Rome Will Kick Your Butt--TV Series

American Chronicle ^ | Oct 30, 2010 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

(Television series proposal, submitted to History Channel, Discovery Channel, A&E, Learning Channel, Disney, et al, by Word-Wise Productions.)

Marketing context: American public education has been dumbed down, neutered, rendered dull and boring. Little is taught. One thing especially is not taught. History. There is thus an unfed hunger for History real, raw, and revelatory.

Everything that makes children and adults love History has been eliminated from History. Starting in the 1920s, progressive educators used a gimmick called Social Studies to constrict the teaching of History. Less was taught, and taught in a less interesting way. Throughout the 20th century History was made more politically correct, more timid, bloodless, and unfocused, more a vehicle for social engineering, more wimpy. Soon History had all the intellectual excitement of an infomercial for a new vegetable slicer.

At this point, we all need to be reminded of what History was always about for many thousands of years: Quests. Victories. Defeats. Excellence. Death. Egos. Genius. Battles. Greatness. Insanity. Business. Law. Art. Family. Government. Luck. Military campaigns. Heroes. Disease. Monuments. Crime. Tragedies. Plots. Romance. Religion. Engineering feats. Politics. Duty. Sacrifice. Honor. Human behavior both ordinary and under pressure. Great personalities. Inventions. Glory. Suicide. Philosophy.

We all delight in extremes and superlatives. We love a great story. History is millions of good stories. The Roman Empire, with 10 centuries of history, has a million stories all its own.

[[Who knows, somebody might actually want to produce this series. But the main impetus was to dramatize the pathetic way that history is taught. Rest is on AmericanChronicle with a fine graphic of Crassus, said to be one of the richest men in all of History.]]

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[MrsEmmaPeel]

You will love him, I guarantee it. His observations were astonishing - "the more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws" is a personal favorite of mine. Many an hour was spent in hand with the original Latin with such phrases as: "odio humani generis" trying the weave sense out of it all.

[ApplegateRanch]

ca 1967, Barf Area, CA.

I also had a female history lecturer whose class I quickly dropped, when she started in on day one teaching 'herstory' instead of history.

I NEVER had a Conservative for history; the best I could do was a couple of Centrists. That was within the framework of two semesters of U.S. history; one of California History; one semester of Far East Asian History, ancient through 18th Century; one semester of World history, following a semester of Western Civ.

Same school: I also bailed out of an introductory astronomy class, as that prof wanted to spend the entire semester teaching Ptolemaic astronomy, "as a groundwork of how/why Copernican astronomy (to be taught in his second semester classes) was superior, and what the problems with the Ptolemaic System were that lead to the Copernican System's development."

The math, physical science, and English departments were pretty much unaffected, but the social sciences & other humanities were rife with fairly new Berkeley grads at the podiums.

The political and sociological imperatives (later becoming political correctness) within the Anthropology department changed my mind about pursuing a degree in archeology.

I really find it distasteful to be falsely accused of being an uneducated ignoramus and poseur, simply because my experience is different from someone else's.