Raymond Blair

Mike, That is in interesting interpretation. I usually hear it the other way. That LBJ was hoping to focus on his War on Poverty but he got drawn into the War in Vietnam. I am not sure how the Vietnam War would help the Great Society programs. MLK Jr. made a clear step away from the Johnson administration by complaining that young black lives were being drawn into Vietnam and not being well supported at home as the focus was lost on Great Society programs. Johnson and the liberal democratic party wing was committed to out Cold Warrior the Republicans. That meant, no matter what the situation take a stand to avoid any more China's and Cuba's. His style was more the bull in a China shop variety, and that is how our policies applied themselves in Vietnam. I write this not to correct you, but to share my academic impressions of a war that I was born during. Any added insight on how the Great Society was dependent on the Vietnam War?

I am a teacher of history in the United States. I cover the Watergate scandal at least one week of every year. I had some success with a power point presentation this year.

I am a teacher of history in the United States. I cover the Watergate scandal at least one week of every year. I had some success with a power point presentation this year.

The domino theory and the theory of containment that were the basis of US foreign policies were not wholesale failures. Vietnam was a bad war, but to wholly read Vietnam's recent turnaround as the proof that trying to fight in the name of the domino theory was wrong is not something to accept without qualification. The region did become quite destabilized and the oppression of the liberation communist nationalist forces was so horrific that tens of thousands of people chose to jump on boats and take their chances on the open sea than their chances with the Communist government. The Khmer Rouge and the Pathet Lao caused real damage in the neighboring countries of Laos and Thailand. I think the United States was guilty of ignorance in applying the containment theory in SE Asia. We misunderstood the local cultures in part because of arrogance and in part because local flavors did not matter if communism was a monolithic transcendent force. We needed more 14 points and less anti-communism. When the United States stopped the 1956 elections it failed in its essential foreign policy of idealism. We were not making SE asai safe for democracy we were trying to stop the spread of communism. That Ho Chi Minh was a legitimate national hero did not stop us from financing the French Indochina war for Cold War reasons and it did not stop us from oppsing his political persuasion instead of his legitimacy. I would argue that in the climate of the time, the United States had to learn the hard way the failings of its Cold War foreign policy. Namely that the enemy of our enemy can be our worst enemy. The Diem government was fatally corrupt and oppressive and the US failed to try to understand that. But the rise of communist parties in the neighborhood during the conflict seems to give the domino theory some credence in my book.

John, this debate has been one of my lingering to-do list items for some time. I have been trying to figure out what I would consider a more ideal education system for my students. And there are always the fears of minus-sum tradeoffs or unintended consequences to slow me. One of my previous points I was trying to emphasize is that I am limited significantly by the structure in which I find myself. Someone else has chosen my classroom size, the length of class period, and the meeting schedule for my class. I also have a list of responsibilities for any given day at work. I feel very pressed to keep up with my present workload and it keeps increasing every year. I have placed high priority on making my students write and write often. I sometimes dream of a more open environment in which I assign my students material and have them come back in tutorial or small group sessions to discuss there individual journey through the material and prompt them with follow up questions. But no one is seriously discussing moving to a tutorial system in my neighborhood. I also have a strong conservative streak in me when it comes to education. This conservative streak looks out at some very modest countries that routinely out-perform the United States in education despite our heavy spending on education. On the other hand our university system is the best in the world and our professors qualify to teach by virtue of their mastery to teach and have no required education courses. Quite often those university classes are chalk talk and independent outside study, period, with very little individual access to instructors. What does all of this mean? Well I don't know. I also coach tennis at my school. I have played tennis for almost thirty years and I am capable of being an effective private tennis instructor. We have another coach with many years of on court teaching experience. Parents and players often expect that their children will get a lot of on court instruction time from us during the season, and I understand this assumption, but it is wrong. Our season progresses very quickly. Conditioning, getting back in the swing of tennis swings, challenge matches to set the order of the ladder, and then a series of weeks with two to four matches. In between those matches we have light hitting sessions that can be tailored some to meet individual needs. But in reality, by the end of the season, if we spend one half hour of individual time working on tennis with each player on the team, we are lucky. I assume that every year I can be determined to have failed to helping my tennis players become inspired students of the game. In the classroom, I hope to motivate and inspire my students. But I stop short of placing that on my requirement list. I believe learning is largely self-motivated. Parents, friends, relatives, dreams, and teachers can be motivational in this, but I feel that I have done my job if I have presented the opportunity to have a quality learning environment and that I have challenged my students academically. In terms of life training, I tend to believe that a rigorous workload provides my students with their best opportunity to succeed in life.

