bearing blog

Serial numbers.

This is a moving piece about young people, the descendants of Holocaust survivors, having themselves tattooed with their grandparents' concentration camp numbers.

When Eli Sagir showed her grandfather, Yosef Diamant, the new tattoo on her left forearm, he bent his head to kiss it.

Mr. Diamant had the same tattoo, the number 157622, permanently inked on his own arm by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Nearly 70 years later, Ms. Sagir got hers at a hip tattoo parlor downtown after a high school trip to Poland. The next week, her mother and brother also had the six digits inscribed onto their forearms. This month, her uncle followed suit.

“All my generation knows nothing about the Holocaust,” said Ms. Sagir, 21, who has had the tattoo for four years. “You talk with people and they think it’s like the Exodus from Egypt, ancient history. I decided to do it to remind my generation: I want to tell them my grandfather’s story and the Holocaust story.”

This may sound like a strange association, but the first thing I thought on reading this was: it's like they're retweeting the tattoos, into the future.

 

Entertaining Wikipedia article (unless you're afraid to fly).

Often, when our family takes a road trip, I bring along something to read aloud to Mark -- usually a nonfiction book. I like books that spur conversation between us, particularly pop-science books that we can argue about and analyze. This is fun even when the book is really bad. On the way down from Minneapolis to Ohio last week, we read The Psychopath Test, which turned out to be perfect road-trip reading -- entertaining, not entirely convincing (meaning that we had a chance to argue about it) and also, in general, food for thought.

I didn't have a book for the way back up, so I made do by following trails of links in Wikipedia to articles about things we didn't know. We started from an article about the Mars robot that landed earlier, and from there to previous Mars lander missions, including the one that famously failed because somebody forgot to convert newtons to pounds-force -- a mistake roundly mocked by everyone EXCEPT former engineering students because deep down, we all know THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO I. If my life had been only a little bit different, I too might have broken NASA.

Anyway, from there we went to a list of disasters caused by metrication errors, and that led us to what must be (since I love engineering failure stories) the most entertaining Wikipedia article I have ever read in my life: the story of the "Gimli Glider."

It is only entertaining if you know how the story ends, so let me give you the spoiler first. EVERYBODY SURVIVED, NO MAJOR INJURIES. There you go. Now the teaser: this is the story of an airliner that ran out of gas at 41,000 feet because Canadians had just started converting to the metric system. Now you can read and enjoy.

I read this aloud to Mark, and we agreed that it could never have been made into a true-life disaster movie because no one would believe the chain of events. The aircraft was nearly uncontrollable -- but by a remarkable coincidence, the captain was an experienced glider pilot. The first officer proposed landing at the nearest runway, which happened to be at a nearby closed air force base -- which he knew well because he had once served there as a Canadian air force pilot. But he didn't know that the air force base had been converted to a race track complex. Or that there was a race going on (think NASCAR, but Canadian) and the runway area was full of cars and campers. Also that there were cars racing on the runway.

Anyway, if you thought the "Sully in the river" story was gripping, I think you should try this one.

"Hacking for Solidarity."

Interesting history post at the Engineering Ethics Blog:

During the 1980s, the Communist government of Poland imposed martial law and rigidly suppressed and controlled speech. All media outlets, including radio and TV, were under government supervision. As the Solidarity movement grew, however, a group of radio and television engineers joined with other technical types (mainly university professors) to do (what we would term today) hacking of the official radio and TV networks. Pretty soon after that, TV-watching Poles began to see images of things like the words of the national anthem superimposed on the video feed of dull official programs. Now and then, the audio of the TV channel would give way to music of the national anthem, a joke, or some popular song that had nothing to do with the official program. At other times, Poles listening to their radios began to receive signals from “pirate” radio stations broadcasting information that the government did not want them to hear.

The content of the messages sent by what came to be called “Radio Solidarity” was not as significant as the mere fact that somebody, somewhere, was messing with the government’s system, and could get away with it.

Read the rest.

 

Frederick Douglass and an inspiration: a rhetoric-based approach to high school history?

First, the Douglass.

Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy has posted the entire text of Frederick Douglass's speech of 160 years ago today, "What July 4th Means to the Negro."

Since this is a blog of religious practice among other things, I am excerpting (emphasis and some paragraph breaks mine) this part about the Fugitive Slave Act (which, among other things, required all states to enforce within their own boundaries the property "rights" of slaveholders):

I take this law to be one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty, and, if the churches and ministers of our country were nor stupidly blind, or most wickedly indifferent, they, too, would so regard it.

...But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! welcome atheism! welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by those Divines!

