Posted on 06/13/2009 7:32:51 AM PDT by reaganaut1
To the pessimists evidence that the field of diplomatic history is on the decline is everywhere. Job openings on the nation’s college campuses are scarce, while bread-and-butter courses like the Origins of War and American Foreign Policy are dropping from history department postings. And now, in what seems an almost gratuitous insult, Diplomatic History, the sole journal devoted to the subject, has proposed changing its title.
For many in the field this latest suggestion is emblematic of a broader problem: the shrinking importance not only of diplomatic history but also of traditional specialties like economic, military and constitutional history.
The future of the history profession (as well as the journal’s title) are the subject of a roundtable discussion to be held this month at the annual convention of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Many historians “are on the defensive,” said Thomas W. Zeiler, the executive editor of Diplomatic History and the moderator of the panel. (Mr. Zeiler, who floated the name change, said he did not have a particular replacement in mind.)
To Mr. Zeiler there is no doubt that the days when diplomatic history dominated the profession are gone. Fewer traditional courses in the subject are taught, fewer articles are published in refereed journals, and graduate student training has changed. Nonetheless Mr. Zeiler is not as worried as some of his colleagues. The shift does not necessarily mean students aren’t learning the material, he noted, but rather that a new approach to teaching it has developed.
The shift in focus began in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when a generation of academics began looking into the roles of people generally missing from history books — women, minorities, immigrants, workers. Social and cultural history, often referred to as bottom-up history, offered fresh subjects.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Traditional history courses have long since vanished, which is why so few people recognize 0bama’s Treasury Department enacting Fascist economics.
Even worse is the decrepit state of history education in the secondary schools, where it is usually taught by some idiot athletic coach and/or lumped into the amorphous glop known as "social studies." Thank the NEA for that one.
I challenge any parent of college age kids to attend classes just to see what is happening to their kids.
I agree with the article. Having graduated from university in 2005, all of my knowledge of history beyond “Honest Abe and George and the Cherry Tree” all comes fom my own reading outside the classroom.
My son-in-law took a world history class at college a few years ago. The teacher was a moslem who didn’t know the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King Jr.
I graduated from college in 2001 and saw this transition occur from elementary, middle, high school and then in college. Everything gradually moved toward the ‘bottom-up approach’.
US History in college was essentially broken into chapters like “History of Women in America”, “History of Africans in America”, “History of Chinese in America”, “History of Hispanics in America” and all essentially outlined the challenges (racism of course) they faced here.
Of course the Italians, Germans, Irish and other “white people” were lumped together into a two page chapter on “mass immigration”. Nothing was said of the challenges they faced.
Our own Freeper, LS, author of “A Patriot’s History of the United States” might have an opinion to share about this article.
And while you're contemplating this, ask your local hiscrool history teacher to explain the Diet of Worms and the Peace of Augsburg, or even what team we were on in WWII.
Also please note that Cousin Odinga, the Christian-Massacring, Marxist Jihadist, who holds a special place in his black heart for Obamalini, is conducting talks with Achmedananutjob in Iran. No doubt but that he is opening back channel communications between Cousin Barack and the 12th Imam's chief nuclear engineer.
Got any spare foil?
Objectivity in historical studies went out the window a long time ago. History departments of universities are one of the few remaining places where Marxism is considered relevant. That’s because many of the professors learned Marxism on their way up to their present positions.
Patricia is late to the dance isn’t she?
Recently experienced the same thing via a grandchild. What is really distressing is when I try to tell my friends about it they act as if I’m a little nutty. I’ve just about come to the conclusion most people won’t/don’t learn until it happens to them personally. Sad for them and even sadder for our country.
Speaking of Martin Luther, my daughter had to do a porject on Martin Luther. All she could find were oodles and oodles of stuff on Martin Luther King and Martin Luther King Jr. at her local library. It was as though Martin Luther, the German Reformer didn’t exist. I had to use the internet to get material on him.
Thank you!
We will order that -
A Diplomatic History of the United States”
by Samuel Flagg Bemis
The Ancient World: From the Earliest Times to 800 A.D. (Allyn and Bacon's Series of School Histories) (Hardcover_)
I got them at Amazon and recommend any home schooled or history buff to get them.
It's almost enough to make you take it to the schools and show them what was expected of an educated person and what drivel is pushed out by the "education" industry. pfft...
I've told my 4 children and pounded into their heads everyday that the people in charge WANT you to be stupid. That's the whole point of the "group" projects, dioramas (make work bullsh#t) in high school and the whole gender/race/politics studies programs... Stupid people are lazy and easy to dominate.
