BY HANK REICHMAN The other day, as part of an informal self-reeducation in American history prompted by our current political fix, I was rereading after many decades Richard Hofstadter’s 1948 The American Political Tradition, a series of portraits of leading American politicians from the founders to FDR. Only one of Hofstadter’s subjects, the abolitionist Wendell…
BY AARON BARLOW David Brooks writes in today’s The New York Times of “the fact that we’ve regressed from a sophisticated moral ethos to a primitive one.” This has always been a favorite conservative trope, that we should yearn for the beliefs and coherences of yesteryear. Yet it has no truth behind it, as any…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a statement issued August 28 by the Council of the American Historical Association. The AHA is also compiling an ongoing bibliography of the diverse perspectives of AHA members. The American Historical Association welcomes the emerging national debate about Confederate monuments. Much of this public statuary…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Some links to resources of possible interest: Women’s History Month; National Women’s History Project; New York Times Learning Network: Celebrate Women’s History Month; Smithsonian Education: Women’s History Teaching Resources; Science NetLinks: Women’s History Month; National Education Association: Women’s History Month in the Classroom;
POSTED BY JOERG TIEDE The following resolution was adopted by the Fifty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors on April 17, 1971. Misconceptions of tenure are commonplace. For many groups and individuals tenure has become a conveniently simple explanation for what they perceive as a variety of educational ills. Tenure is not the…
BY AARON BARLOW Teaching the Alien and Sedition Acts to my journalism students the other day, I concentrated on this passage: The vituperative quality of the opposition press began to worry even the Federalists more and more, especially President Adams (even though the Federalist press was doing pretty much the same thing). A touchy and…
BY JOERG TIEDE If teachers do not stand fighting in the front rank for freedom of intelligence, the cause of the latter is well-nigh hopeless, and we are in for that period of intimidation, oppression, and suppression that goes, and goes rightly, by the name of Fascism and Nazi-ism. — John Dewey, 1935 The American Association of…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Timothy Snyder is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is the author of six highly praised works in European history, including most recently the award-winning Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth: The Holocaust…
BY HANS-JOERG TIEDE Anton Julius Carlson served as AAUP president from 1936 to 1938. He was once described by another former AAUP president as the Association’s “war horse” of that period of time, serving on Committee B on Freedom of Speech and on a total of four investigative committees between 1930 and 1941. Carlson chaired the famous…