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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.

"The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants."

neither the American public, nor the Cuban public, wanted to see U.S. troops deployed to drive out Castro. Reflecting this, the U.S. plan called for establishing prolonged military — not democratic — control over the island nation after the invasion.

a time when there was distrust in the military leadership about their civilian leadership, with leaders in the Kennedy administration viewed as too liberal, insufficiently experienced and soft on communism. At the same time, however, there real were concerns in American society about their military overstepping its bounds

reports U.S. military leaders had encouraged their subordinates to vote conservative during the election

One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base — an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.

Afraid of a congressional investigation, Lemnitzer had ordered all Joint Chiefs documents related to the Bay of Pigs destroyed, says Bamford. But somehow, these remained.