Raymond Blair

Ooh, throw in Voltaire in my party before anyone else nabs him

I too would like to have a free form discussion about a utopian experiment large or small I would like to have Gandhi, Buddha, Leonardo Da Vinci, Plato, Mozart, Thomas Jefferson, Rousseau, Milan Kundera, and a Francis of Assisi and Julius Caesar and Machiavelli there to keep everybody on their toes and we would all have access to spellcheck!

I find the stress of teaching to be like that of being sleep deprived. Every day into a cycle seems to knock you a little behind and you can never catch up. As it continues you become less and less competent and less able to do the things to the standards that you aspire to. Then comes irritability and the incessant wave of deadlines that come with each period with each wake up alarm and with each unexpected surprise. As a teacher in a private school I am provided with the environment that allows me to still feel that I can teach the ideal class. On the other hand as I become more and more of a part of the community more and more shows up on my plate. I find that the worst of the stress (and it is as bad as it could possibly be right now as our term is winding down and I have 60+ ungraded term papers while my peers walk by and ask me why I do such a thing to myself and my students wonder audibly what the point is) is the fact that the job is more of a lifestyle that hangs on over your head constantly. There is always something that can be done and there is almost always something that absolutely needs to be done. There is also the responsibility of being a constant role model in the way you teach, in your personal life, the way you talk. The influences you have on teenagers are pretty profound and it makes you definitely modify your actions and words. I find the most unfortunate aspect of teaching is that it absorbs nearly every ounce of my patience, something I generally don't sense during my school day but I feel it immediately as a leave school and spend time with my family. I leads me to unfortunate quips or to try to block out everything I possibly can to hide from my family and thoughts of undone school work. I have noticed that teaching has a much more demanding day and the outside society sees it as a part time engagement. Yet I don't know of many other professions where 5-6 hours of seminar/presentations are lined up every day. My wife outearns me (in her first year in sales) and she set 3 or for appointments per day. The responsibility of being prepared to instruct 5 fifty minute classes per day is itself a constant feat of management. The biggest mistake I have made by financial necessity (and yes the third child is on the way) is that I have used my summer "breaks" working as many hours as I can. I really need that time to decompress. But it seems awfully whiny when all of my friends in other professions have work responsibilities all summer. We do get a lot of down time. It is helpful. But, like now, at the end of semester with too much to be done in too little time, the stress of teaching makes you wonder. And then there is the thing that brings me to this site, where I search between JFK posts for ways to be a little bit better at what I do and to find in a community of colleagues a few pieces of wisdom to get better and better. Yet, teaching a class that is compulsory to standard level kids doesn't result in a lot of immediate positive feedback. This profession does show immediate results and one can devolve into despair wondering if one is making a difference, or worse if one is taking up space that could be better used by a more competent and energetic instructor. But i stick with the sleep depravation model, because with proper rest and real time away from school (prep, grading, seminars, and all) it is a great profession. One has to keep an open heart with the kids and fight off unwarranted intrusions into ones time or compensation. That's enough rambling. At the very least it was therapeutic.

I find this idea interesting. My present time available for creating publications is limited and I have no such project in mind, but I think the basic idea is strong. Ray Blair

Not that I teach much Australian history, but all I can say is "Amen sister!" Content first. Make sure the requisite materials are being covered and then figure out how to apply learning skills to that. Learning skills as the priority with the content picked based on the suitability to the intended skill is putting the figurative cart before the horse.

To quote the sage of Greenbow, Alabama, Forrest Gump, "I think it's a little of both." Only a fool stops learning. I tell my students at the beginning of each year that one of the values of history is learning how to gain artificial experience. As the stories of governments and societies from different times and places come through there are lessons to be learned. Think back to your first experiences in a classroom as an educator. Would you do everything the same way you did then? I can't and won't. I miss some of the optimism and fire in trying to find a style of everything that I wanted to use. But my first tries at things go much better today than they did then because I have more experience. However, relying on one's own resources solely is an ineffective way to improve as an instructor. I see myself as always being on the lookout for ideas, materials, technologies that I think will improve things in my classroom. But I fear that if I find a guru, or the all-encompassing curriculum aid, or the perfect video series, or the perfect website that worked without any adjustment or personalization by yours truly then I will have found the day that something died inside my teaching soul. I think only a fool would throw away his own experience. I also think it is a wise person that sees exponentially expanding opportunities in watching and listening and asking of the world for ways to do things.

