Edited by author 02-13-2007 10:54 PM
I agree with David and Will. Our version of the Cold War is often dramatized around the Cuban Missile Crisis and the US standing up against the evil Soviet Union and Cuba. Our version of history definately portrays the US as the good guy and the Soviet Union as the bad guy. I wonder how much can be attributed to JFK. He is generally a mythic character in US history and it is likely a large part due to the fact he was assasinated. Even to this day we have anti Russian or Soviet sentiment that I assume we have all been guilty of. It is interesting to see how history is portrayed through the eyes of different people. I can't remember who brought it up in class the other day, but the Japanese and Pearl Harbor is a perfect example. It was mentioned that in Japanese schools Pearl Harbor is not even in the curriculum. It just shows the biased nature of history and how different sides have completely different stories.

I apologize for all of the stuff in class today. In all honesty, I didn't know it was that funny, but I did mean it on a serious note. I understand the Women's Voting issue to be part of the overall Civil Rights movement. I do consider that to be an issue of great importance as a whole, but I though Women's Voting in particular was a midway type of issue. It had a greater effect at empowering women and their influence on national politics, but overall it doesn't have the impact of the Civil Rights movement in general. I apologize if I offended anyone in the process.

And also, I did mean to have the Harris Treaty on the top of the list as far as historical importance. It was the diving line between the fall of feudalism in Japan and those who took over in the aftermath were those who advocated high competition to keep up with the West. The treaty treats Japan as a stepping stone to Chinese trade, and I think it is a prime example of American foreign policy that is short sighted and always seems to nip us in bud in one way or another; American aid to the Middle East in the 1980s is another example. If the Harris Treaty didn't exist, Japan would have had more time to confront the United States on its own terms and possibly silence the internal conflict between those who wanted to keep Japan closed and those who wanted to compete. In the end, that economic competition led to greater conflict in the 20th century and directly influenced Japanese involvement in World War II, which everyone can consider a 10 on the scale. Just as important as World War are the seeds that are sown decades in the past. I just thought I would explain myself somewhat on here.

Brandon, I would have to agree that the Harris Treaty is important, but maybe not a 10. I would (from your brief) a 8.5 or so. I think it is important because, like you said, it sets important presedence concerning future US involvement in Japan. On the other hand, I wouldn't give it a 10 because it didn't have major affects in the US at the time. One thing to remember is our scale from class is about US history, not world history. If it were world history then I would maybe give it a higher rating. I do agree, however, that it is a very under-rated subject in terms of teaching goes. Which leads to another discussion, one that we have kind of focused on in this class: how do things like Custer's Last Stand get 3 days of lectures (seriously, in my AP US class we spent 3 days on it!) while topics like the Harris Treaty or the War Relocation Authority or the infamous Kore-itnam recieve very little if any teaching?

The master page of Wiki stubs for the class can be found at http://facweb.furman.edu/~bensonlloyd/hst21/stubs07.htm. Please look these over to make sure I have the correct link for your project. Feel free, too, to browse the other submissions put up by your classmates.

Ha, the consensus of historians. I agree, Will.

Does anybody know why Richard Nixon was ever elected President in the first place? I find it hard to believe that a Checker speech is strong enough on its own. Plus, "He is a very unpleasantman...What I never understood is why he became a politician. He hated to meet new people." (ATF 395-6)

What was his appeal?

Edited by author 02-19-2007 10:06 PM
I thought more today about Malcom X's call for separation, and on some level it makes quite a bit of sense. In a form of government where human rights were given to white males above all, it is very difficult to gain the same rights for a people the system was not made for. From his point of view, King was striving for political equality...if he was striving for more, he was going about it in a political way. But to Malcom X, it was a futile attempt to gain rights of being through rights of state. That issue has been debated by philosophers for hundreds of years; it still is to this day. So separation in that sense comes from the recognition of a flaw in the system; humanity isn't defined by the state, humanity defines the state. And political equality is a far cry from the equality of brotherhood. I look at his position as somethign more than just a movement. It's a system in its own right, and I find that quite fascinating.

I think Richard Nixon was elected because poeple were fed up with LBJ and the Vietnam War. They wanted a change so they replaced a democrat with a republican.

When I was reading some of the Ronald Reagan articles, I was suprised at how blantantly biased some of them were. I understand that it is ok to criticize a president on his actions during the presidency, but to do it without context irritates me. The article, "Reagan and the Salvadoran Baby Skulls" upset me some. I understand that, esp. in Guatemala, there was alot of violence. Reagan supoported General Rios Montt who was a religious fanatic and committed genocide. "While keeping the CIA account secret, Reagan permitted Guatemala's army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June 1981. Confident of Reagan’s sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its political repression without apology." It is horrible what he did, but you have to keep in mind that Reagan could have supported the communists in the country instead, who were being funded by the USSR and Cuba. Both sides committed genocide. It is hossible what happened, but you have to consider which was the lesser of two evils.