They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done! These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty and leave the throne of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and with out hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation-a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons, and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea’ when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

...The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission. Albert Barnes but uttered what the common sense of every man at all observant of the actual state of the case will receive as truth, when he declared that “There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.”

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday School, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery, and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds, and that they do not do this involves them in the most awful responsibility of which the mind can conceive.

In prosecuting the anti-slavery enterprise, we have been asked to spare the church, to spare the ministry; but how, we ask, could such a thing be done? We are met on the threshold of our efforts for the redemption of the slave, by the church and ministry of the country, in battle arrayed against us; and we are compelled to fight or flee. From what quarter, I beg to know, has proceeded a fire so deadly upon our ranks, during the last two years, as from the Northern pulpit? As the champions of oppressors, the chosen men of American theology have appeared-men honored for their so-called piety, and their real learning... [G]reat religious lights of the land have, in utter denial of the authority of Him by whom they professed to be called to the ministry, deliberately taught us, against the example of the Hebrews, and against the remonstrance of the Apostles, that we ought to obey man’s law before the law of God.2

My spirit wearies of such blasphemy; and how such men can be supported, as the “standing types and representatives of Jesus Christ,” is a mystery which I leave others to penetrate. In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are....

...[T]he anti-slavery movement in this country will cease to be an anti-church movement, when the church of this country shall assume a favorable instead of a hostile position towards that movement.

The whole speech is long, covers many more points than this one, and is a wonderful piece of argument.

+ + +

Now, the inspiration.

I am preparing to teach 19th-century American History again this fall with a crop of late-elementary school kids, and Frederick Douglass is one of the personages whose biography we'll highlight; this piece makes me wish it were easier to teach 19th-century American rhetoric directly to kids under eleven or so.

In my vision for homeschool high school, I have generally assumed that a "survey of American history" course would be a necessary evil -- you know, pack the entire thing into one school year, anchored by a text that necessarily runs broad but not deep. I thought the best I could hope for would be to find a really well-written text (and that not necessarily a text made for schools).

I wonder now if, especially given the way I taught elementary school history, if I couldn't put together a sufficiently informative U. S. History course based primarily on pieces of rhetoric. I think you would still have to have the history spine to hold it together, provide a time-sequence, and give context, but perhaps I would not have to work so hard to find a wonderful "main text" if the intellect and imagination were fed by primary sources -- not meta speech, but speeches. And pamphlets, and laws, and opinion-pieces, and court opinions, even advertisements.

I suspect I would have to cut back a bit on other literary analysis in order to fit it in -- or conversely, I could make that the same year that "literature and writing" focuses on persuasion, analysis, satire, and the like -- er, rhetoric, I suppose -- so that History and Literature/Language Arts dovetail.

Thoughts?

"Colored Me."

A fascinating story that begins with a curious anecdote of family genealogy and leads to a discussion of the history of eugenics and racial classifications in midcentury Virginia.

This [photo] is the mar­riage license of my great-great grand­fa­ther,  born in Ire­land in 1854 and mar­ried to a Vir­ginia native in 1884. His race, you’ll notice, is given as “col­ored.” Since when are Irish­men colored?

My father found this when he started doing fam­ily his­tory after he retired. We mostly laughed, a lot, when he revealed it at a fam­ily Christ­mas party: that year he sent us all Kwanza cards as a joke.

But being a his­to­rian I couldn’t help but be fas­ci­nated.... I thought the “Irish were not white” bit was wildly overstated.

I was clearly wrong, and look­ing into it a lit­tle more resulted in a whole class les­son around the image of the Irish in the 19th cen­tury and the range of anti-Irish nativism. It focused on the mal­leabil­ity of stereo­types, and how what seems “nat­ural” and obvi­ous in one era seems odd in the next.

But still how to explain this doc­u­ment? It was his mar­riage cer­tifi­cate: surely even the green­est Irish immi­grant knew enough to avoid being classed as “colored.”

If you take a close look at it, it gets more and more interesting....

Read the whole thing.  

(h/t commenter HCCarey in this really interesting comment thread on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic blog about mutual cultural understanding, or the lack thereof, between American Jews and African-Americans.)

Saint Nicholas the badass.

A day late, but (thanks to Taylor Marshall of the blog Canterbury Tales) here is some stuff about St. Nicholas I didn't know:

...the good Saint Nick allegedly "h-slapped" ("heretic slapped") the heresiarch Arius. You see, Arius wrongly taught that Christ was not fully divine. Rather, Arius taught that Christ had been created by God the Father.

