king governed the territory until 1908, when it passed into the hands of the Belgian state. Leopold II ruled the Congo as his personal dominion from 1885 to 1908. During this […]

Caitlin Clark Leaves a Lasting Legacy in NCAA History

by Jacob Dunn age, 14 Caitlin Clark is the face of the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team. She is known for breaking NCAA records in 2022 as a junior and 2023 as a senior. She has come a long way since she was a kid reaching for and achieving her basketball dreams. From the young […]

Civics: “President Biden is the first president history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech”

CNN & RFK, Jr. CNN: “When people talk about the threat to democracy that Trump poses, do you really think that is equal to Biden?” RFK JR: “Biden is much worse threat to democracy.. President Biden is the first president history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech”

Complaint Alleges University of Wisconsin DEI Czar, Husband of Harvard’s DEI Chief, Has Decades-Long History of Research Misconduct

Aaron Sibarium: The complaint, which was filed anonymously, implicates eight of Charleston’s publications, many of them coauthored, and accuses him of plagiarizing other scholars as well as duplicating his own work. It comes as the university is already investigating Charleston over a separate complaint filed in January, alleging that a 2014 study by him and his wife—Harvard University’s […]

Black History Month Is More Complicated Than It Seems

Lance Morrow: How does a person who isn’t black think about Black History Month? With respect? With reverence? With guilt? Curiosity? Indifference? It depends partly on that person’s own history—on when and how his family arrived in America. Those whose predecessors were present during the wickedness of slavery, and all that followed, will have a […]

Civics: Nevada identifies voter history errors on website, fixes underway

Jessica Hill: After numerous Nevada voters saw irregularities in their voter history on Sunday, the secretary of state’s office said it has identified the issues and is fixing them, according to a statement Monday evening. The office learned Sunday there were possible technical issues relating to Nevadans’ voting history for people who did not participate […]

The Forgotten History of the Chapter

Nicholas Dames It is hard to see chapters, such is their banal inevitability. The chapter possesses the trick of vanishing while in the act of serving its various purposes. In 1919, writing in the Nouvelle revue française, Marcel Proust famously insisted that the most beautiful moment in Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education was not a phrase but a blanc, or white space: a terrific, yawning […]

Civics: A Brief History of the U.S. Trying to Add Backdoors Into Encrypted Data

Jessie Guy-Ryan: In fact, the government has actually won this fight before—secretly.  Throughout 2015, U.S. politicians and law enforcement officials such as FBI director James Comey have publicly lobbied for the insertion of cryptographic “backdoors” into software and hardware to allow law enforcement agencies to bypass authentication and access a suspect’s data surreptitiously. Cybersecurity experts […]

Madison school district Superintendent finalists’ history: One resigned, one fired

Kayla Huynh: The Madison Metropolitan School District has named two former education administrators and one current administrator as finalists to be the next superintendent. Two of the finalists left their former jobs after facing criticism for their performance. The finalists are Mohammed Choudhury, the former state superintendent of schools at the Maryland Department of Education; […]

Notes on the 1619 History Curriculum

The 1619 Project K-12 curriculum makes some interesting word usage to obscure the fact that Mansa Musa, the 14th century king of Mali, was a mass-enslaver. Imagine Nikole Hannah-Jones's outrage if a history textbook only described Thomas Jefferson's slaves as "servants." pic.twitter.com/KxpudOSZp7 — Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) January 21, 2024

Linguistic relativity holds that your worldview is structured by the language you speak. Is it true? History shines a light

James McElvenny: Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas […]

The story of academic history in the 21st century is the story of ceaseless politicization.

David Randall: The statement also specifies that “Historians hold this view not because they believe that all interpretations are equally valid, or that nothing can ever be known about the past, or that facts do not matter. Quite the contrary. History would be pointless if such claims were true.” An old debate is where to […]

Notes on History Curriculum

So strange. We finally got this nonsense out of Virginia’s history standards *in 2023* and yet all these people were struck mute about it….in fact, the Northam draft that was waved around like a bloody shirt was muddled on this point. https://t.co/jah3rX9Yuz — Andrew Rotherham (@arotherham) January 3, 2024 Ralph Notham notes and links.