Thanks for this link John. A very interesting site.

I am fairly saddened that this case has become such an incredible focus of the international media, and the courts, and the governor, and the Congress, and teh President, when it is fundamentally a family matter. I do not think any person in the history of litigation has had more due process done one her behalf than that of Terri Schiavo. She has been in her condition for fifteen years and the basis of the lawsuit that netted Michael Schiavo a $1 million settlement was the fact that doctors had failed to diagnose her bulimia (not that he was awarded for spousal abuse) The 1998 court case (8 years into her present condition) had contending family members fighting over her care. Her husband and other witnesses presented evidence that Terri had stated she did not want to remain in a vegitative condition without hope. She has been under the care of a large number of doctors. I think if you look closely into it, the weight of the medical profession has weighed in that her case is hopeless and that her body actions that remain are reflexes. There medical world leans overwhelmingly to the opinion that Terri is already gone and that her body only is being sustained. Since this court case there have been 7 more years of reveiws, appeals, legislative and executive action. Mr. Schiavo could have easily walked away and he claims he is trying to honor the wishes of his wife. He is trying to do what he feels he is absolutely certain that she wants. Sure he has moved on. It has been 15 years. I think the efforts to impugne his character beyond normal human weakneses and failings have been horrifically unfair. It is a sad story. The Christian Right to Life crowd has swung into a major campaign on it. The Republican Party thought they had a wedge issue that would work out in their favor to the point where President Bush flew in in his pajamas to sign the bill, but the backlash against this intrusion into family affairs and using the Congress to pass a national law for 1 person has been so extreme that Congress and the President have not have the nerve to try to use the bill. It is a confusing case, but largely because the attention has served to obfuscate the facts instead of to calrify them. Shame on the enternainment news media (as always)

If I may first gush, Dr. Hobsbawn, your writings played a key role in my education in history. I amused one of my PhD. (I never completed it) professors with my assessment of your take on Methodism, that you beat it like a piñata. I think 1989 was a clear turning point in history. We are in an in between period right now and my government has taken an unfortunate and unrealistic turn in the direction of trying to move forward with the goal of permanent global hegemony. US hegemony, like that of British hegemony of the 19th century, is preferable to hegemony of totalitarianism be it Marxist or fascist based. The United States could try to use its powers to create a more lasting historical legacy, a cooperative Pax Americana. We should aspire for greater social justice and try to use the potential of the UN (and the nationalism reducing trend of organizations like the UN) to help create a lasting peace. This war on terrorism we are embarked on does not need to be a war. Much better can be accomplished in having our country be more introspective and more honest about our country's negative impacts around the world. I probably am less critical of my government's long term foreign policy than you are, but our country does not often go out in foreign policy to create harm. At times conservative/nationalistic factions operate under dubious delusions. Attacking Iraq was one of those. The PNAC attempt to spread democracy to the Middle East has an imperialistic tone. Can democracy really be imposed? Can democracy exist in a place without an industrialized economy and without a stable prosperous middle class? Can good be accomplished while introducing a doctrine of preemptive war? Those in the Bush administration seem to answer yes to all three. I lean to the negative on all three points. I must go grade, but this is a great thrill for me to post in the same thread with you.