This story is the common e-mail and part of an educational motivational speeches in education here in the states. I thought it seemed somewhat appropriate here. Link

I would look at the Atlantic Charter as a point of origin for the architecture of the postwar economy with an emphasis on freer trade. Case studeis should include looking at how the West German and Japanese economies were set up while under Allied occupation. They definitely were solid examples of friendly Cold WAr economies that could be put forth as examples of the economic superiority of the capitalism-heavy mixed economies of the "First" world in the cold war era. This link in the ever evolving Wikipedia format has quite a wealth of detail Wikipedia Here is another link for that Bretton Woods System Also, the fight to fend off communism from sweeping into Western Europe was not just poltical with the Truman Doctrine, but the very successful element of this program, which was based on the premise that economic instability fueled the communist movement, was the Marshall Plan. Marshall Plan 1947-1997 America and the West: Lessons from the Marshall Plan From Plan to Practice

I share your starting premise about the significance of Jesus of Nazereth and the even broader significance of Judeo-Christian values. People of conscience have used their moral beliefs to move mountains from the Quakers, to William Lloyd Garrison, to MArtin Luther King. Down here in the bible belt it is not uncommon to see bumper stickers with the four letters WWJD. Often the cars aren't the newest and biggest, and the riders in them seem to hold blue collar or big box service store jobs (not trying to sound like a snob) WWJD means what would jesus do? While I rarely feel I am informed enough to know the answer, I find it to be a good question to use as a refer to. I tend to inclusion in my ill-defined theology. I don't want a heaven that you can't get to if you are Hindu or Buddhist, are from the wrong side of the reformation, or Jewish. Others use moral beliefs to exclude or condemn. I read a passage in the bible the other day about Jesus cursing a fig plant when it had no fruit to offer him out of season. When he and his disciples returned that day the plany had withered. When they asked him about it he said everyone has that power to pray and move mountains if that be their desire, they simply had to forgive every one that had wronged them first. Another example would be the prosrcition against judging fellwo men. I don't see how either approach can be used while condemning others to war declaring others to be heretics and fanatics. Religion permeates our society and it has the power to move mountains like in the hands of MArtin Luther King and it has the power to destroy them in the hands of Osama Bin Laden.

Compared to the founding nation of fascism (italy) Hitler's vision was much more racist. Italy attached its fascist nationalism to a long distant period of glory, the Roman Empire. The term fascism comes from an old Roman symbol, the fasces. Fascism was aggressive in its foreign policy. A nation was to be tested in the field of battle and that was how to measure success. Victory was a part of the system. Italian fascism focused on conquest and the creation of a larger Italian nation and I would think that Mussolini hoped to have Italy take its place among the great nations of the world and gain the respect it was not given in World War II. Mussolini was not at ruthless or efficient as Hitler. He failed to make Italy self-sufficient. It agricultural systems were not sufficiently modernized by the eve of WWII and its industry still left much to be desired. Germany was in a different position. In their birth they became arguably the strongest power in the world. It was a mighty industrial nation that rose from the various German states and changed the balance of power in Europe. It wiped out the Danes, the Austrians, and the French in short order and proclaimed its empire in the Palace of Versailles in 1871. Yet, this period of military glory had a tremendous setback as William I blundered into World War I, defeat and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles. Some Germans, who had subsrcibed to the scientific racism of the Victorian era had to find a reason how their great nation, their great people, and their great military could have possibly lost. If it wasn;'t the fault of pure-blooded Germans (and how could that be!) then something sinister must have happened. In the search for reasons that the great German noation had failed, a key scape goat was discovered, German Jews. They were not German but they (banished from landowning in the feudal age) were well established in the key urban areas of Europe and Germany. These Jews were not really Germnas, they were from an "inferior" racial stock but also could be blamed as being sneaky and sinister in tactics. They had sapped the vitality of the German people and snuck anti-German messages into the media and undermined the economy through socialism and communism. Fear not, Hitler told the people of Germany, you are a truly great people and that would have shown through in World War I and that war would be a legacy of glory, not shame, had it not been for the Jews! Germany needed a scape goat to explain away its great national failure in World War I, and the 500,000 jews were a large enough segment of the population to blame and be able to effectively target using the techniques of demagoguery (sp?). As a minority without a clear identity in an ethnically defined nation. And, viola, the pseudo-scientific race theory was used to give the Germans a scapegoat in the jews and a target for "legitimite" place to expand in using lebensraum against the slavs.