During the First Ecumenical Council of Nicea (AD 325), Arius was called upon to defend his position on the inferiority of Christ. Saint Nicholas just couldn't listen to all of Arius' nonsense and so he stood up and laid in to Arius with his fist.

The Emperor Constantine and the bishops present at the Council were alarmed by Nicholas' act of violence against Arius. They immediately stripped Nicholas of his office as a bishop by confiscating the two items that marked out a man as a Christian bishop: Nicholas' personal copy of the Gospels and his pallium (the vestment worn by all bishops in the East)...

See, I didn't even know that St. Nick was at the council of Nicaea, let alone that he personally punched Arius in the face.  The things we leave out of our tales to children these days!  

(We could have been promising the kids a stocking if they were good, and a socking if they turned out to be filthy little heretics.)

More at the link, including the story of the miracle that gives us the traditional Eastern iconography for St. Nicholas, and a painting of St. Nick waving his fist (and undoubtedly going, "Why, I oughta...bam! To the moon, Arius!")

Now, I happen to own a children's book called The Miracle of Saint Nicholas, and it's really quite a sweet one too, about a small village whose church has lain disused and empty since the soldiers came, and how (after the soldiers have gone) the villagers reveal one by one that they have preserved its treasures.  The "miracle" in the book is just the "miracle" of human ingenuity, memory, service, and charity.  And there's nothing wrong with that; it certainly seems like a miracle sometimes.  

But I can't help but think that a kid's book based on this episode would be pretty darn cool.

He knows if you've been good

He knows if you've been rotten

He knows if you've been teaching that Jesus Christ was created, not begotten

SO you better not spout Christological lies,

You better not flout, I'm telling you why,

Santa Claus is taking YOU doooooown!

I wonder how this would fly if my eight-year-old performed it at the annual parish "Saints and Scholars" pageant.  

SO SO TEMPTING.

Everything I remember from fourth-grade Ohio history.

MrsDarwin mentions having to get the Ohio state history requirements in:

The oldest two are heading into 3rd and 4th this year, and since it works well to have them do things in unison we're leaning towards putting them through two years of US history and kids literature (with enough Ohio specific side-lights to say that we met the state education requirements)...

Although the whole Darwin family is recently transplanted from Texas, MrsD also grew up in Ohio, I think, but just in case I thought I'd help her out.

Everything I Remember From Fourth-Grade Ohio History

1. The glaciers stopped partway across. That is why southern Ohio is so hilly and interesting, while northern Ohio is so flat and boring.

2. The boundary of the glacier-scoured area is called a "moraine." 

3. Many trilobite fossils can be found in Ohio, possibly more than in any other part of the world.

(Fun fact: once while hiking in Red Rock Canyon outside of Las Vegas I met an upper-level college geology class from the University of Dayton, who were presumably having a field trip to somewhere less flat, even though comparatively lacking in trilobites. By casually dropping the above information in conversation, I managed to be mistaken for a geologist.)

4. First there were the Mound Builders. They built mounds. The most famous mound is the Serpent Mound. They were a peaceful people, i.e.., they were already gone by the time white settlers got to Ohio.

5. Then there were the Miami people. They were very interesting. They were not already gone when white settlers came to Ohio. They gave Ohio its name.

6. The first capital of Ohio wasn't Columbus, but Chillicothe.   There's some story about how it got changed but I forget it.

7. Ohio was an important destination along the Underground Railroad. Some houses had secret rooms for hiding fugitives. Maybe even YOUR house!!!!!  That would be SO COOL.  Or at least that's how I remember it from being nine years old.  

8.  Ahem.

 A comparison of the contributions of North Carolina ("First in Flight") and Ohio ("The Buckeye State") to powered flight:

 Ohio:

• Orville
• Wilbur

North Carolina:

• Wind
• Sand

9. Ohio is nicknamed "Birthplace of Presidents" because a bunch of U. S. presidents were born in Ohio, including William Henry Harrison (He died in thirty days).

10. Also the electric automobile starter. You know that crank sticking out of the front of your car that sometimes kicks back and breaks your arm? No? WELL, then. Did North Carolina have anything to do with that? I think not. 

The full literature-based U.S. history curriculum.

I thought maybe this deserved its own index post.

You may use it freely, but please attribute or link back.

U. S. History I: Prehistory through 1812
U. S. History II(a) The Civil War
U. S. History II(b): Topical survey of the 19th century
U. S. History III: Topics of the twentieth century

Literature-based American History (III): Topics of the twentieth century.

The other two parents that I co-school with really liked the topic-based format that I used for the year we studied 19th-century America, so I went with that again for the twentieth century.  