I speak only as a student of history and not as a member of any military organization. There I have no experience. I would stop well short of accusing Westmoreland of aiding and abetting the enemy, but I am generally mystified at the lack of criticism that Westmoreland gets from the war. Every year I show my classes a CNN video about the war. It has two quotations that disturb me about Westmoreland's character. (He, Vo Nguyen Giap, McNamara, and Clifford were all interviewed in the video.) One of the quotes was more from the time of the war (I think) and he talked about the actions as "being on a learning curve". I probably read too much into that, but it amazes me that he could be talking about American military operations as being part of a learning curve. By the time we send our troops into war, we better have a clear idea of what we are doing. A trial and error approach simply will not do. The second quote is similar to your description of the limitations he had on him. He talked about the orders he was under from his government. No commanding general should pass the buck to his commander in chief. As posted above, if he knew the rules of engagement would lead to a defeat, he should have forced a change in the rules of engagement or resigned. He consistently responded to every setback in his strategy by confirming in his mind that he was right and asking for more troops. In that same video he is quoted as saying that he knew what the enemy was going to do on Tet 1968 but that he "failed" in informing the public that he knew. So here again he is deflecting blame for the larger campaign for his perception of the media reaction to Tet. Tet was a military victory technically. It was a military victory in the same sense that every American search and destroy campaign was a VC/NVA victory during the entire war. It was a reverse search and destroy campaign. It was an overwhelming statement that the American plan was not working. Because after 3 years of Westmoreland's escalations and body count based search and destroy missions, the enemy remained as capable or more capable of carrying out attacks anywhere in South Vietnam. There are a lot of political reasons for US failures in Vietnam, but that does not exonerate Westmoreland from being branded an utter failure as a commander. We could have reacted very differently after we were fully committed. We could have stated clearly that we reserved the right to strike inside any country that aided, abetted, or sheltered communist/insurgent/NVA/VC supporters or sympathizers. We could have used a policy of sealing the borders and making the Ho chi Minh trail a non-factor. (We did have 550K troops and the ARVN to do this with. We could have invaded North Vietnam and taken that fight throughout the country and in this way keeping China and the USSR from having an easy way to bring supplies into the theater. Westmoreland should have insisted on a strategy evolved with the reality of that war instead of consistently saying that the strategy was on course and he simply needed more troops. Heck the buffoon asked for 200K more troops after Tet. He is comparable to the British WWI General Haig.