Civics: 2024 Elections and History

🇺🇸 https://t.co/JKUE7x9AYA — Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 2, 2024

What I Learned Using Private LLMs to Write an Undergraduate History Essay

zwischenzugs.com I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules: The experience turned out to be radically different with AI assistance in some ways, […]

History of Science Q&A

History of Science and Technology Q&A (December 27, 2023) https://t.co/btijrSM8WB — Stephen Wolfram (@stephen_wolfram) December 27, 2023

Commentary on current history climate

Some personal opinions from my conversation with @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/19R1rC8Yxl — Sandy Munro (@teardowntitan) December 18, 2023

Preserving US History

1/ Some were surprised yesterday that an African American Judge, Rossie Alston Jr. was the person to temporarily save the Confederate Memorial, dedicated to reconciliation between North and South, in Arlington National Cemetery. But they shouldn't be. A 🧵: pic.twitter.com/1DYf4nb8mt — Jeremy Carl (@jeremycarl4) December 19, 2023

History (revisionist…?), Governance and Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results

David Blaska: Here in Madison, the proponents of one-size-fits-all government monopoly schooling are rewriting history to cover their misdeeds. The occasion was the recent passing of barely remembered Daniel Nerad, superintendent of Madison public schools between 2008 and 2012.   Capital Times publisher Paul Fanlund marvels that the same problems that beset Nerad a dozen years ago plague the […]

How do historical conditions influence our health? How does health change history?

After the Plague: The After the Plague project investigates these questions by exploring health in later medieval England. It is centred on studying about 1000 medieval skeletons from the cemetery of the Hospital of St. John, Cambridge and from other medieval sites in Cambridge. The people we study date to between 1000 and 1500 CE. […]

History Has an Ideology Problem

Mike Côté: History has always been a contentious field, reflecting the biases of both the historian and society. It is a window into the present as much as into the past. Still, the writer of history must do his best to check and overcome his innate biases. In the words of the 19th-century historian J. A. […]

Civics: History and the Supreme Court

This article cites a claim that that opponents of abortion did not make historical arguments until the '80s. From Justice Rehnquist's 1973 dissent in Roe: "The fact that a majority of the States reflecting, after all the majority sentiment in those States, have had restrictions… — Rick Esenberg (@RickEsenberg) December 3, 2023

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: “the operating budget is the largest in Madison’s history and exceeds the 2023 budget by about $23 million”

Allison Garfield: Surrounded by accusations of fiscal irresponsibility, the Madison City Council overwhelmingly passed budgets Tuesday night while tweaking how the city spends taxpayers’ money on staffing and major projects. The council deliberated for hours into the late evening, ultimately ending with a capital budget totaling $273.1 million — a $6.6 million increase from Mayor […]

Department Of Education Imposes Largest Fine In History On America’s Largest Christian College; Was It Targeted By Biden Administration?

Paul Caron: Wall Street Journal Editorial, Biden Regulators Fine a Christian College: The liberal press frets with some cause that Donald Trump will target his political opponents if he wins the White House in 2024, but why aren’t they bothered by the Biden Administration’s weaponization of government? Consider the Education Department’s record fine last week against […]

Censoring History

Theresa Fallon The fact that a book about an emperor from about 400 years ago is now censored in🇨🇳 speaks volumes about how Chinese Communist Party officials fear the public’s perceptions of Xi Jinping’s policies. “A Chinese reprint of a book about an emperor who ran his realm into the ground before committing suicide nearly […]

Simulating History

Benjamin Breen: In the long term, I suspect that LLMs will have a significant positive impact on higher education. Specifically, I believe they will elevate the importance of the humanities.  If this happens, it will be a shocking twist. We’ve been hearing for over a decade now that the humanities are in crisis. When faced […]

