AHA and History Teaching in the News

Posted on September 20, 2024 by briansandberg

The American History Association and high school history teaching are in the news once again as the so-called “Culture Wars” continue to rage across the nation. History and Social Sciences teachers and their curricula often find themselves in the crosshairs of political activists and protesters from diverse ideological perspectives.

The New York Times reports that “as printed textbooks increasingly gather dust in classroom bookshelves, a new and expansive survey published on Thursday finds that social studies teachers are turning to digital sources and primary documents from the nation’s past.”

According to the New York Times, “While the most popular curriculum providers are not ideologically skewed, the report warned about a trend of ‘moralistic cues’ in some left-leaning school districts, with lessons that seemed to direct students toward viewing American history in an ’emotional’ manner, as a string of injustices.”

This news article is based on a new report on American Lesson Plan: Teaching US History in Secondary Schools (2024), issued by the American Historical Association (AHA), the flagship academic association of professional historians in the United States.

According to the report summary, “American Lesson Plan: Teaching US History in Secondary Schools distills insights gathered during a two-year exploration of secondary history education to illuminate the three levels where decisions are made about what students learn in US history: the state, the district, and the teacher. Combining a 50-state appraisal of standards and legislation with a nine-state dive into local contexts, we commissioned a survey of over 3,000 middle and high school US history educators, conducted long-form interviews with over 200 teachers and administrators, and collected thousands of pages of instructional materials from small towns to sprawling suburbs to big cities.”

The report is available on the New York Times website. The full AHA report is available at the AHA website.

Posted in Digital Humanities, Education Policy, High School History Teaching, History in the Media, History of the Western World, Humanities Education, Public History, The Past Alive: Teaching History, United States History and Society, World History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Pager Attacks in Lebanon and the Laws of War

Posted on September 20, 2024 by briansandberg

Massive and coordinated communication device attacks on Hezbollah members and civilians in Lebanon this week have killed at least 36 people and injured over 3,000. The attacks were carried out by detonating explosives hidden in pagers and hand-held radios in two waves of simultaneous explosions. Israeli military and/or security services are widely suspected to have orchestrated the attacks.

Many Lebanese civilians were injured and killed in the attacks, including a 9-year old girl who was killed in her family’s kitchen. A video of the explosion of a pager worn by a man shopping in a supermarket shows how everyday civilian sites across Lebanon have been turned into bombing sites. The massive scale and indiscriminate nature of the attacks have shocked Lebanese communities and disturbed outside observers.

Still image from video of pager explosion in a Lebanese supermarket. BBC.

News reports rightly describe the attacks as unprecedented, since this form of attack seems as novel and disturbing as the use of commercial airlines as flying bombs during the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Indeed, the attacks could potentially be classified as acts of terrorism, despite the effective state of war between the state of Israel and Hezbollah.

Ambulance responding to pager attacks in Beirut, Lebanon. AP.

International lawyers, political scientists, and historians of war, and violence studies scholars are already considering the pager attacks and their significance.

Legal expert Brian Finucane has written an initial analysis of the pager attacks in Lebanon, focusing on their legal implications. Finucane is a senior adviser with the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law. His article explores how various aspects of the attacks may be considered under the laws of war and international law.

Finucane argues that “the attacks raise concerns about civilian harm and whether further escalation in the hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah is likely to ensue. Alongside those concerns, the exploding pagers in Lebanon raise a number of factual and legal questions related to the law of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law (IHL), given that Israel and Hezbollah are engaged in an ongoing armed conflict.”

The legal issues related to the laws of war include questions of civilian targeting, proportionality, precautions, and prohibitions on weapons. Brian Finucane provides an overview of some of these issues in his analysis. Historians of war and violence studies scholars will certainly work to set these attacks into broader historical contexts of massacres, atrocities and war crimes.

Brian Finucane’s analysis appears in Just Security (18 September 2024). He was interviewed today (20 September 2024) on NPR. Axios reports using anonymous sources on Israel’s planning of the attacks. The BBC and other news organizations have posted the video of a pager exploding in a supermarket. The New York Times reports on the funeral of a 9-year old girl killed in the attacks.

Update: since the publication of this essay, Michael Walzer, a noted scholar of just war issues has published an op-ed on the pager attacks in the New York Times.

Posted in Arms Control, Atrocities, Civilians and Refugees in War, Gender and Warfare, History of Violence, Human Rights, Laws of War, Political Theory, Religious Violence, Security Studies, Strategy and International Politics, Terrorism, War and Society, War, Culture, and Society, World History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Roman Colosseum and Gladiator II

Posted on September 17, 2024 by briansandberg

The Colosseum will soon be on the big screen once again. The feature film Gladiator II is set for release to movie theaters this fall.

