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Bennett vs. Zinn
Theme Overview
"The American story is color-blind."
At least that's what former education secretary and conservative icon Bill Bennett said in his keynote address at last year's National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference.
Bennett's point was that U.S. history should be taught, as the preamble to the Constitution would have it, in a "We the people..." sort of way.
Educators should not, in Bennett's view, teach black history, women's history, or Native American history but plain old American history.
Howard Zinn Discusses Citizenship
(© 2003 Getty Images, Inc.)
Speaking at the same conference, progressive historian and social activist Howard Zinn said there could be no single narrative of American history because Americans experienced their history in such radically different ways. It's misleading, Zinn said, simply to assert that the United States won the Revolutionary War.
For Native Americans, after all, that "victory" marked an end to the few protections they'd enjoyed under British rule. Using activities from this new edition of History Happenings, encourage your students to weigh in on this debate. Do they agree more with Bennett or Zinn in their take on American history?
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Pulling a Fast One
History Study Center
When is empty land not empty? When there are people in it.
Why, Zinn asked in his NCSS address, do we continue to teach the Louisiana Purchase as a benign acquisition of empty land? It makes no sense, he suggested, because the land was not "empty" (there were a hundred thousand people already living there), and its acquisition was not "benign" (not for thousands of Africans and Native Americans at any rate).
Map showing land acquired in Louisiana Purchase
(© Helicon Publishing)
In this new activity from ProQuest's History Study Center, decide for yourself how history should view the Louisiana Purchase.
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July 12 & December 27
World Conflicts Today
The correlation isn't perfect. But, as a general rule, American conservatives unreservedly support the Israeli government's policies, while American liberals have concerns. That said, Americans of all political stripes have tended to accept the following:
- The Israeli-Hezbollah war started on July 12, 2006.
- The Israeli-Hamas war started on December 27, 2008.
A Lebanese man carries a child killed in Israeli air strikes
(© Getty Images, Inc.)
In this new activity from World Conflicts Today, see how consideration of other perspectives—the Lebanese and Palestinian perspectives—may shake your faith in these apparently simple and uncontroversial facts.
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"The aggressor will be confronted heroically."
SIRS Decades
On October 14, 1962, two U.S. spy planes took photographs of Soviet scientists installing nuclear missile bases in Cuba. Accounts of the crisis that followed—which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war—have typically focused on the actions of government leaders in Washington and Moscow.
Editorial cartoon satirizing Cuba's close relationship with the Soviets
(© Washington Post)
But what of the Cubans? Should the history of the Cuban Missile Crisis really be told without their perspective?
Explore these questions in a new activity from SIRS Decades.
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Taliban Makeover
ProQuest Historical Newspapers
The elasticity of historical interpretation is a product not just of diverse perspectives and competing interests but also of time. In this new activity from ProQuest's Historical Newspapers Graphical, see how American perceptions of the Taliban differed in the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 eras.
Keyword searches in ProQuest's Historical Newspapers reveal that between January 1 and September 10, 2001, articles mentioning the Taliban appeared in the New York Times and the Guardian, a British paper, at a rate of 1.42 per day. Unsurprisingly, after the al-Qa‘ida attacks, that number shot up.
Between September 11 and December 31, 2001, articles mentioning the Taliban appeared in both papers at a rate of 24.05 per day and, what's more, the focus had changed. Before 9/11, nearly 45% of the Taliban articles also contained the words "women" or "female," while only 17% also contained the words "terrorist" or "terrorism."
After 9/11, the ratio shifted dramatically, with more than 53% of the Taliban articles now containing the words "terrorist" or "terrorism" and only about 25% containing the words "women" or "female."
This shift was also reflected in the headlines—where pre-9/11 the Taliban were frequently referred to as an "army" and post-9/11 they were almost unfailingly called terrorists—and in the photographs. Here, the shift was subtle but unmistakable.
Before the attacks, the Taliban and their supporters were typically shown looking away from the camera (see below), suggesting that the Taliban phenomenon was an Afghan thing with little strategic relevance beyond Afghanistan's borders.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers / Guardian
(May 21, 2001)
After the attacks, more pictures showing Taliban supporters staring directly at the camera were published (see picture below), reinforcing the notion—frequently articulated by Western leaders—that the Taliban posed a genuine threat to the world.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers / Guardian
(September 17, 2001)
Something similar occurred in the photographs' captions.
Activity:
Find five photographs of the Taliban published in U.S. newspapers before 9/11 and five more published after 9/11. List both sets of captions, then, with reference only to these captions, write a 250-word essay describing differences in the way the Taliban were portrayed before and after 9/11.
If you found this exercise instructive, check out ProQuest's new video series, narrated by Adam Blackwell, the author of our History Happenings email newsletters:
Captioning the Taliban:
Teaching Students How to
"Read" Historical Photographs
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