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Projects such as The Great War Archive, which combine popular interest in the war with specialist expertise, and which recognise that an archive is different from a tribute or a memorial, suggest that it is possible to create high-quality content based on user submissions.

the exploitation of popular enthusiasm to encourage thought, rather than to enforce the "correct" opinion

It is certainly true that the 1914-18 war is popularly seen as the "bad war" and 1939-45 as the "good war." I think the one view is sustained in order to support the other. Although no expert, it seems to me that in reality the two world wars were marked more by their similarities than their differences (Europe-wide military/imperial rivalry causes collapse of inadequate alliance system > Germany invades everywhere > everywhere invades Germany). However, there is an extreme reluctance in Britain to admit that WW2 was anything other than a Manichean struggle between the elves and the orcs, so WW1 becomes a kind of dumping-ground for a lot of suppressed anxiety and guilt which might otherwise accrue to our role in WW2 - just as it might in any war. So we make a donkey out of Haig in order to sustain hagiographic views of Churchill. "Remembrance" of both wars continues to be a central feature of British public consciousness to an extraordinary, almost religious degree, and I think this has a nostalgic angle as well: if "we" squint a bit "we" can still tell ourselves that it was "our" last gasp as a global power. Personally I think it's all incredibly dodgy. "Remembrance," it seems to me, is always carried out in a spirit of tacit acceptance that the "remembered" war was a good thing. Like practically all of the media representation of the current war, Remembrance Day is a show of "sympathy" for the troops which is actually about preventing objective views of particular wars (and war in general) from finding purchase in the public consciousness. It works because it's a highly politicised ritual which is presented as being above politics and therefore above criticism. All these things are ways of manipulating the suffering of service personnel past and present as a means of emotionally blackmailing critics of government into silence. I reckon anyway.

In middle and high school, that's where the loss of instruction time comes.

has to be an engaged study of the past.

[National History Day] is not just for gifted and talented students; this is a program that does extremely well with kids in the lower quartile.

riginal research, you have an opportunity to form your own opinion on a topic. You're looking at original material. They do have to read secondary material so that they can have context. Have you talked to any teachers about how they're discussing the killing of Osama bin Laden with students? What should teachers be saying to their students? What's the importance of recent history in history class? I haven't had the chance to talk to any teachers since [last] Sunday. But I can tell you that what I hope they're doing is helping young people put this in perspective. I hope they're helping students understand the history of terror and understand why 9/11 happened in the first place. You have to understand the history of the Middle East and the history of the United States' role there, so you can draw some meaning and understanding. Using the word understanding doesn't mean condoning; it just means you need to understand why it may have happened. See how your school stacks up in our rankings of Best High Schools. Have something of interest to share? Send your news to us at highschoolnotes@usnews.com. More High School Notes posts Reader Comments Add Comment Start the discussion! Be the first to comment on this story. var RecaptchaOptions = { theme : 'clean' }; Add Your Thoughts Title Comment 3000 characters left About You Name Email State - state - AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DE DC FL GA HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WY International Please enter the two words below into the text field underneath the image. Recaptcha.widget = Recaptcha.$("recaptcha_widget_div"); Recaptcha.challenge_callback(); Your comment will be posted immediately, unless it is spam or contains profanity. For more information, please see our

Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled "Advancing American Art", with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." The tour had to be cancelled.

This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s.

If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.

Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another

As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows. The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.

"It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."

Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA. But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.

for the last 18 months, I've been leading a project, based at the Institute of Historical Research, which is looking into the history of the teaching of history in schools in England since it first became a serious activity early in the 20th Century. And one of our most important discoveries so far has been the extent to which similar questions have been asked across the decades and generations, and often in complete ignorance of how they've been answered before.