There's so much that happens in the twentieth century, it was very hard to narrow down the topics.  In the end I let two principles guide me:

(1) Since this is American history, I would stick with a U. S. perspective on global events.  I wouldn't, for example, explain what led up to World War One over in Europe.  We would cover that material in World History.  So instead I would limit my discussion of WWI to the Americans' entry into the Great War and afterward.  I applied this same principle to a number of other global events.

(2) I would favor topics that would help explain "how we got where we are today."   If something is important in today's news, I wanted to try to give the last hundred years of context for it.

After much fruitful discussion, we came to this arrangement of topics:

• American foreign relations and the roots of the War on Terror
• Economics (including the Depression, the effects of unionization, Social Security, the national debt)
• American mobility (including the interstate highway system, migrations, immigrants)
• Parties and ideologies (FDR, Reagan, the 2000 presidential election, Bush v. Gore)
• Civil rights (women's suffrage, Brown vs Board of Education, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the disability rights movement,  important Supreme Court cases, and homeschooling rights)
• Twentieth-century changes to the American experience of childhood (child labor, schooling, gender and race restrictions are lifted, the American family mutates, the unborn lose protection)
• Communication technology (radio, television, movies, computers, Internet and social media)

Meanwhile, I completed my short list of dates for the kids to memorize, and we did various exercises with the dates all year long.  Previously learned memory dates include:

• 1492, Columbus sails 
• 1776, Declaration of Independence 
• 1860, Lincoln elected
• 1865, Civil War ends; Lincoln assassinated 
• 1900, remember that McKinley was the president at the turn of the century

Here's a week-by-week book list.  "Hakim" refers to Joy Hakim, A History of US.

Week 1------ MEMORY DATE: 1918, the "Spanish" flu epidemic and the end of World War I.

• Hakim vol. 9 Preface about world war I 
• Marquette, World War I 
• Hibbert, In the Trenches in World War I
•  "U. S. Enters World War I" short film at http://www.newseum.org 
• Kudlinski K, Hero Over Here (Spanish flu) 
• Sergeant York (film)

Week 2 ------

• Blassingame, Combat Nurses of World War II .  This book is twelve kinds of awesome.  You get the stories of women who saw combat, you get a close look at the Pacific theater, and you get lots of interesting details that never make it into textbooks.
• Hakim vol. 9, chapters 26, 27, 29, 30 
• The Great Escape (film)  (okay, they were Brits, but it's such a great movie)
• Sands of Iwo Jima (film)
• Leckie R, The Battle of Iwo Jima

Week 3 ------ MEMORY DATE:  1941, Pearl Harbor attack, U. S. enters WWII.

• "Japan Bombs Pearl Harbor;"  "Nazi Holocaust Exposed;" "Hiroshima" all at  http://www.newseum.org 
• Stein, The U. S. S. Arizona 
• McGowen, Battle for Iwo Jima
•  Blassingame, Combat Nurses of World War II (continued) 
• "The Great Escape" (PBS NOVA documentary)

Week 4 ------ MEMORY DATE:  1945, the first nuclear attack on a city; WWII ends.

• Elish,The Story of the Manhattan Project

Week 5 ------

• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (read parts through 1957)
• Kallen, The Race to Space 
• Grant, NATO 
• Various books about Apollo and Mercury missions
• Doeden, Weapons of the Cold War
• WarGames (film)
• Russkies (film)  DO NOT LAUGH AT THE EIGHTIES FILM LOVE.  I wanted to show the kids what the pop-culture notions of Russians and of nuclear war were like in the mid-eighties.

Week 6 ------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapter 7 
• Leckie, The War in Korea 1950-1953 chapters 1, 2, 12, 13.  This is a fantastic Landmark book.  I wish I had had time to read it all to the kids.
• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (read from Sputnik to Johnson) 
• Kent, The Story of the Saigon Airlift
•  Discussion question: If the war in Vietnam is over, why continue to argue about whether the US sould have fought it, or when it should have come to an end? 
• Huynh Q, The Land I Lost - a memoir about Vietnam from a Vietnamese refugee

Week 7 ------ MEMORY DATE: 1989, the Berlin Wall is opened.

• Foster, The Story of the Cold War (finished)
•  Schmemann, How the Wall Came Down (parts) 
• "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech by Reagan, Youtube
•  "The opening of the Wall at Berlin Bornholmer Strasse 1989" 

Week 8 ------ MEMORY DATE: 2001, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell.  This is a history of terrorism in general.  It is a Landmark book and was revised after September 11, 2001; older editions won't have a discussion of the 9/11 attacks.  It's really wonderfully comprehensive.