I think there is much more to it than this John. First of all, in the best situation of your examples, the student teaching others has a basic problem, what are the other students doing while the one student is in the 90% learning mode. I agree that teaching others is the best way to learn something. While "students being involved in an activity that is related to what the teacher wants them to learn" does seem to be ideal, it is dificult to find the right activities that create that more ideal level of learning. Often times these types of activities can fall flat too. I would argue that teachers use the traditional method because they come to believe it is the best approach to use in their system. The influencing factors include classroom size and number of overall students and the range of interest, ability, and behavior of students. Part of this is a structure that gives every class a small piece of time every day. To optimize the 75% scenario listed above, I would want to be able to immerse my students in the basic material with a reading assignment and a presentation, and maybe even a discussion. Then we could set out at an activitiy that inspired higher level learning from a student. Beyond the difficulty of finding such activities that work (I am sure if this method was more widely used great ideas would be easier to find and they could inspire other great ideas from individual teachers) I larger block of time would be necessary for this. For example I could see teaching American philosophies of government as implemented by Hamilton and Jefferson in one block lesson one day and following that up the next week with an formal debate between team Hamilton and team Jefferson. As with many of these ideas, it would be something that could be done in a cross curricular fashion, in this case with speech class, But how do you isolate all of the students that are in my history class and a speech class at the same time to take advantage of this always on the horizon cross-curricular approach and put it into action. Does it require new schedules every week? And how do we coordinate to know when I get to command the time of a speech or art or physics teacher to empbellish my material and when other teachers get to call me in. The school schedule and format itself mandates the dmonation of "chalk talk" (1) this was the way that the teachers were taught when they were pupils at school; many young teachers remember this and fight against chalk talk presentations but find themselves in need of the style to make sure they can cover a broad enough range of material in a given period of time. I don't think this creates a feeling that the presentation is the only way to go. I think most of us spend time trying to figure how to break out of the system. I don't rely on this method for 60% of my days because I was taught this way. (2) this was the way that teachers were trained to teach; I was not trained by our education departments in college, I was in the graduate school method. I had separate sections from the main lecture with free reign to try to supplement learning from the classroom. This was set up specifically for the socratic method. I found genuine discussion extremely difficult to foster in that setting. I didn't switch to chalk talk and present supllemental material, but I also found the session distressingly unproductive for the majority of the students. (3) this is the accepted way of teaching amongst colleagues - i.e. peer group pressure; I don't feel peer pressure from my colleagues to teach a certain way. As stated earlier I feel pressured by the schedule of the day to make sure that the basics are covered, and then much of the time for a subject I want to cover has been used up. (4) teachers enjoy being performers; I think this one is the least accurate of all. I love the idea of creating the self-sustaining chain reaction of a learning environment in which I could be like God in the Newtonian or Deistic universe, where I set things in motion and they happened and I as the clock maker was revered as the rarely present omnipresent creator of learning. I enjoy reading magazines and clicking around here on the Internet. If I didn't have to be "performing" and putting information in front of my students and holding them to task to do some type of learning for my subject, I would be a much more relaxed person. I do not lecture because I like hearing myself speak. I do not like speaking in public much. I lecture because I feel that it is the best way to ensure that a level amoount of information is being chewed on by my several classes and that we have a base of material to work from to use for testing and interpretation purposes. If my lectures were interrupted every day by on topic questions and those questions were anwsered eagerly by their peers and a real give and take in discussion was occuring I would be happy to give up more and more of my lecture time every week. Nay, ecstatic. Moreso, I would feel like the greatest teacher in the world. I encourage discussion. The students discourage it. (5) the teacher feels more in control of the situation when traditional instructional methods are used. There is a power dynamic in the classroom. There is a teacher student relationship. Teachers need to feel in control of the situation. Teachers should feel in control of the situation no matter what situation is used. My main point here is that there are many reasons that the lecture format is still used and they go beyond those five listed above. While our high schools are often assailed for there shortcomings, our university system has a much better reputation for learning. It relies even more heavily on chalk talk than our primary and secondary classrooms do.

When I have time in my course for 12th graders, I have a Bob Dylan song day. He has the ability to look at the problems of the end of the legal segregation era with an eye on the problems of a society trying to separate the interests of poor whites and poor blacks. Only a Pawn in Their Game is a great one. link I like to look at the transition in tone from Blowin in the Wind to The Times They Are a Changin to Ballad of a Thin Man. My favorite of his songs that connect to the threads of the dispossessed is Chimes of Freedom. Some days I can sneak this more obscure song in on the kids. link I think Bob Dylan 1962-1966 represents the transformation of the New Left of the 1960s. He reinvented himslef and evolved so quickly and his age gave him a voice of radical youth that was authentic and an odd combination of idealistic and disgusted.

This seems to be the problem I faced when bringing my Serb friend instead of my Croat friend to speak to my class several years ago. BTW, in class I spell Amritsar correctly. I don't teach much about Kashmir. It had a hindu prince and a Muslim majority. War broke out and it was paused by a UN cease fire in the 1971 war Pakistan let East Pakistan go and focused on winning in Kashmir (failed) it has been an unstable border with standing armies and guerilla fighting since 1948. the problem persists to this day, but it is better than 2002 (?) when there were obvious nuclear (nukular ) tests for intimidation and parliamentary bombings. My kids ask if there is a connection between Kashmir and a Led Zeppelin song, and Kashmir and some of their sweaters. Tho rarely do both questions come from the same student.