According to the New York Times, “When ‘Gladiator’ was released in 2000, fans and critics applauded its visual effects and production design, from the towering Colosseum to the detailed costumes and prowling tigers.”

“More than two decades later, the architects of that film reassembled for a daunting task: building a sequel that captured what people loved about the first film’s visuals, while also finding fresh ways to surprise viewers.”

“‘Gladiator II’ (in theaters Nov. 22) includes familiar elements — tightly choreographed sword fighting and lofty speeches about the Roman Empire — but it adds combat scenes in the Colosseum that include a rhino in one sequence and sharks in another.”

The New York Times reports on Gladiator II.

Posted in Ancient History, Empires and Imperialism, Historical Film, History in the Media, History of Slavery, History of the Western World, History of Violence, Museums and Historical Memory, Security Studies, World History | 1 Comment

On Judicial Authority and Insurrection

Posted on September 16, 2024 by briansandberg

An investigative report in the New York Times finds that Chief Justice Roberts acted personally to steer the Supreme Court of the United States to find for former President Trump in three major cases related to the Storming of the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021. The Chief Justice’s actions seem motivated by a desire to protect the former president from prosecution relating to insurrection.

“In a momentous trio of Jan. 6-related cases last term, the court found itself more entangled in presidential politics than at any time since the 2000 election, even as it was contending with its own controversies related to that day. The chief justice responded by deploying his authority to steer rulings that benefited Mr. Trump, according to a New York Times examination that uncovered extensive new information about the court’s decision making.”

Chief Justice Roberts’ unusually aggressive maneuvers allowed him to accelerate the timeline for judicial consideration of the arguments and to determine the outcome of all three cases.

Details on the judicial procedure and negotiations surrounding these three cases have emerged from diverse sources. The New York Times reports: “This account draws on details from the justices’ private memos, documentation of the proceedings and interviews with court insiders, both conservative and liberal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because deliberations are supposed to be kept secret.”

Judges, lawyers, and legal historians will undoubtedly be delving into the decisions themselves and the documents that the New York Times has unearthed.

Posted in Political Culture, United States History and Society, World History | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Rituals, History, and the Paris 2024 Olympics

Posted on September 16, 2024 by briansandberg

The Opening Ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Olympics were certainly impressive and have attracted sustained interest from cultural historians, political historians, sports historians, and literary scholars in French and Francophone studies.

Trisha Urmi Banerjee and Nathaniel Zetter (University of Cambridge) published an op-ed in the Washington Post, analyzing the ways in which the Opening Ceremonies at the Paris 2024 Olympics disrupted Olympic rituals that stem from Nazi propaganda during the Berlin 1936 Olympics.

Banerjee and Zetter argue: “Few recall that many of the Olympic traditions we consider timeless — including the torch relay — are Nazi inventions. Adolf Hitler hadn’t wanted to host the Games; why dent his country’s economy to risk German athletes being outperformed by “non-Aryan” competitors? But Joseph Goebbels convinced him of the Games’ propaganda potential. Hosting and broadcasting a spectacular Olympics would prove the new regime’s stability and showcase German supremacy on a world stage.”

The op-ed emphasizes that “many of the rituals the Nazi propagandists developed with these objectives in mind were used again and again in Olympic ceremonies after World War II. Paris 2024’s Opening and Closing Ceremonies challenged this legacy with new styles of anti-fascist performance. Whether the organizers were conscious of it or not, the resulting spectacle disrupted the enduring legacy of fascist propaganda.”

The full op-ed is available at the Washington Post website.

Posted in Cultural History, European History, European Studies, History in the Media, History of Race and Racism, Museums and Historical Memory, Political Culture, World History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

French History at the Paris 2024 Olympics

Posted on September 13, 2024 by briansandberg

The dramatic opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics featured French history and culture in a series of tableaux vivants and performances that referenced early modern French theater and court culture.

Several of my colleagues in early modern French history and literature have posted analyses of the opening ceremony at the Early Modern France website. Therese Banks, Katherine Ibbett, Ellen McClure, Anna Rosensweig, Marine Roussillon, and Thibaut Maus de Rolley each contributed essays on aspects of the opening ceremony’s constructions of French historical memory. 