Week 9 ------

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell (continued)

Week 10 -------

• Meltzer, The Day the Sky Fell (continued)
• Several news articles about terrorism in the past week, to show that it continues to be a significant global threat

Week 11 -------

•    14 Cows for America

Week 12 ------- MEMORY DATE: 1929, the great stock market crash

• Downing, The Great Depression (free browsing) 
• Blumenthal, Six Days in October 
• Sandler, The Dust Bowl through the Lens
• Lange, "Migrant Mother" (photograph)

Week 13 -------

• Appelt and Schmitzer, Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky.  Love.  This.  Book.  

Week 14 -------

• Discuss current economic recession 
• Lauber, Flood: Wrestling with the Mississippi.  This book didn't really fit in anywhere but I liked it so much I wanted to use it, so I decided it went in with economics (since natural disasters are economic disasters, right?)   Patricia Lauber is a prolific writer of kids' science titles.

Week 15 -------

• Paradis, From Trails to Superhighways: The Story of America's Roads to show how we got our interstate system
• Williams, Road and Rail Transportation (pgs 20-26) for a handful of technical details

Week 16 -------

• Stanley J, Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp.  This is an utterly amazing story of how Okie children, rejected by Californians, built their own school with their own hands under the leadership of a visionary and kind public school official.  It is sobering to think how far we have come from the regionalistic xenophobia of just a couple generations ago, when citizens of one state regarded migrants from another state  as dangerous aliens.
• Discuss other migrations (African-American "Great Migration;" Mormon migration; Gold Rush)

Week 17 -------

• Paul, North Across the Border (Mexican immigrants) 
• Springstubb T, The Vietnamese Americans.  I picked these two books not because I particularly favored Mexican or Vietnamese immigrants over others, but because they seemed the best books our library had about the immigrant experience

Week 18 -------

• "The Rainmaker" (from Armstrong, The American Story) about FDR
•  Church and Lacayo, "Social Insecurity," TIME magazine, March 20, 1995 
• Hakim vol. 9, chapters 20, 22, 23, 24, 25 
• Discussion about how Social Security works and potential for insolvency; possible solutions.

Week 19 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, ch. 36 and 37 (Nixon) 
• Lewis and others, "5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats' Office Here" The Washington Post, June 18, 1972 
• Discuss the attitude that one's political opponents are one's enemies.

Week 20 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapters about Ronald Reagan 
• Discuss: Reagan as polarizing figure, liberal vs. conservative economic philosophies, pros and cons of progressive taxation, arguments about trickle-down economics, Reagan as "the great communicator."

Week 21 -------

• The American Experience: Ronald Reagan (film)

Week 22 -------

• Discuss 2000 presidential election, close elections, electoral college, Florida recount, mechanics of voting machines, chads; 
• 2008 Minnesota senate race (close race with hand recount) "Challenged Ballots: You Be the Judge." Activity from Minnesota Public Radio website,  I printed out the challenged ballots, cut them apart, and had the three kids pretend to be election judges and decide how to allocate the challenged ballots.
• CBS News archive coverage of presidential election night, 2000. 
• Hakim, vol. 10, chapters 46-47 
• Greene A, Understanding the 2000 Election (background chapter)

Week 23 -------

• Separate but Equal (film): first half.  It's a made-for-TV movie about Brown v. Board of Education.

Week 24 -------

• Finish Separate but Equal (film). 
• Read Justice Earl Warren's opinion in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Week 25 -------

• Hakim, vol. 10, chapter 16 (integration of Little Rock Central High)
•  "1920: Votes for Women" (from Armstrong, The American Story) 
• McKissack P and Zarembka A, To Establish Justice: Citizenship and the Constitution, chapter 10 on the disability rights movement.  There's some adult and controversial material in this book so I excerpted carefully.

Week 26 -------

• "I Have a Dream" Martin Luther King speech, full, on Youtube 
• Short clip of Malcolm X speaking 
• Hakim vol. 10, chapters 14, 15, 19 (Martin Luther King) 
• King ML, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (excerpts) 
• Graves R, Malcolm X (Cornerstones of Freedom series) 
• "The Black Revolution" from The World's Great Speeches (Malcolm X speech to socialists organization, 1964) 
• Discuss Malcolm X and MLK: influences of religion on them, name change, assassinations, opinions of the method of nonviolence

Week 27 -------

• Curtis CP, The Watsons Go to Birmingham -- 1963 (fiction, used as independent reading)
• Writing assignment: Curtis places a real event (the 1963 Birmingham church bombing) in a fictional story. Does it make a fictional story more interesting if it contains a real event? Does the fictional context make it easier to understand the impact of the historical event?

