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David Hilton

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Young Minds Force-Fed With Indigestible Texts - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As for the teaching of history, Ms. Ravitch argues, the sort of censorship being practiced today by textbook publishers can result in all manner of distortions and simplifications. For instance, to insist that depictions of women as nurses, elementary-school teachers, clerks, secretaries, tellers and librarians perpetuate demeaning stereotypes is to minimize ''the barriers that women faced,'' and to pretend ''that the gender equality of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was a customary condition in the past.''
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    I wonder what everyone else thinks of this type of criticism of education today. Are we watering-down the curriculum due to ideological pre-occupations?
Ian Gabrielson

Why Are They Talking? - 3 views

  • Community-based oral history projects, often seeking to enhance feelings of local identity and pride, tend to side step more difficult and controversial aspects of a community's history, as interviewer and narrator collude to present the community's best face.
  • More practically, narrators whose interviews are intended for web publication, with a potential audience of millions, are perhaps more likely to exercise a greater degree of self-censorship than those whose interviews will be placed in an archive, accessible only to scholarly researchers. Personal motives too can color an interview.
Aaron Shaw

Popular: Did Marie-Antoinette really say "Let them eat cake"? - 10 views

  • in fact, Marie-Antoinette was a generous patron of charity and other members of the royal family were often embarrassed or irritated by her habit of bursting into tears when she heard of the plight of the suffering poor. There's also a problem with dates. During Louis the Sixteenth's time as king, there was only one case of bread shortages in Paris and that was shortly after his coronation. Marie-Antoinette was eighteen at the time and when she heard about the people's unhappiness at the food situation, she wrote a letter about it back to her mother in Austria, in which she said, "We are more obliged than ever to work for the people's happiness. The King seems to understand this truth; as for myself, I know that in my whole life (even if I live for a hundred years) I shall never forget". Marie-Antoinette's personality therefore seems to have been the exact opposite of someone who would joke about the starving poor.
  • The story of a princess joking "let them eat cake" had actually been told many years before Marie-Antoinette ever arrived in France, as a young princess of fourteen in 1770. Her brother-in-law, the Count of Provence, who hated her, later said that he heard the story as a child, long before his brother ever married Marie-Antoinette. The count claimed that the version he heard was that the woman who made the comment had been his great-great-great grandmother, Maria-Teresa of Spain, who advised peasants to eat pie crust (or brioche) during bread shortages. A French socialite, the Countess of Boigne, said she'd heard that it had been Louis the Sixteenth's bitter aunt, Princess Victoria, and the great philosopher, Rousseau, wrote that he had heard the "let them eat cake" story about an anonymous great princess. Rousseau wrote this story in 1737 - eighteen years before Marie-Antoinette was even born!
    • Aaron Shaw
       
      This is quite interesting. Many of my AP Euro students enjoy thinking it was the queen. This will give them something to "chew" on, and allow for a teachable moment. As another great Philosophe suggested we should accept nothing as truth except our own existance.
  • Others think that because the French Revolution was able to dress itself up as the force that brought freedom and equality to Europe, it had to justify its many acts of violence and terror. Executing Marie-Antoinette at the age of thirty-seven and leaving her two children as shivering, heart-broken orphans in the terrifying Temple prison, suggested that the Revolution was a lot more complicated than its supporters like to claim. However, if Marie-Antoinette is painted as stupid, deluded, out-of-touch, spoiled and selfish, then we're likely to feel a lot less pity when it comes to studying her death. If that was the republicans' intention, then they did a very good job. Two hundred years later and the poor woman is still stuck with a terrible reputation, and a catchphrase, that she certainly doesn't deserve.
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    As a student and teacher of, among other things, propaganda and censorship, I think this is a great example for students to play with in thinking about how 'truth' gets established, politically and historically. In discussing nationalism I often talk about the importance of political myth in establishing identities, and here is a powerful example of a myth that became hegemonic.
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