“Approximately an hour and twenty minutes into the Opening Ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics, the masked character guiding viewers through the spectacle runs behind the clock of the Musée d’Orsay. In the glow of the clockface, our guide turns the lever of a conveniently placed time machine from “au-delà du futur” back to the “passé.” A tribute to Georges Méliès unfurls. If Méliès’s early nineteenth century is the “past,” would the French Revolution—so heavily brought into the present throughout the ceremony—be the time machine’s “passé lointain”? Where does that leave Molière’s Les Amants magnifiques (1670), pulled off the shelves of the Bibliothèque Richelieu in the infamous “ménage à trois” scene? Or the jardins de Versailles-turned-skatepark divertissement on the Seine?”

The analyses of the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony are available at the Early Modern France website.

Posted in Contemporary France, Cultural History, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern France, Early Modern World, European History, European Studies, French History, French Revolution and Napoleon, History in the Media, Museums and Historical Memory, Women and Gender History | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Appian Way and World Heritage Politics

Posted on August 30, 2024 by briansandberg

The Appian Way is often considered the world’s first highway, and now it is officially listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The New York Times reports: “Known as the “regina viarum,” or the queen of roads, the Appia was built by the Romans starting in 312 B.C. to allow them to move efficiently and to conquer the south of what is modern-day Italy. Finished about 400 years later and extending to Brindisi, the road became an important trade route and an example of the excellence of Roman engineering. Many sections are still used today, running through fields, sheep tracks and towns. Some sections still have the original ancient cobblestones. Others have been paved over, including a long, straight tract of road, about 25 pine-tree-lined miles that run from near Cisterna to the coast, that was used to break 20th century speed records.”

Yet, not all the sections of the Appian Way have been included in the UNESCO listing, prompting disappointment in some Italian communities.

The New York Times reports on the controversy.

Students in HIST 110 History of the Western World I and graduate students working on historical memory of the ancient world will be interested in this article.

Posted in Ancient History, European History, European Studies, History of the Western World, Italian History, Museums and Historical Memory, World History | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Teaching Western History

Posted on August 30, 2024 by briansandberg

I am teaching HIST 110 History of the Western World I this fall semester at Northern Illinois and am once again revamping the readings.

I have decided to go with a new interpretive essay, Josephine Quinn’s How the World Made the West (2024), as the core reading for the course.

This work questions the idea of the West from various perspectives and provides a metahistorical approach to the history of the ancient and medieval worlds.

We’ll see what the undergraduate students think of this work as we move through the history of the West and the World….

Posted in Ancient History, European History, Historiography and Social Theory, History of the Western World, Idea of Europe, Medieval History, Mediterranean World, Northern Illinois University, The Past Alive: Teaching History, Undergraduate Work in History, World History | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Douglass Day Workshop

Posted on February 2, 2024 by briansandberg

The Newberry Library in Chicago is hosting a Digital Humanities workshop on Frederick Douglass during Black History Month.

Undergraduate and graduate students in History at Northern Illinois University may be interested in participating in this event.

Here is the announcement from the Newberry Library:

Join us for Douglass Day 2024!

The Newberry Library and the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH) at Loyola University invite you to a birthday party for Frederick Douglass. Although Douglass never knew his birthdate, he chose to celebrate every year on February 14. Please join us in observing this date by creating Black history together.

Simultaneously with volunteers around the world, we’ll participate in a transcribe-a-thon, using By the People, a crowdsourcing website from the Library of Congress, to improve access to the correspondence of Frederick Douglass. We’ll also be streaming music and presentations from the Douglass Day organizers, and exhibiting Black history items from the Newberry’s collections.

No transcribing experience is necessary! Everyone is welcome. You can choose to drop in for a bit or stay for the whole session.

Cost and Registration

This event is free and open to all. No advance registration required. Remember to bring your own laptop!

For more information see the Newberry Library website.

Posted in Digital Humanities, History of Slavery, Human Rights, Manuscript Studies, United States History and Society | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

French Colonial History Online Workshops

Posted on January 29, 2024 by briansandberg

The French Colonial Historical Society is organizing two online workshops on using documentary sources at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM) in France.

For additional information or to register, see the French Colonial Historical Society website.

Here is the announcement from ANOM:

Any graduate students at Northern Illinois University who are interested in participating in these workshops should contact me.

Posted in Archival Research, Contemporary France, Digital Humanities, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern France, Early Modern World, Empires and Imperialism, European History, French Empire, French History, Graduate Work in History, History of Race and Racism, History of Violence, Manuscript Studies, World History | Leave a comment