I would definitely say you have provided a comprehensive answer. I will try to print this material out to set behind my lecture notes to answer questions that hopefully arise in the future. I think my brief list of things that I make sure to explain include INC Mulsim League Jawaharlal Nehru Muhammad Ali Jinnah Amristar Massacre Salt March Lahore Resolution Quit India Movement Government of India Act/ Indian Constitution non-alignment Kashmir Indira Gandhi 1971 War Golden Temple Tamils/Rajiv Gandhi Write large it is a week of class material at 45 minutes per class.

I teach a course of 20th century history and my nashville tennessee (USA) area students don't have much patience for delving out of western civ. I spend every january completely out of western civilization as I am fighting Senioritis, a condition where students see college on the immediate horizon and expect to take a semester off. Anyway. Part of January I spend covering India from 1885 to 2004. What would my colleagues here on the forum find to be the ten most important facts to convey and explain about this period in Indian history? I've got my list and I wanted to hear from some other perspectives with very likely a better understanding of the subject. Thanks in advance.

First of all. A good link (apparently) for using while teaching Hawthorne Hawthorne in Salem The best tome I have read that helps explain the differences in colonial America split the region into New England, the Middle colonies, the South, and the backcountry. It is called Albion's Seed. Link There are a variety of things to take into consideration when looking at the initial formation of the different colonies. The southern colonies were generally set up to make wealth for their owners. The colonists tended to be royalists or cavaliers and they peaked in migration during the English Civil War. After the English glorious revolution the basic pattern of many of the colonies was set and they grew under of policy of salutary neglect by the British Empire until around the time of the beginning of the Seven Years War. Over time all of the colonies became royal colonies. Religion, climate, arable land, and the goal of the colony were among the different factors that led to different development. Economic also played a role. The poorest of British society could not afford to come over for the most part. This system was more set in place after the uprising of discontented former indentures and others who could not find easily profitable land (Bacon's Rebellion) The elite tended to be secure in their position in England and saw no reason to go to a cultural backwater in the Americans. They were above that. For this reason the American colonies tended to consist more of the middle ranks of society with more in common and less differentiation. Somewhat by luck, the impulse in America became democratic. As land was extremely available in the colonies, it was the many, not the few, who could exercise political rights as landholders. South Carolina had some of the best land and the harshest plantation conditions, many of its leading citizens came in from the island model of plantations from Barbados. Georgia was initially set up as a bizarre and misguided social and mercantile experiment to make silk (so as to not give $$ to the far east and wine (France and South Europe) It was a buffer zone so granting its utopian founders a place to try out their experiment with debtors and other convicts served the purpose of providing a buffer zone from the Spanish in case of war. Maryland was set up as a haven for Catholics (for Lord Baltimore) but quickly got overwhelmed by the success of the Virginia colony as aspiring planters from that colony search for land near water. North Carolina was an in between colony without good navigable rivers or large swaths of good bottomland for plantations. It was mostly a backcountry pattern of a colony. Pennsylvania in the middle was a gift from Charles II to the Penn family for their support in the Restoration. William was a heretic Quaker and he set out to create a colony of openness and tolerance. He was well ahead of his time and Pennsylvania alone reflected the freedom of religion that is present today. They had the best policies toward native Americans (save perhaps Rhode Island) and they allowed settlers from most communities to come to their colony. This helped establish Philadelphia as a thriving seaport, and it attracted a host of settlers that filled into the backcountry to set up a freer way of life. Freedom was more of a priority in this colony that profits for the founders, although the Quaker element held onto political power as long as it could into the 18th century. Delaware kind of fell off from PA later. New Jersey was part of a gift to the Duke of York and was a proprietary colony that became a gift to his associates including George Carteret, the governor of Jersey. It was an in between colony in the sense that revenues tended to come in import duties and the port cities of New York and Philadelphia captured the lion share of those duties. It was nicknamed the Garden State and now is the most densely populated state in the country. (And my birth place!) New York had been a Dutch colony. There the Dutch hoped to set up a system with wealthy