History and the New York Times

James Freeman: Why do so many media folk who constantly warn that our form of government is under attack also constantly promote misleading attacks on our form of government? This week the opinion editors of the New York Times , who seem to care more about particular, arbitrarily selected “democratic norms” than about democracy itself, […]

Biden Rewrites the History of Covid School Closings

Wall Street Journal: President Biden welcomed students at Eliot-Hine Middle School in Washington, D.C., back to class on Monday. He also gave them a lesson in irony as he lamented pandemic learning loss caused by his teachers union allies. “The hardest thing is to come back after three months of not doing any work, not […]

The early history of counting

Keith Houston: In 1973, while excavating a cave in the Lebombo Mountains, near South Africa’s border with Swaziland, Peter Beaumont found a small, broken bone with twenty-​nine notches carved across it. The so-​called Border Cave had been known to archaeologists since 1934, but the discovery during World War II of skeletal remains dating to the […]

Civics: “For the second time in three years, the Bezos’ Washington Post has quietly “updated” one of the most consequential fact checks in the history of American politics”

Paul Sperry: The original article by the Washington Post’s chief fact checker, Glenn Kessler, was published the same day as the New York Post’s pre-election scoop revealing that Joe Biden had attended a 2015 dinner with a top executive of a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, which was paying his son $83,000 per month. Kessler’s fact-check involved […]

Who is Dr. William B. Allen? He’s taking on Kamala Harris over Florida Black history curriculum

Samantha Neely and C. A. Bridges Political advisor William B. Allen, who helped approve Florida’s African American history curriculum, called out Vice President Kamala Harris for her comments on the new course material during a brief interview with ABC News. The Florida Board of Education signed off on a new K-12 curriculum for social studies in the state last […]

Language history and we: the case of “like”

Anatoly Liberman: In 1894, the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen brought out a book titled Progress in Language. Whether anything in language can legitimately be labeled as progress is a moot point, but no one doubts that language indeed has history. The larger the speaking community and the more mobile the population, the faster the change. Problems arise when […]

How Fake History Gets Made

Helen Andrews: Over the weekend, a village in Lancashire celebrated the 80th anniversary of “the Battle of Bamber Bridge.” There was a dramatic reenactment as well as live musical entertainment, a history walk, and an academic symposium in collaboration with the U.S. embassy. In the American press, the anniversary was marked by long feature articles […]

Rewriting History: Sulzberger New York Times Edition

🧵Incredible rewrite of South Korean history by the @nytimes that completely eliminates FIVE critical facts. 1) Korea was a Japanese COLONY. 2) Korea was DIVIDED by the US (unilaterally) in 1945 so US forces could accept Japan’s surrender in the south and the USSR in the north. pic.twitter.com/pJvIKsqQLK — Tim Shorrock (@TimothyS) June 22, 2023 […]

World’s Largest Soil Archive Brings History to Life

Jenna Hoffman: In 2018, a barn on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) main campus was set to be demolished. On demo day, Andrew Margenot, associate professor of soil sciences, walked into the dusty, dilapidated barn to size up the job at hand. That’s when he stumbled upon a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. Nestled within the confines […]

Notes on the history of school choice

The free market roots of #SchoolChoice are often overlooked in today’s political debates. It’s important to remember that the goal of school choice isn’t the elimination of public schools, but rather the lifting of all ships by providing competition to the public school monopoly. https://t.co/t49It5boHq — Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 1, 2023

Civics: Federal Judge Makes History in Holding That Border Searches of Cell Phones Require a Warrant

Sophia Cope: In analyzing the government’s interests in gaining warrantless access to cell phone data at the border, the Smith court considered the traditional justifications for the border search exception: in the words of the judge, “preventing unwanted persons or items from entering the country.” In particular, the government has a strong interest in conducting warrantless searches of […]

The California Reparations Commission Fails State History

Will Swaim California’s reparations commission has determined that slavery, as opposed to disastrous policies advanced by the political establishment for decades, is the real reason for present-day black poverty in the state. In just a few weeks, the legislature that created the task force will take up the commission’s proposal, which calls for payments to […]