I guess I am in the minority in saying that the United States and Great Britain fought for democracy in World War II. I think these countries declared so in the Atlantic Charter and did followed up this agreement by carrying it through fairly effectively. That is my argument for saying that Great Britain fought in the name of democracy. I think that an historical understanding of democracy also comes into play in answering the question. Democracy has evolved to mean a broader swath of a population over time. First white male property holders, then more white males, then issues of religion, race, and gender came into play in an expanding concept of democracy. This has been an evolutionary issue. Great Britain took the lead in ending the slave trade and slavery in the 18th and 19th century. Then she reengaged in a tremedndous expansion of her empire for pragmatic and moral reasons. David Livingstone and Rudyard Kipling helped publicize and legitimize the spread of imperialism. The Victorian Age was infused with racism (of the type that Hitler used to put in his concept of the Master Race) and Social Darwinism. From that cultural perspective Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem "White Man's Burden" to presuade the United States that it had a moral duty to take the Philippines as a colony. It was a point argued that Western Civilization was superior and it was only fair that the culturally "wealthy" civilizations take under the "less developed" cultures and take them from savagery to civilization. That this was a more liberal way of looking at the world is hard to understand from our Modernist/multi-cultural/diversity is a sign of strength perspective today. Many British felt that the goal for the empire was to prepare its colonies for self-rule. So the moral argument tended to be that these less developed peoples, like children, were not yet ready for self-rule. By the 1940s as modernism had swept out Victorianism the belief in moral superiority had to seem like it was being horribly mocked by the likes of Hitler. There was a debate within the British political system over how to deal with the issue of home rule as the Indian nationalist movement had usurped the moral high ground under the leadership of Nehru, Jinnah, and Gandhi. Using the techniques of nationalism and civil disobedience taken from western intellectuals and merged with Indian philosophy into a form called satyagraha the British seemed to look like the savage bullies of Amritsar and the Keystone cops of the Salt March. I think the irony of this question in my mind is that the naitonalist hero of World War II who saw the right side of the policy of appeasement and gave a strong voice of naitonal defiance to rally the people around the idea of risking the safety of the nation by keeping a defiant stance against Germany in the face of an invasion, who saw a vision of the postwar world that set the political and economic tone of the twentieth century. Chruchill was an old empire person who had a very difficult time seeing the light in terms of acknowledging an end to empires. It should be noted that in the immediate generation after WWII Britain did shed her empire in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, or at least most of it.

Of course you can, and having just been to a conference on Monday I would have been in your room had you been there. Nuts and bolts are incredibly important and showing ways to help prepare the foundation that will be a launching pad for teachers to take off from and add the whistles and bells to that foundation is something that would be of universal value.

I have not explored using either (I don't think) Web simulations sounds interesting to me. I keep my eyes and ears open for innovative, effective use of technology but I tend not to find anything that shakes my world enough to want to move to a new paradigm for large chunks of time. I love the smart board systems. I rarely have found any pre-prepared content that works for me (oh I wish someone would read my mind and make exactly what I want to use) And yes at this point I am reinforcing my current paradigms but remaining open to jump into a web site that provides and interesting and interactive fifteen minutes or so. This is a great point. I so often hear about power point as the system to innovate. I remember a college professor devoting hours and hours and hours in converting lecture material to a power point presentation in the 1990s. I was not his Grad Assistant but I took a close interest. Then when I realized that he was essentially making notes for his college students I was dissapointed. In his lectures I saw discontinuity between the lecture and the actions of the students who now watched the screen and copied it down. I want a catalogue of short clips or simulations that I can pick freely from from year to year. Show a short clip and ask my class about. It is the old paradigm, but that is what I want. I am very skeptical about projects and the difficulty in gauging individual particiation and quality of work. I tend to listen carefully and look for uses of technology that I want to use in my classroom. I tend to look for things that can be done to completion in 45 minutes. What I am doing right now with the smartboard is using it on google for images (of course the freud search brought up some disturbing images, gulp) and get photos and maps from sites and show them during lecture. The smart board is fun in that you can draw on the web sites and highlight points that support the day's lecture. I live in fear of the problems that come up in projects like that undertaken by Mike Tribe. We have a computer lab, I am online with my computer in the class room, I have a mobile pc lab for 18 students at a time. However, there are often bugs that come up in using technology and the make intricate of a display one uses in class, the more things can go wrong. This is my greatest limitation. The kids like using the technology. It is good for them to keep working on their electronic skills. But I feel compelled to stay on task and get content delivered. If I am unsure, I don't do it. Being more cutting edge compared to my peers is also a drawback. I tend to be the gunea pig for technology when I don't want to be. I need someone to come into my school that uses the heck out of this stuff and helps me see what works and what is not for me.