landlords and tenants. But with so much land available to land lord class could not hold onto its tenants. With England's star rising, the aspiring Dutch Empire could not hold onto its New Netherlands through a series of 17th century wars and it was taken as a proprietary colony for James the Duke of York. The colony became royal when James became king. It is the northernmost of the middle colonies. These colonies tended to have better farmland than New England but shorter growing seasons than the south. They could produce food in abundance (wheat, apples and others) but did not have a need or the scale for slave labor. Their commercial centers propelled the region to some wealth and standing. Massachusetts was settled by two communities hoping to set up religious utopias where they would be free to practice their religion. This colony quickly became dominated by the Puritan (as opposed to the Separatist Pilgrims that came on the Mayflower) because of the size of its members. Its greatest period of growth came before the English Civil War because during that time there were great opportunities for English Puritans. They tended to oppose the royal families. They came in families and intended to create a sustainable community, not to find quick wealth. There was an attempt to create a theocratic government but the anti-authoritarian nature of its faith made it more like local democratic dictatorships. It was the congregation that was the center political unit in Puritan society, and issues were hashed out until there was a unanimous consent. People of other faiths were not welcome and did church membership was the path to political rights. Heretics were banned or if they kept coming back, executed. Famous dissenters Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson found themselves banished for their religious views and set up Rhode Island. The smallest and most defiantly independent of the colonies. Connecticut split off from Massachusetts mostly for logistical reasons. The rivers of the Connecticut valley poured out in a different direction. New Hampshire and Maine were both hashed out in the court rooms of England as to whether they were under the control of Massachusetts or they had been given out to proprietors. The court ruled against Mass. but the family that inherited Maine allowed that territory to fall back under the control of Mass where it remianed until the Missouri compromise of 1820. As the first generations of true believers died out, declension became a big problem. Those born into the Congregational religious community had not chosen a rigorous religious life for themselves and many could not meet the criteria for becoming members in the church. The Calvinists faced a strange dilemma when the strict life of hard work (idle hands are the devil's work shop) creating a burgeoning society of traders. The wealth created seemed to create people who were diverted by material things, but the material blessings had come by god's providence. New England became increasingly secular into the 18th century. This caused a difficult transition from Congregationalist rule that had symptoms such as the incident in Salem in 1692. After the Glorious revolution Mass became a royal colony (It had tangled with the government under the Restoration) and New England society evolved under the growing port city of Boston. In the country the existence was hardscrabble. The land was hard to work so it stayed in the hands of yeoman farmers. The system of even distribution of the land among sons made parents search westward for new farms for their younger children as they came of age and the settlement spilled into the west and south west. (New York, Ohio) New England merchants gained a level of wealth only surpassed by the wealthiest of South Carolina and Virginia planters (with slaves counted in as a $$ figure) Probably too much information, but I had fun. I apologize for any errors or misperceptions left in in my haste this AM.

At a site called America's Debate we are presently debating whether our speech rights should be legally protected when it comes to things like publishing blogs. The conservative view is that employers have complete rights in the area of hiring and firing and that while reprehensible, the episode of a woman being fired for refusing to pull apolitical sticker off of her car was within the rights of an employer. On another thread we are debating whether an Ohio bill that gives a student bill of rights should be passed. Should students be protected from instructors who grade against them for not sharing their beliefs. Free speech is a tricky area. I often find myself saying that freedom of speech is not the freedom to not be held responsible for the consequences of our words. In a world where corporations have the powers of small nations, I think the employee (and the student) in the above examples should have certain protections. That firing should not be for reasons of free speech that are unrelated to the job. (I lost the student along the way.) I believe that teachers ethically should not try to create a flock of students that share their political beliefs. That is going about things wrong, we should be trying to create free thinkers who have the skills to critical think for themselves.