As you can read in Chapter 13, section 4, the Nicaragua government was overthrown by the Sandinistas, a communist group. Reagan supported their enemies, the contras, led by the democratically elected President who was deposed, Violetta Chamorro. Both sides killed and tortured countless people. It was the way they fought, and the US can't force people to fight a certain way, yet because Reagan supported one side, he is blamed for the violence.

Also with the town of El Mozote, El Salvodor, there is no reason that the Atlacatl Battalion should have killed those people, esp. the children, but it was how they fought thier enemies. Again, it was them or the communists.

I just don't agree with only blaming one side for the violence and death. Everything should be put in context. The article is biased and therefore hypocritical and inaccurate. I do think that we should look back on past actions and be critical to learn from our mistakes, but it should be put in context. I do not think that article does that. It is like saying we dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, but without saying why. Just don't mention that they attacked us and we were at war with them. Now I am not saying that the decisions that Reagan made were necesarrily correct or that I agree with them, but it all should be put in context.

With reference to The Landscape of History reading, I guess the most important thing that I got out of it would be the author’s views on how to determine what history really is. To me, this is what the entire book was about. Gaddis emphasizes the importance of breaking down history into smaller pieces in order to better understand it. He points out the need for the analysis of cause and effect both in a small window of time and in time periods that may span several years, or even decades. He goes even further to emphasize the importance of using models in order to figure out the causes behind certain effects and even the theoretical consequences of what may have happened if the past did in fact occur differently than we now understand it.

For the final exam, I vote to keep it in the same format as the mid-term. Because there is so much information on particular schools of historical interpretation and the names of the historians that supported them, I don’t think that an essay would even be worth writing if we were to do it in class. I think that the essays would be much more in-depth and potent if we had the option of using reading material to support our ideas. For the multiple choice portion, it might also benefit us to focus more on the causes and effects, social implications, and general themes of the class instead of specific dates because of the fact that the majority of class time was spent discussing the former rather than the latter.

I agree with Casey about the exam concerning the multiple choice. I do think thought that an out of class essay would be problematic just because of time contraints. We would have to write an essay and study for two exams.

I agree, I would prefer just multiple questions and maybe some short answer/identification questions. The essay would be tough since we would only have 2 days to do it, as well as study for two exams.

Casey, I like what you say about Landscape of History. The biggest part of that book was definetly about how history os written/decided. I really did enjoy that about the book since I am fascinated about the idea. I like how Gaddis tells about perspective, and how one's perspective can decide how you write history. For example, the further you are away from the history you are writing about the less biased your view tends to be. You really do have to distance yourself from history, not only to create a more objective and less biased viewpoint (to remove all bias is impossible), but also create a bigger picture and more fully explain what you are writing about. Like Micheavelli says: "to know well the nature of peoples one needs to be a prince, and to know well the nature of princes one needs to be of the people."

In reading Gaddis' Landscape of History I found one quote very interesting, "The trouble with the future is that it's so much less knowable than the past" (pp 56). Thomas Jefferson once said something that goes along with what Gaddis is saying here when he proclaimed "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past". We always know that certain continuities will follow us into the future, but people have the ability to change and better the world by leaving some of these continuities behind.

I have found reading this book to be considerably difficult as the author provides so many arguments for his points that it begins to run together for me. But, as I was reading today I did come across a pretty interesting quote that could even relate to us doing our research. Gaddis says, “Causes always have contexts, and to know the former we must know the latter.” In saying this Gaddis is essential declaring that there is no absolute truth due to the fact that he is declaring that everything every event is based on some other event. In order to have an absolute truth we must have an event that is going to happen regardless of what is happening during the same time or what has occurred previously. Therefore as historians we must understand that however we try to isolate an event it is impossible to truly find an instance that is not effected by various variables in history.

That's an interesting point, Miller. It makes me think of our group discussion today. In finding the "Ethos" of the sixties, we examined each event and (at least for my group) we usually ended up talking about how certain events were sprung from others and how, in some ways, they were all related. But for my post I wanted to comment on a couple things about the overall class. I found it pretty interesting (though strenuous at times) to be studying "schools of historians" and how each school examined history a little differently. This to me reinforced the idea that all historians are a product of their time period. Another interesting thing that we just could not seem to avoid in this class was the idea of the Jeremiah. This idea was new to me and I found it pretty fascinating how many different people in history used it either as an excuse or a reason to support their cause. It provided some proof that no matter how different eras seem to be, there are always some common threads that are consistent in progressing times.