I assign term papers about Twentieth Century history every year in my classes and I hold them to the fire in terms of coming up with strong arguments/theses that provide historical analysis. I have almost gotten to the point where I am going to ban papers on the Holocaust or Auschwitz. The problem is almost that the crimes are unimaginable and the with the deed done students have a very difficult time coming up with an effective thesis that presents an analysis of historical significance. To focus on the effects takes the students away from the content they are trying to present. Ducking the thesis is the most common problem where they present facts from the Holocaust and let the awful truth speak for itself, which undermines the intent of the assignment. help, I am once again placing comments on papers trying to guide students with this topic.

The Democratic is in need of a vision of where to go. It is struggling from a lack of effective policies. I cannot think of one democrat that I have had the opportunity to vote for that I was proud to do so (and of course, that dem had a chance of gaining a nomination) The last great Democrat IMO was Bobby Kennedy. In the aftermath of Nixon, nothing emerged to take advantage of the possible collapse of the republicans. Clinton was a charismatic but couldn't get much done. The Democratic party has been a victim of its own success. Its legacy is the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's more controversial additions to it. The last great unfinished business of the liberal program would be a national health service but no democratic leader has the guts to argue that it would be in the best interests of the American people. LIberal democrats are left to caretake the remains of the New Deal and defend it from conservative revision. It is time for new ideas to address the problems of today and tomorrow that reveal the bankruptcy of the Republican program. Democrats are just to darned timid and they lack new ideas to move the country forward. They get stcuk with the lable tax and spend even though the pile of debt we hold has largely been run up by the republican presidencies of the last 20 years. No one seems to mind that the republican alternative has been to tax cut and spend. Fiscal conservatives should be howling at the moon at the reckless spending and pork barrel corruption srewing forth from our tills. But alas, the dems have failed our country and we have put forth two mediocre candidates to usher in the Bush generation.

I would think this is more likely to be compared to Dien Bien Phu if things go awry. The Americans are on the offensive and they think they are going to catch a large amount of opposition fighters on their turf. The French tried this and failed with more troops I believe. But personally I don't think things will go horribly wrong, I think the heart of the resistance in the area would evaporate and return when the strength of the American forces goes away.

Well I threw my vote into the wind but my state will pick Bush agin this year. Our election system dod not get effectively reformed in the past for years. Florida could happen again. The Secretary of state (FLA) has already been trying to make manual recounts against the rules. I hope people flooded early voting to find out if they had been expunged this year. Ohio seems to be an issue this year as well. The RNC has issued a challenge to 35,000 newly registered voters. Discarded democratic registration forms were found in Nevada. Of course, the Republicans got shafted in 1960 by Chicago, daley, and mob connections. I just hope that Bush wins the popular vote this year and loses the electoral vote.

I teach a twentieh century history class. It covers a history of the world and a part of that coverage is that of Europe. Europe gets much more play in its era of world dominance through 1945 than it does in the second half These are the European topics I include Victorian Culture Imperialism the pre war I Alliance system (with Balkan crises explained some) World War I Treaty of Versailles Russian Revolution (1905ish thru non-agression pact Interwar Democracies Rise of Fascism (Italy, Germany, Spain) World War II (& Holocaust) Cold War Decolonization Environmentalism (briefly) Brief postwar histories of France (Age of DeGaulle), Germany, and Great Britain European Unification End of the Cold War Disintegration of Yugoslavia as an issue of nationalism

My name is Raymond Blair and I am a history teacher at a private high school in Nashville, TN, USA. The fact that I thought I had already posted a full comment on this thread not too long ago may negate any reason to allow me to participate in this. I am active internet user and try to find ways to incorporate material available on the internet into my courses. To be honest this is something I am actively doing probably only once a month. The school I teach at was behind the curve on technology when I came to it so I am something of an expert among my peers. Out here in cyberspace my skills are what I consider to be much below average and I bring the insights of a user and not a designer or architect. I have used John's Spartacus site several times. We have access to a mobile personal computer lab, a fixed computer lab, and internet access on campus. Our latest new piece of technology is a smart board but our school only owns one. It is fun to use. It combines that active computer monitor for fingertip use during presentations along with the ability to use marker to highlight and add to anything brought up on the computer screen. I also am an active participant in a political debate site called America's Debate and I am one of the moderators of the site. I do not know if that is at all relevant for our purposes. I don't have the experience or skills of most others on this site, I guess my most valuable contributions will be an American perspective and a voice from a private school.