As Freepers we should try to get a home school list of books from K-college that are in order by subject and have great lesson plans as well as content. I can vouch for this series of books. They are by Willis Mason West... look them up and be amazed.
I have NO financial benefit from this book only the knowledge that I'd be helping those that want a great series of history books.
For our America to survive as a great nation, we must take back the education system, and the media, to once again spread the truth.
Thanks for that book suggestion. I put it on my ‘Wish List’ at my library online account.
I jsut ordered the one you recommended.
What is your take on some of his other books?
Specifically,
The United States as a world power;
a diplomatic history, 1900-1950
By Samuel Flagg Bemis
Lend me some tin foil too!
It’s amazing ... what’s going on and how he LIES about it.
He will specifically point out the he is NOT doing the very evil deed he IS doing - of course with the street thug lilt in his voice.
bookmark
I had to struggle to keep "Civil War and Reconstruction" on our teaching schedule, and we only teach it in the summer. Most schools no longer have "Age of Jackson" or "Revolution/Constitution/Early Republic." Everything is "social history this," "minority/women that." Just look at the dissertations that are coming out of the grad schools. Now, that is not to say that there aren't some real gems out there (we got one recently, whose cover I won't blow), or that all the work that these students are doing is meaningless. But it's mostly what I call "supportive" evidence to larger historical questions that they refrain from engaging. You can see this in the reviews of the books, in which "so-and-so offers us a new insights into the world of antebellum urban slaves," etc. Because so little genuine NEW, SIGNIFICANT research is turned out, virtually all of it is "nibbling around the edges." And since it is nearly verboten to write about "great men," or simply do a new biography of Lincoln or Washington unless you "out" them as homosexuals or fraternal twins to a wildebeest, well, you're not going to get anywhere.
BTW, I went to UCSB when the author, Pat Cohen, was teaching there, although I did not take any classes from her.
I'm sorry. I am not presently reading any posts from you. What if the new Internet Czar finds out? I could lose my job at the Ho Chi Minh Political-Reducation Camp. (I teach revisionist deconstructed historical oppression appreciation skills.)
There is some small light flickering at the end of the tunnel.* The Rat The Dick Morris is actually publishing some stuff that could be considered slightly critical of our Duce, which means Hillary and that fellow she is still married to think that our Duce may be a somewhat brief phenomenon.
Big time Lefties hedging their bets a bit?
*Stay flexible, it could just be the headlight on The Marxist Express
I'd bet Military History gets taught intensively at the service academies, but unfortunately, there aren't any institutions which bring the same focus to diplomatic history.
Students just don't think history is important enough. At university's today, history is a dessert, not a main course, because there's no career track associated with it.
The curious thing is that political and military history books sell quite well to the general public -- much better than social history.
It is very hard to believe that about half these OWP's were actually women, because all they have ever done is force their views, their religion, and their cultural values on minority groups.
Because of their incorrect attitudes toward non-Western peoples, their 5,000 years of history must be completely disregarded. History began with the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and although Bill Clinton and JFK were OWP's, they are sort of important milestones in our development as politically correct world citizens, too, under the far-seeing Obama, of course.
Next week, we'll talk about Fidel Castro. In the meantime, watch plenty of TV and don't smoke.
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Whomever controls the present controls the past. -- George OrwellJob openings on the nation's college campuses are scarce, while bread-and-butter courses like the Origins of War and American Foreign Policy are dropping from history department postings. And now, in what seems an almost gratuitous insult, Diplomatic History, the sole journal devoted to the subject, has proposed changing its title. For many in the field this latest suggestion is emblematic of a broader problem: the shrinking importance not only of diplomatic history but also of traditional specialties like economic, military and constitutional history.To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
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LOL!
Hide your eyes from my rants.
I’m having my daughter read Animal Farm and I am more than happy to name names for present day characters. I just can’t wait till she does a book report on that one.
Is a lot of this “non-basics” teaching because those striving for their PhD’s must publish new material? What’s new about the old guys? Their advisers steer them toward new topics for their dissertations, and frankly this might be all that’s left that is new: Outlier topics or discoveries of hidden scandal. When called to teach a course, these people would naturally gravitate to that which is easy for them to teach: their field of study. I would wonder if the best chance to find a good basic course in history would be from a professor who had a passion for the topic. If the department is full of left wingers, those who won’t propagandize the material may be hard to find. Is this an accurate reading of the situation, or am I off base?