Sarah DiGregorio on the Little-Known, Radical History of Nursing and the Danger of Biases in Medicine Today

Sarah DiGregorio; The idea of Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, as the prototypical nurse—this mythic origin story—has served to further white supremacy in nursing and to strip nursing history of its truer, broader kaleidoscopic power. The real history of nursing is utterly radical in its vastness—and in what it says about the care we […]

Notes on our disastrous civics and history results

Andrew Rotherham: In related news, new NAEP data on history and civics out today, it’s not good news. Some of the data suggest our social divides are getting worse with students furthest from opportunity more impacted.  Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona made the following statement: “The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress further affirms the profound impact […]

Now associated with childhood fun, the swing has a near-universal history of ritual transgression and transformation

Javier Moscoso: What does it mean to tell the story of this instrument? The history of the swing reveals how an object of disorientation became instrumentalised across the long arc of human culture, appearing in different territories and cultures throughout time. But this history is not just the story of an object. It’s also one […]

Declining US student civics and history proficiency

The new data on students’ knowledge of history and civics is abysmal. There’s no other way to describe it. These are the lowest scores ever recorded: ➡️13% are proficient in U.S. history ➡️20% are proficient in civics pic.twitter.com/WzweyhVXsS — Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) May 3, 2023 Rick Hess: The “Nation’s Report Card” is out with new results on […]

Revisionist history on Covid Policies

Vinay Prasad: Fauci’s next claim is that he always wanted school reopened. This is contradicted by a detailed timeline of his position on schools, which was consistently to fearmonger about kids and keep them closed. In the summer of 2020, Fauci was still opposed to schools. In spring 2020, when DeSantis reopened Fauci went on […]

The role of bacteria and viruses in world history

The Economist: According to Jonathan Kennedy, the author of “Pathogenesis”, there is a better explanation for why H. sapiens prevailed: their immune systems were superior. As their populations boomed, genetic diversity increased and, since they lived in Africa, much closer to the equator than other humans, H. sapiens would have been exposed to a greater […]

Who owns history? How remarkable historical footage is hidden and monetised

Aeon: High-quality video is an invaluable way of transporting viewers to the past and helping to put the world in context. From the late 19th century to today, cameras have been there to capture some of history’s most important moments, from pivotal battles, to civil rights marches, and even moonwalks. However, as A History of […]

The Joy of Computer History Books

Fabien Sanglard: When I was a child, growing up in the 80s, I read pretty much anything I could find about computers. There was not a lot translated to French. I even read the MS-DOS Version 5 Reference Guide. The cover was dry and the content was not very tasty either. To be fair, history […]

Want to cure American amnesia? Teach history backward

Mark Judge: There is a simple step America’s educators can take to improve civic awareness dramatically. Teach history backward. That’s how I learned it. One of the best teachers I ever had was a man who taught me high school history. On the first day of class, he announced that we would be learning U.S. history starting […]

History Curriculum: Communist era and the Virginia Teacher Union

College Fix Democrats in the Virginia state legislature put on hold a bill that would require schools teach about communism and its victims. Although House Bill 1816, the “Standards of Learning; instruction on dangers and victims of communism,” passed the House of Delegates with some Democrat support, it ultimately met its demise in the Democrat-controlled Senate […]

Ah, history!

Angela Davis’ ancestors arrived in America on the Mayflower. pic.twitter.com/dnwrG6fB6U — Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) February 22, 2023

New group wants to help teachers across Kentucky teach Black history

Krista Johnson: Established in December 2022, the association was formed through a partnership between the Muhammad Ali Center, Berea College, Kentucky State University and the Thomas D. Clark Foundation. On Wednesday, Cummings plans to celebrate the start of Black History Month at the Ali Center, meeting with Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman and Jefferson County Public […]

“When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”

Douglas Belkin: On Wednesday, the College Board said its revisions had been completed in December in consultation with more than 300 professors of African-American Studies from 200 colleges. “No states or districts have seen the official framework that is released, much less provided feedback on it,” the College Board said. “This course has been shaped […]