Who the heck cares about debating the subject Don? If you are onto something about how the holocaust never existed. Document it. Write it down and provide the evidence of how this horrific example of mass deception has occured. I don't believe you can do it. But if you have something your work eventually will be received. If you'd rather engage in shadow boxing and mental mastrubation about hypotheticals that could have happened in the gaps of the available evidence and have a debate, you definitely have the wrong audience in me. To me history isn't Crossfire and punditry. It is evidence presented with believable interpretations. Ever since the persecution of Jews began under Nazi Germany, this has been one of the most studied subjects out there. All of us have the responsibility of looking at this information and finding it valid or not. But until someone comes up with persuasive scholarship on the other side that moves the collective opinion of historians of the world, I'm with them and I think deniers are crackpots or (likely) worse. Free speech exists out there. There is also accountablity for our actions and words.

Answer 1933-2005 In the information age you should be able to go find information infimitum on this.

John, I find it extremely difficult to believe that such a campaign could get the book used in class. There is little chance that the book is even on an academic par with a book by Al Franken or John Stewart. You are right to be concerned about our rightward turn here in the US but we still have teachers who insist on using accurate and diverse text books in their classrooms. (And parents, and school boards etc.) Talk radio can talk all it wants and they can show their power in getting an agendized book on the best seller list, but neither Al Franken nor this guy are going to emerge as accepted authorities for our history cirricula. http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods30.html edited to add a blurb about civil rights by Woods. This is also a good blog post about some of the views under the skin of the League of the South. http://www.acsblog.org/guest-bloggers-839-...rn-comfort.html And a book review by Woods http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/068...8936902-6714452

In the pursuit of knowledge we all must have a healthy skepticism and an open-mind. But we also must know when to accept a basic understanding and move on unless presented with compelling and convincing evidence. We can not progress with our accumulation of knowledge if we get mired in debates that have been thoroughly hashed out before. In terms of history, a thorough debate over whether or not the Greeks existed or whether the Egyptians came from spaceships, it not the avenue of my study at this point. In history there are always going to be dissenting points of view from the commonly accepted knowledge. I remain open to the idea that the accepted knowledge in any area might someday be changed, but there are certain arguments that I will dismiss offhand and consider the adherent to be have an agenda, be a fool, or have an illness. The area of Holocaust denial is one of those. In our present backlash against PC we forget that there are some reasons for operating in this world with civility. Not that controversial ideas should not be pursued but that we should use our powers of free speech or freedom not to listen to deal with people who want to spread hate or bile. When I lived in Alabama an organization called the League of the South (then the Southern League) was formed. Their premises about history were definitely revisionist (although not too revisionist from the local presentation of the history of the Civil War and its origins I'm sure). In the university community the organization got a lot of mileage out of the liberal attacks on their views and the hypocrisy of liberal ideology that supposedly embraces free speech but also pushes to control people's freedom of expression by denouncing certain ideas. These things should be allowed into the public forum, because, like the members of the League of the South when exposed to the light of the day, the other shoe eventually drops and the bile comes out a little more clearly. At the end of the day that is a racist organization that celebrates the good old days of antebellum America when blacks were slaves, or at least when they were properly terrorized into their proper space in southern society. You holocaust deniers have the right to spread your rumors about what happened, and you can exploit the fact that I wasn't really there and can't really verify what happened. And crackpot scholars such as you should keep mucking around in the crevices of history to fact check accepted history. But there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the Holocaust happened. The Nazi regime was a moment in history when people lost their control over modern Judeo-Christian values. The two major political trends that turned away from our established concepts of right and wrong or good and evil (Nazism and Marx/Lenin/Stalin/Mao-ism) unleashed more brutal killing on this world than any other forces. Jews were exterminated. The 20th century was riddled with anti-Semitism. Holocaust deniers are crackpots. The verdict is in. And the appeal will not be received in my court until compelling new evidence arrives to reopen the case. Until then I will see Holocaust deniers as racist, Nazi apologists, crackpots, and fools.