I am not surprised at all. The Marxist have almost completely taken over without firing a shot and little confrontation. MLK & Rosa Parks are the new "American" heroes and icons. Along with rewriting history they are hard at work displacing street names, school & building names etc. Our icons, symbols and heritage are slowly but surely being displaced, destroyed and demonized. Even on this supposedly conservative board many here will quote or refer to MLK as the ultimate American. He's quoted and idolized in spite of his Marxist and racist connections.
Of course what we are starting to see now is the big push for Hispanic heroes and icons. If we continue down this path in 20 years or less The founders and other American heroes will all but be wiped from our history except as examples as evil slave holding whites. The Alamo will be used as another example of this evil manifestation. Whites are the fair haired step child and eventually will be destroyed. Destroy our heroes and history and then genocide is all but a given but many either don't care or have their head buried in the sand. Our posterity is being set up and our country ransacked.
It starts and ends in our "public education" system but implicitly with our government and the MSM. Another reason why home schooling is vital but of course it also depends on the curriculum used and We the People.
And, of course, my own specialty fields of European Intellectual History (18th/19th centuries), American Intellectual History, and Philosophy of History are pretty much gone. The study of Modern Europe certainly doesn't mean what it used to.
It's amazing. There are good specialized books published in the last 30-40 years, but not much (yours excepted) in surveys. The newer editions of the essential text on Modern Europe, the R.R. Palmer, et. al. A History of the Modern World are not as good (IMHO) as the 1970 edition I still have. For a US survey, there are really on a couple of choices: your Patriot's History, the Morison, Commager and Leuchtenburg (they of the last generation of solid liberal scholars) The Growth of the American Republic, which I think is a little more in depth and represents the 'consensus' of the generation that taught us, or, maybe, with reservations, Bob Kelly's survey, which is a bit stronger on intellectual history but otherwise veers a bit squishy left.
I think someone wanting a solid knowledge of history today is probably better served with the courses on DVD or CD from The Teaching Company from the local library, than they would be in most college or university history departments. Our town library has several dozens of them, I've probably listened to 25-30 courses over the past 5 years on everything from Ancient Egypt through the Greeks and Romans (philosophy, literature, and history) through the First World War. Some of the bibliographies are good enough that between the lectures and the suggested readings, they're really pretty close to being equivalent to a decent upper division course on the old UCSB model of 1-2 books a week for a quarter course.
The quality of local libraries varies enormously. Most college and university libraries are still pretty good, and many libraries in big cities and wealthy suburban towns are good. Ours (Greenwich, CT) is pretty good if you know what to look for, but the omissions in history especially are striking. My own personal library is stronger in terms of major works of history and the history of ideas. It's a constant battle with the wife, who wants to see the 4,000 odd volume personal library pared way down. She keeps saying, if you want it, it will be in the library. And I reply, no, it's not there. And, as they keep changing the collection, less and less solid stuff is there, and more politically correct fluff replaces the solid stuff.
Traditional students are also vanishing. I had a graduate history class where a young lady who taught high school said, “Professor you keep talking about WWII. Does that mean there was a WWI?”
It was an uncomfortable moment for the professor and some of the students who actually understood the implications of her remark.
I'm at work on a "big" project that is essentially a "Patriot's History of the Modern World." Probably 60% finished.
I don't think it's correct that only the new guys publish the junk. People like Sean Wilentz still get awards for writing socialist pap.
Real history has going down the memory hole at breakneck speed.
Real history has been going down the memory hole at breakneck speed.
I’m a little late to this one, but...
I teach six sections a semester of modern Western Civ and classes on World War II. In the fall, I pick up a section on the War Between the States, which I’m very much looking forward to.
My approach to all this is very straightforward, with papers and two “reaction sheets” due for each class, where the students THINK about a topic, and then give me their opinions. We require lots of thinking from our students; but, then, we are considered an elite school and I’d estimate half of my students are looking towards law or graduate school.
I am a Reagan Republican, now an Independent, as are half of my coworkers. The loons who see a commie in every classroom have never been to college, it’s obvious.
I'm at work on a "big" project that is essentially a "Patriot's History of the Modern World." Probably 60% finished.
I like Johnson, but I find him interesting, but perhaps to much a popularizer for my taste. His Intellectuals was good in places, but he horribly badly misreads Nietzsche (as do many who haven't really studied Nietzsche), which put me off the book.
I look forward to your next project.
We should probably also include the somewhat idiosyncratic From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun. It's great stuff, but probably better suited to those who've already digested Palmer thoroughly than as a place to start.
She was working on her Masters to get a raise.
What’s that phrase about people who know more and more about less and less...
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