Uses & abuses of military history

Victor Davis Hanson: More practically, military history rests on the hallowed notion that human nature is unchanging over the centuries. The study of wars of the past, then, can offer timeless lessons about why wars in the present and future start, how they proceed and end, and what, if anything, they accomplish. Clausewitz was right […]

ChatGPT and the revenge of history

Tyler Cowen: I have been posing it many questions about Jonathan Swift, Adam Smith, and the Bible.  Chat does very well in all those areas, and rarely hallucinates.  Is it because those are settled, well-established texts, with none of the drama “still in action”? I suspect Chat is a boon for the historian and the […]

Civics: a history of FBI cointelpro

James Bovard: The history of the FBI provides perhaps the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between […]

On the history of science

History of Science and Technology Q&A (December 28, 2022) https://t.co/GRL3u8Kfph — Stephen Wolfram (@stephen_wolfram) December 28, 2022

The History of How School Buses Became Yellow

Bryan Greene: The brainchild of education expert Frank Cyr, the meeting at Columbia University carried the goal of establishing national construction standards for the American school bus. Two years earlier, Cyr had conducted a ten-state study where he found that children were riding to school in trucks and buses of all different colors, and even […]

Civics: Royal family ‘on mission to rewrite history’, claims archives campaign

Valentine Low: In one instance, she said, an entire book about Prince George, Duke of Kent, was cancelled because of lack of access. George, the youngest brother of Edward VIII and George VI, died in an air crash in Scotland in 1942 while serving with the RAF. The author, who wishes to remain anonymous to maintain […]

“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” and the ambiguous history of counting-out rhymes.

Adrienne Raphel: Not only are there hoards of Eeny Meenies, there are just as many counting-out schemes that share the same DNA. “Hinty, minty, cuty, corn, wire, briar, limber lock” (United States). “Eenty, teenty, ithery, bithery” (England). “Ippetty, sipetty, ippetty sap, ipetty, sipetty, kinella kinack” (Scotland). And I’d be remiss in omitting “One potato, two […]

TV News Covered British Royal Visit 5,668% More Than Largest Academic Strike in U.S. History

Adam Johnso: NBC News dedicated 39 minutes to the royal visits, ABC News 20 minutes, CBS news 12 minutes, and CNN 25 minutes. (Note: These figures do not include ABC, NBC, and CBS’s online only streaming platforms. If it did the number would likely be much greater.) Both Harry and William took separate trips to […]

Civics: How the 2002 Iraq AUMF Got to Be So Dangerous, Part 1: History and Practice

Scott R. Anderson For the past two years, Congress has been on the verge of a step that it hasn’t taken in more than half a century: the repeal of an outstanding war authorization. Several decades-old authorizations are nominally on the chopping block. But only one has been the subject of substantial debate: the repeal […]

Civics: The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History

Grassroots Journalist: These are the stories that mattered most, including the Times’s disastrous coverage of the: Second World War – Holocaust – Rise of the Soviet Union – Cuban Revolution – Vietnam War – Second Palestinian Intifada – Atomic Bombing of Japan – Iraq War – Founding of America The result is an essential look […]

Civics: A Google Dragnet on Location History

Fascinating discussion. Hard to see how Americans can complain about Chinese surveillance state, given that J6 “general warrant” appears to have resulted in search of over 500 million Google location histories with NO regard to probable cause. https://t.co/O9BCMDMF6h — Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) November 29, 2022

A History of Palomar Observatory

Astro.caltech.edu Palomar Observatory is among the most iconic scientific facilities in the world, and a crown jewel in the research traditions of Caltech. Conceived of nearly 100 years ago, the observatory has been in continuous scientific operation since the mid-30s, and remains productive and relevant today. Palomar is most directly the vision of George Ellery Hale (1868–1938). In […]

In scrubbed piece about Edward Snowden, the Bezos Post offers a preview of how history will be re-written

Matt Taibbi: This article began as an aggressive rewrite of history and the Post’s own views, but underwent numerous alterations after it attracted criticism online yesterday.