I had the displeasure of being around the genesis of the Southern League which was subsequently renamed the League of the South. I have not heard of the book or the individual, but the League of the South is simply a buttoned down version of a right wing hate group.

I use ICT quite often and would be lost without it. I use the internet for research. My students do so too with sometimes loose instructions and sometimes strict instructions. My classroom is wired and I have found that sometimes the best way to deal with a question that I am uncertain of an answer to is to google it. When I have a smart board working in my class AND I have a little free class prep time I use that for maps and image. Slowly I am converting my lectures into lectures with links. but that is a tedious process and I rarely am ready to use the links when I have a pre-linked lecture. I rely on my students access to internet technology in doing Current Events assignments in my 20th Century class. They find an article from todays news (credible, major source) relating to our current topic and they print it out and do a subject on it. John I have used your Nazi Germany site for a type of scavenger hunt to be completed in one class period and I used the JFK site for something similar. Both tend to be good days. This year I had most of my students use the Nazi links on the smartboard to point out something they found interesting. I used a BBC site on the Treaty of Versailles for the past four years but it was not available this year. I use films and videos in the classroom, both educational, network (A&E history channel stuff) and hollywood. I use a plagiarism check site called turnitin.org to scare my students from using the internet to buy a paper. I like the ICT best that I hardly notice anymore. The internet is still king. I wish I had more time to search for things that would be easy to use in the classroom. I would like to supplement my lecture material more and more with ICT. I would love material that has a strong overview but could be explored in greater and greater detail when students show an interest.

My biggest concern with ICT is that the more technology one uses, the more can go wrong. Shared resources cannot always be depended uopn to be available. I am very optimistic about smartboard technology and hopes it evolved fairly quickly into a easy touch and easy control with mobile pad to use as a whate board, internet access, and stored presentation device. I like to find ICT to use in the classroom but I find that I often can get more done with some creative thought and available hard copy resources. I also tend not to find the fit I want. In this way I think our libraries and book publishers are behind the times. While libraries have access to more and more extensive periodical databases, they could be stocking up on ICT deviced such at interective CD/Roms or better yet subscriptions to image and video/audio clip databases. Education material providers could be packaging these materials and marketing them much more agressively. It would seem that a combination ICT hardware, text book, and ICT files.software would be enough revenues for those businesses to go after more effectively. To date the ICT support that accompanies my text books is always full of promise on first glance and disappointment in reality.

My United States history class has just passed this period and is bracing for the Civil War. (Always fun to teach in the South) I don't know that I could have gotten use out of the full body of that material, but I could have used a good piece of it. We watch the movie Amistad every year before Xmas break. John that slavery section on Spartacus is wonderful. I should have set my juniors in front of it with our modile computer lab a day or two.

In my utopian/distopian school students would receive high cash rewards for getting As, teachers would have complete freedom of how to teach in the classroom, and they would be surrounded by a team of excellent, inspired, hard working peers who lived a monks lifestyle but with loving nurturing families and were content well-rounded people. The teachers would have little but yet want for nothing. Their surprise retirement fund would kick in any time after age 55 or 25 years service and it would be based on a percentage of all tax revenues generated by all of their students. All students would be treated equally in the classroom and those with the least ability who were able to earn D's in the classroom would be celebrated for there accomplishments. The courses would be content and work laden to prepare students for the real world that will ultimately await them. Students would be advised throughout their education that an inability to maintain a B average, no matter how difficult the school, would not be eligible for university level work. Parents, administrators and teachers would all provide every effort to get every student across that line. A love of learning would be encouraged but the main focus would be to instill a core education. Ample periphery electives would be available for those who learn along the way that they have no love of classical learning. Arts, shop, vocation, business, life skills, etc. would be offered. Society would recognize a value in graduating from such high schools and gobble those up in the work force who chose not to go on to college, and many of those high school graduates that opted not to go on to college or were ineligible to do so, would go on to have extremely lucrative careers. End of utop/distopic rant.