This debate is somewhat overwhelming for me. First of all it contains a level of self-awareness that is not so common among the teachers I know. It also contains references to several different types of education systems combined with several terms I am unfamiliar with. So in forming opinions I would have to be making some inaccurate assumptions here. At the philisophical level I think I am tuned into the aspect of this debate that touches on top level control of curriculum. The idea of a teaching environment where Margaret Thatcher can decide what I am supposed to teach with a group of politicians and someone who owns a castle it frightening to me. In some ways it implies that mediocre teachers will be employed and they need to be given detailed guidance in a command economy model of education. I feel that our school may soon have the same experience that happened at the American school in Madrid. A curriculum expert? Uggh. Must demonstrate an understanding of the facts of a certain area? This seems to be an example of content based learning at the exclusion of learning skills. But of course the very valid counter point its that an exhaustive unit on Nazi Germany wouldn't be the major project in three consecutive grade levels. Nico Zijlstra said this. This is the most intrusive guidelines I would want a national body to give to history teachers. I actually think this is a great approach. Content should determine what is taught and when, and some vaguely defined targets for learning comprehension are given. In this system a student would not be expected to turn in a performance of returning the political timeline of the Netherlands from the sands of time through the House of Orange to the Present, but to demonstrate an understanding of the significanct aspects of each perion. A hopefully as far as I'm concerned, the commission would never define what the main facts should be and that would be a debate within the hitory profession and open to variation as the field continues to evolve. Some of the ideas presented for teaching curriculum sound wonderful. A mock trial for General Haig or the Munich Putsch or practicing archeaology and history with the Tollund Man all sound like fantastic creative exercizes that would bring about long term retention. Similar exercizes I have done in the classroom are role playing exercises about Victorian culture, a classroom debate contesting the values of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, playing an Oregon trial game that highlights the pitfalls of life on the trial and sneeks in historical facts constantly, and this year I will probably be asking for advice on how to contruct an exercise to evaluate the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. I think that this is a horse and cart question. I think that curriculum should be laid out based on content and content should drive the history curriculum. If learning skills are put out first, then the teacher gets to pick and choose content with which to apply those learning skills and invariably chunks of content will fail to be covered and subsequent teachers will have to assume a balnk slate of knowlegde and give a background of anything they attempt to cover, or assume that content has been covered when it often hasn't been. So, I think curriculum design for history must first be content designed. And when a K-12 (years 5-18) grid has been laid out for what base of material needs to be presented, then the teachers who walk into the classroom still have the flexibility and opportunity to present this material and work on any learning skills they deem to be in the best interests of the students. My point here is that laying down content first does not exclude the apllication of learning skills. Working on those long term learning skills is a selling point to students who do not like history. "Okay, you may not like studying about the political history of Great Britain, but you are going to be developing writing, reading comprehension, analytical, interpretation skills that will give you a better ability to solve problems in the future and make a persuasive argument such as why I have earned a raise." In fact I think that history in itself is only a positive good if it is perceived that way by the student. But academically it is another way to create students with better learning skills and that is why it should remain as part of the mandatory core of classwork. After a school or an administrative district has laid down the basic content to be covered, then it makes sense to come back and look at what skills a student should possess as they walk out the door at different levels. At my school, since I work at the tail end of the academic process, I am trying to place a greater emphasis on developing reading comprehension and writing skills so that I see more students who can argue the significance of historical concepts and connect it to clear and effective examples from course material. And I also hope to someday see students that can create an effective thesis that can control a five to seven page paper or even a five paragraph essay. To me the pitfall of focusing on learning skills is that nobody along the way then will know what they can assume students know and holes will be created that may be a disservice to the student later on in college as they encounter material for the first time when they should have already encountered twice beofre college. It also allows teacher to focus on the more fun aspects of creating long group projects that make them college level experts on a few topics but the base facts of history are left unaddressed. So I am a content person. Get the content presented and when possible find ways to make room for deep projects here and there, but making sure that a critical mass of material is being presented and the students are being held accountable for having at least temporarily mastered the building blocks of historical learning skills, the facts of history.