We bring you over 1000 years of Black history in the German-speaking lands and show you why it matters right now

www: There are over 1 million Black people in Central Europe today. Most Europeans still don’t know of the long history of the Black Diaspora in their countries. As a result, there is a general assumption that Black people are a relatively new presence on the continent and thus are historical and national outsiders. Through […]

How history caught up with my Russian academic friends

Orlando Figes: The gulf between these two worlds is historical. It was the fundamental problem of the 19th-century revolutionaries and democratic reformers, as it has been a major reason for the failure of today’s intelligentsia to play a more decisive role of national leadership since the collapse of the Soviet regime. The social background of […]

Myths and History

Revolver News: This wasn’t just a harmless myth. For decades, ordinary people in Cincinnati were tarred as hateful racists in order to further a specific narrative about America. They weren’t the only victims of myths related to Robinson. Enos Slaughter of the St. Louis Cardinals has been villainized for decades for slashing Robinson with his spiked cleats […]

History: A look back at Wisconsin Governor Tony Ever’s 1997 DPI campaign

Heather Smith: During his rough and tumble 1997 campaign Evers directly criticized fellow Democrat Benson saying he had failed to call attention to the problems in our state’s education system, and that continual promotion of the good without sounding the alarm on the bad “wrecks our credibility.”  Evers said students and districts were in trouble […]

Google workers publicize concerns over search activity history (!)

Raquel Maria Dillon: Concerns over the role of technology in such prosecutions have ratcheted up in recent days, especially after it was revealed that Facebook had handed over private messages between a young woman and her mother in Nebraska to local law enforcement agencies that were investigating the death of a fetus. In-q-tel: the CIA […]

What’s Actually Being Taught in History Class

By Kassie Bracken, Mark Boyer, Jacey Fortin, Rebecca Lieberman and Noah Throop: Schools across the country have been caught up in spirited debates over what students should learn about United States history. We talked to social studies teachers about how they run their classrooms, what they teach and why. In the last two years, dozens […]

A Progress Studies History of Early MIT — Part 1: Training the engineers who built the country

Eric Gilliam: Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen opened their 2019 Atlantic piece that helped jump-start the progress studies movement with the following passage: In 1861, the American scientist and educator William Barton Rogers published a manifesto calling for a new kind of research institution. Recognizing the “daily increasing proofs of the happy influence of scientific culture on the […]

Recent History of End Times Forecasts

But this time I promise it’s real, guys pic.twitter.com/38zlo1iaU6 — BowTiedRanger (@BowTiedRanger) July 17, 2022

Introduction: Whose Present? Which History?

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins There can be little doubt that the history profession is experiencing a turn to the pre- sent. The post-2016 “crisis of democracy” has only dramatized it. Long-standing anx- ieties over presentism have crumbled under the weight of recent events.1 They have proven little match for Brexit, Trump, the rise of strongmen in the […]

Civics & History

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 […]

US grappling with Native American boarding school history

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, […]

The Rich Basketball History of Madison La Follette High School

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, […]

Teach ‘1619’ and ‘1776’ U.S. History

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 […]

Alternate History List

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 […]

Notes on the history of taxpayer supported K-12 Schools

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” […]

Civics: The greatest government failure in American history

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 […]

Education must make History Again

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 […]

Notes on the 1619 History Project

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 […]

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: US Dollar “Reserve Currency” history

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.

I have served as a history teacher at Waukegan High School for over ten years.

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 […]

Two Simple Reasons to Study the History of Ideas

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 […]

Teaching ‘honest history’ from Douglass to King

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 […]

Beyond Conspiracy Theory – The Sick History of Public Education

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 […]

Commentary on global slave history teaching

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 […]

Untold History of AI: Algorithmic Bias Was Born in the 1980s
A medical school thought a computer program would make the admissions process fairer—but it did just the opposite

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 […]

History Curriculum

🚨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

History of Mathematics

Website: A virtual interactive exhibit being developed for the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City

A Brief History of Markov Chains

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 […]