Week 28-------

•  Laws and court cases relevant to homeschooling rights and regulations: 
  • Meyer v. Nebraska 
  • Pierce v. Society of Sisters 
  • Wisconsin v. Yoder
  • Minnesota v. Newstrom (relevant in Minnesota only)
  • Current Minnesota statutes about home schools 
• Discuss: Should the state regulate the subjects taught? Should the state regulate the credentials of homeschooling parents? Should the state regulate the number of days of instruction? Should the state ban homeschooled children from working during school hours? Should the state require public schools to allow homeschooled students to use their facilities?

Week 29 -------

• Discussion about how the lives of children changed between about 1920 and 1990. (consumer safety regulations, equality in education, overall better health but more obesity, labor laws, sanitation, vaccinations, antibiotics, extended families living more often far away, fewer family members lost to premature death, more divorce, working mothers, smaller families, racial and gender diversity of role models) 
• Discussed growing awareness of diversity by discussing the role models who were available to young people. 
• Ryan, When Marian Sang (about Marian Anderson) 
• Weatherford, Jesse Owens: Fastest Man Alive 
• Szabo C, Sky Pioneer: A Photobiography of Amelia Earhart 
• (Biographies of others were available, including Jackie Robinson and Jim Thorpe)

Week 30 -------

•  Cleary B, Dear Mr. Henshaw (fiction; first half) 
• Themes of 20th-century child life: divorce, working parents, child support, moving to a new school, small family, lack of connection to extended family 
• Discuss various literary styles of Dear Mr. Henshaw: first- person; "epistolary" or letter format ; writing in dialogue; diary format; book review . 
• What do we think Mr. Henshaw thinks about Leigh? How do we learn what Mr. Henshaw has written to Leigh? How does Leigh express his feelings?
• (this actually appeared a few weeks later and we discussed it then, but thematically it goes here:) "Census: Saying No to Marriage," Star Tribune, May 12, 2011. Less than fifty percent of Twin Cities households include married couples. Read the article, list the main points, and discuss the implications.

Week 31 -------

• Cleary B, Dear Mr. Henshaw (second half) 
• Continue discussions of themes of 20th-century child life
• 20th-century child life: Roe v. Wade. Discussion with parent.  (I did not teach this to the group.)
•  My take: 
  • What it means. 
  • How it changed U. S. law. 
  • Current legal controversy (aside from moral controversy) about whether there is a constitutional right to privacy. 
  • Rights of the unborn compared to what we have learned about civil rights, women's rights, and the rights of the disabled. 
  • What mechanisms exist under which the law could be changed? What can an ordinary citizen do about it?

Week 32 -------

• Discuss radio, cinema, silent movies, newsreels 
• "1938: The War of the Worlds" from Armstrong, The American Story 
• Watch: "Keystone Kops: Fatty Joins the Force"
•  Watch: Newsreel of the Queen Mum's 1923 wedding, side by side with TV highlights of Prince William's wedding to Kate Middleton in 2011 
• Watch: Trailer for movie "THEM!" 
• Discuss the social and cultural purposes and effects of movies in different periods 
• Are there fewer moviegoers now? Why? What do theaters do to keep customers coming?
•  For browsing: Parkinson D, The Young Oxford Book of the Movies

week 33 -------

• Kent, Z. The Story of Television. 
• Clarification of the differences among broadcast television, cable television, VCRs, DVDs, streaming video, hard drive storage of video. 
• Discussion of expanding choices; role of advertising; and cultural and economic changes brought about by television. 
• Discussion of genres of television shows. 
• Watch: Two episodes of I Love Lucy. "Switching Jobs" and "Lucy Does a TV Commercial."

Week 34 -------

• Sherman J, The History of the Internet 
• McPherson SS, Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web (parts) 
• Stewart GB, Larry Page and Sergey Brin: The Google Guys (parts) 
• Discussion (mostly of technical details and GenX reminiscings): ARPAnet, Usenet, bulletin board analogy, gopher, email, world wide web, browsers, search engines.
•  How the Web brings people together bycommon interest. "Cyberspace."

Week 35 ------- MEMORY DATE: 1991, the World Wide Web opens to the general public

• Discussion of safety while using email, online shopping, and social media. 
• Predators; viruses; identity theft; inappropriate or dangerous material; privacy settings; information that should remain personal; precautions that kids should take. 
• Risks organized from most to least dangerous: encountering people who intend physical harm; encountering people who intend harm via internet communications; identity theft; monetary fraud; spreading of private or secret information; bullying; malware; inaccurate information or lies; harvesting personal information for targeted advertising.
•  "1500 Crash Birthday Party After Facebook Slip Up," Stephen Spencer Davis, 6/6/2011.  
• Frontline: Digital Nation (TV documentary)

Week 36 ------- final exam.