I enjoy many sports movies. I love Bull Durham I think Field of Dreams is an entertaining movie. to complete the Kevin Costner baseball theme, I enjoy a much less lauded film, For the Love of the Game. Brian's Song and Bang the Drum Slowly are famous sports tear jerkers. Rocky I and II were good films none of those movies rank as high on my movie list as Hoosiers. Also I think Remember the Titans goes in the Hoosiers category of movie that rates among the better films period. If we are throwing in documentaries, One Day in September is one of the best documentaries I have seen.

I'd hate to think that cyber cheating would have kept Bush in sucha bad poition throughout the debate. I thought his performance was fiarly horrid throughout considering he was trying to stick to points made routinely in his stump speech that he gives multiple times daily. I think the Bush Administration revels in the depiction of the president aws a bumbling idiot. It sets the expectation so low that if Bush doesn't emit random bodily functions for answers he will be seen as holding his own. On the other hand they protray Kerry as a skilled master debater.

Their is something sinister about the intersection of our national politics and our tax policy. Politicians must stand for tax cuts and for adding programs. It seems to appeal so strongly to the American belief in the win-win scenario. Although the Bush administration claims to have a plan to improve the American economy, it is designed to help capital and it operates directly at the expense of the working class. 80% of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes. After the election the majority of Bush's economic "stimulus" plan will kick in and these will be the programs that provide tax benefits for the top .5% of Americans. Yet in the previous thirty years, while the bottom 95% percent of Americans (research David Cay Johnston for this) have experienced a negligible growth in their real income, the top .5% percent has grown tremendously. It frightens me how many parallels our econmy shows to the economy of the 1920s. Somehow, Bush's opposition can't make a strong advantage out of the fact that present policy will strongly tax the next generation both with debt and with already spent Social Security surplus that will be needed after 2008 as the baby boom explodes into the system of retirement benefits. Here is a quote from those 10 nobel prize winners link--scroll down

Three novels that moved my life are Catch-22. I read this first when I was around 20. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. spoke to me about the oddly appealing need to weight ourselves down to give life meaning. Read it when I was around 24 came back to it with as much meaning for different reasons when I was 33 or 34 A Prayer for Owen Meaning encouraged me to go into the teaching profession and to reexplore the possibility of the devine. first read about 25 or 26

I am an American history teacher so some of my commentary should be a little off target for reasons of difference in our systems. We use primary sources in the United States on our AP (where college credit can be earned in a year-end examination) classes in a fomat called a DBQ (document based question) I did not like documents in the classroom setting when they were heavily used in discussion sections in my undergraduate history classes. I was pleased that I rarely had to use documents for using documents sakes as a graduate teaching assistant. As a high school history teacher of general college track students I very rarely have my students work with primary sources. I think they are best used by professional historians in creating secondary works. I think they detract from the quality of learning in the classroom. (Generally) I like to use grander scope essay questions that emphisize analysis. I try to get students to write as much as I can because I feel, like many other aspects of the history classroom, it is an opportunity to use the history classroom to improve important academic skills. My narrative construction assignments tend to work along the lines of "Tell the story of . . ." Expected is a clear timeline in terms of organization, a reasonable mastery of facts and dates, and explanations of the significance of introduced facts in terms of the telling of a particular historical story. I am not at all sure this comment is addressing the proper issue. US high schools tend to require one year of US history and one year of World HIstory. Both are broad at the expense of depth. World History has gotten longer (every year!) but this has been a change from Western Civ to World History, so it increased in breadth. US has of course gotten longer as well. At my private high school, we have added another mandatory year of history (although recent administration changes and a new emphasis on a wider variety of electives may reverse this). This added year is the history of the twentieth century. This course picks up where both course left off around WWI and looks at the events of the Twentieth Century in depth and breadth. I thoroughly enjoy teaching this course. It allows the opportunity to delve more deeply into US history (more in depth social/economic/cultural forays) and more broadly at the development of different societies in the 2oth century (Africa, Middle East, Asia primarily) At our high school level, I use historical interpretation in the ability to write certain type of essays. (Compare and contrast, evaluate the causes/consequences, explain the significance of, tell the story of) Historiography should be left in the undergraduate or graduate level of study (IMHO). Students should simply be constantly be reminded through different presentations of material, that the historian is a human filter that presents bias in his material. History, like most all sources of writing, should be read critically and skeptically.