Dispatches from Vilnius

History is a funny thing. As I noted earlier, the new Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum for American history has come under fire from the right wing for purportedly not focusing on the basics, i.e. the "Founding Fathers," or more specifically the religious conservative interpretation of these seminal political figures.

Ben Carson is the latest conservative presidential wannabe to rail against the new curriculum, claiming it will cause high school students "to go sign up for ISIS." Sadly, I've come to expect such hyperbole from the religious right wing, which seems to think the country is on the eve of a zombie apocalypse and the only way to right the country is to ground ourselves in the basics of the Bible, which they seem to think the Founding Fathers based the Constitution upon.

Now one can understand such hacks as Sean Hannity attacking the curriculum on such grounds, but Ben Carson is a well respected neurosurgeon, so you would think he has a little better educational grounding than the average Fox News pundit. However, Dr. Ben also appears to have missed the point of the new curriculum, which is to open up new topics for teachers to explore in class, as it was assumed by the AP committee that high school teachers would be covering the basics in American history.

The AP curriculum has become a touchstone issue in this election, as conservatives see the topic as a way to mobilize the base of the GOP in what is proving to be a rather tough set of midterms with the US Senate up for grabs. One recently reconstituted Colorado school district even went so far as to "review" the curriculum amid the outcry, resulting in a protest by teachers and students alike, indicating that this strategy may backfire and mobilize the Left.

At heart is that the curriculum comes across as a historical "downer" with emphasis on antebellum slavery and Japanese internment camps during WWII and other American horror stories that conservatives want so desperately to put behind them, as if it was all part of some distant past (we won't call it history) no longer worth exploring. After all, we went through the Civil Rights Movement. Enough already! What we need is positive history, one that extols American values and shines a light on all the good America has done in the past 200 some odd years. History as Walt Disney would tell it, with Morgan Freeman as narrator.

As Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters would sing, we "got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, but don't mess with Mr. In-Between!"

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

TripplerOctober 2, 2014 at 5:37 AM
Benny Carson ain't the brightest bulb in the chandelier - he's the clown that said Obamacare is the worst thing in the USA since slavery. Not a smart thing to say at all.
James FergusonOctober 2, 2014 at 7:12 AM
It surprises me too the incredibly stupid comments he makes. You would think given his work he would offer some intelligent commentary, which is sorely lacking among the conservatives, yet he spouts the same nonsense as the rest of them.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Dylan in America

Team of Rivals Reading Group