 

Literature-based American History (II-b): Topical survey of the 19th-century.

In Part II-a, I wrote about why I divided the second year of American history into two semesters and treated the Civil War all by itself, and I gave the syllabus I used for that first semester on the Civil War. 

In the second semester, that serious business being out of the way, we moved on to other topics for the rest of the year.  They don't really arrange themselves chronologically very neatly, so I took the nineteenth century (roughly; I went from "the end of the war of 1812" to "the U. S. entry into the Great War") as a single chunk, and then covered several different topics.  I would go on to use that same approach with the twentieth century the next year (more on that in another post, natch.)

The flow of topics went like this:

• Pre-Civil War foreign policy and conflicts
  •  Monroe Doctrine (dealings with Europe)
  •  dealings with Indian nations, such as Seminole War, Trail of Tears, etc., Jackson
  •  dealings with Mexico/Texas
• All that pioneer stuff - Western expansion
  • Midwest/Great Plains settlement
  • Oregon Trail, Santa Fe Trail, Mormon Trail, etc.
  • Relations with Indian nations during the Western expansion period
• Growth of cities
  • Midcentury wave of European immigration
  • Working conditions
• Political/social movements
  • Labor unions
  • Urban social welfare
  • Women's suffrage
• Everyday life
  • On the frontier
  • Children's schooling
  • National parks
  • New technologies
• Post-Civil War politics
  • Spanish-American War
  • Presidents

 

Point one: selection.

If it all seems a little haphazard, that's because it is.  If it seems that something very important has been left out, that's because it probably was.  There are only eighteen weeks in which to do it, after all.   The only way to cover everything is to cover nothing in depth.

Point two:  This is not a neutral list.

Some of my choices betray my own values (as I hope they should)!  For example, I made a point of including the establishment of national parks as an important historical and cultural mark.  That's because it's something that distinguishes the U. S. -- other countries haven't done nearly as well in setting aside land in a more-or-less natural state for public use.  If there is such a thing as an "American character," I think our relationship with our lands is something worth exploring in depth.   It's not all gold-digging and monoculture, you know; Americans have a strong naturalist and conservationist tradition as well.  Also because our family enjoys outdoor activities, often in national and state parkland, and I wanted the kids to understand and appreciate why we have national parks to go to.  

(Love of country may be out of style these days, but when I list my reasons to be grateful that I am an American, I don't have trouble coming up with items; and national parks are one.)

 

Point three:  How I deal with teaching controversial topics to middle schoolers.

Remember, I'm working with middle schoolers -- I had two 4th-graders and one 6th-grader for this year.  At this age, I think, they are only just beginning to be ready to stake a position and defend it.  So I never asked them to do this.  I avoided putting them on the spot with "What do you think is the right choice?  Do you think this was a good law or a bad one?  Do you think such and such a person acted rightly or wrongly?"

Instead I tried  to introduce at least two different points of view and make sure that the kids all understand two concepts that are sadly lacking in our public discourse:

1.  Reasonable people can come down on different sides of most controversial issues.  
2. Members of distinctly visible groups -- like "workers," "black Americans," "women" -- don't always line up on the same side of political questions. 

So, instead of telling me what their position was, I required the kids to list reasonable arguments and philosophies held by people on different sides of a position.  For example, I'd want them to be able to tell me why some 19th-century people would think a law establishing a minimum wage was good for workers, business owners, and the American public; and then to come back and tell me why establishing a legally enforced minimum wage might, in the views of others, be bad for workers, business owners, and the American public.  (Note my refusal to frame the question as "Why did workers support a minimum wage and business owners fight against it?")

Being able to competently and accurately explain a position -- whether you hold it or not -- is a prerequisite for defending and promoting a position you do hold.  The former, being a more fundamental skill, is what I emphasized.

 

Preliminaries aside:  what did we read?

 

SEMESTER II

Week 19
-------
Dangerfield G., Defiance to the Old World (explains the historical world context of the Monroe Doctrine).  First part of the book up to where Andrew Jackson comes in.
Begin learning the names of the first 16 presidents in order.

Week 20
-------
Finish Defiance to the Old World
Discuss Monroe Doctrine
Hakim volume 4, chapters 18, 20, 24, 25, 26 about Jackson, the trail of tears, the 2nd Seminole War; chapter 33 on the series of presidents
Worksheet putting the first 16 presidents in order

Week 21
-------

Downey, Texas and the War With Mexico (parts)

Week 22
-------
Downey, Texas and the War with Mexico (about the Alamo)
Cousins, M., We Were There at the Battle of the Alamo (fiction)
Discuss the Texas Republic
Havighurst, First Book of Pioneers (first part.  This book deals with the settlement of Southwestern Ohio, where my kids' grandparents live.  If you live in or have ties to another part of the Midwest or Great Plains, it might be good to pick something else specific to that locale)

Week 23
-------
Havighurst, First Book of Pioneers (finish)

Week 24
-------
Tunis, Frontier Living, chapter 13 "The Harried Saints" (about the Mormon trail.  Because one of the children I teach is a member of the LDS church, it was very important to me to find a source that treated the people who participated in the Mormon migration positively or at least neutrally; many books, especially older ones, are surprisingly dismissive or hostile towards them.  At the same time, I didn't want to use material produced by LDS organizations.   This chapter fit the bill very nicely, not getting into details about religious differences, but positively appraising the hard work and endurance of the people who followed the Mormon trail.  And all the books by E. Tunis are very cool for other reasons.  If I had discovered him in time I would have used his book on the Colonial period in the previous year.)
Draw the Mormon trail on the US Map
Label Mississippi R., Platte R., Missouri R., Great Salt Lake; Nauvoo, IL; Salt Lake City, UT; Council Bluffs, IA
Freedman, The Life of Crazy Horse (begin.)  I decided to use a biography of Crazy Horse as our entry point for discussing the encounters between the Indian nations of the Great Plains and settlers from the East.  This bio is long and I had to stretch the reading over several weeks, but it's well-written, interesting, and attractively illustrated.

Week 25
-------
Trace the Oregon Trail on the map from Week 24
Tunis, Frontier Living, "The Bitter Road to Oregon"
Freedman, The Life of Crazy Horse (continued)

Week 26
-------
Freedman, The Life of Crazy Horse (continued)
Discuss Sand Creek massacre
Wells, R. Streets of Gold (this is a picture book drawn from an immigrant's autobiography)
Sandin J., The Long Way to a New Land (an easy reader, again about immigration)
Heaps, W. A., The Story of Ellis Island (parts; this is an extremely cool book, with lots of details about what it was like for people who came through the Ellis Island bureaucracy, and I would have used more of it except it is written at too high a level for these kids)
Discuss immigration in mid-to-late 1800s from Europe

week 27
-------
Littlefield H., Fire at the Triangle Factory (an easy reader)
McCully E. A., The Bobbin Girl (pretty good picture book about one of those paternalistic factories that employed many young women and provided housing;  gives an entry point into the idea of unions and strikes, and also into women's economic situations)
Hakim vol. 8, ch 16, "Harvest at Haymarket."  Discuss: maximum workday; minimum wage; minimum working age; safety regulations; tension between the economic costs and benefits of these rules.  Discuss strikes and unions.

Began memorizing important dates:  1492, 1776, 1860, 1865

Week 28 (two sessions this week)
-------
Klingel, C., Clara Barton:  Founder of the American Red Cross
Wooldridge, When Esther Morris Headed West: Women, Wyoming, and the Right to Vote
Fritz, J. You Want Women to Vote, Lizzie Stanton?
Discuss suffrage
Everyday life in the 19th century:
Tunis, Frontier Living, about oxen, canal locks, Iowa squatters
Hakim vol 5, ch. 19

Week 29
-------
Bial R., One Room School
Discuss how schooling has changed since then
Douglas W. O., Muir of the Mountains (biography of John Muir.  Oh I love this book.  John Muir is a fascinating figure.)
Discuss extinction of passenger pigeon; modern management of natural resources; Muir's motivation for abandoning his career in engineering and turning to the outdoors

Week 30
-------
Finish reading Muir of the Mountains

Week 31
-------
off this week -- we made it up in advance in Week 28

Week 32
-------
Levine, I. E.  Inventive Wizard:  George Westinghouse (first part).  Why do yet another Thomas Edison biography when instead you can read about George Westinghouse?

week 33
-------
Levine, I. E. Inventive Wizard:  George Westinghouse (continued)

Week 34
-------
Levine, I. E. Inventive Wizard: George Westinghouse (finish)
Fritz, J. Bully for you, Teddy Roosevelt!  (begin)

Week 35
-------
Fritz, J. Bully for you, Teddy Roosevelt! (finish)
Discuss Panama canal, the vice presidential succession to the presidency
Memorize that McKinley was president in 1900 (just a milestone for the turn of the century to help remember dates)

Week 36
-------
Hunter V., Stagecoach Days  (this really belonged earlier in the semester, but it was late coming from the library.)