Humanities II

NewsTrust has created a set of teacher guides that will help you teach your students the difference between good and bad journalism. These guides include interactive lesson plans for college and high school classes in journalism, civics, social studies, communications and more

" Patrick Sharkey's look at neighborhood poverty levels for blacks and whites. This is from his deeply troubling book, Stuck In Place. There is some sense - and the president has affirmed this - that racism is no longer a real threat to mobility, that it is now class. This is wrong. And Sharkey's chart is just one reason why. Basically it shows that huge swaths of black people live in neighborhoods with poverty levels that virtually no whites ever experience. And this finding has been consistent across post-Civil Rights history."

"The bad versus good guys narrative reflects certain aspects of the U.S. government's approach to counterterrorism that are both counterproductive and deeply troubling. First, the term is symptomatic of the attitude that Americans should not ask, or seek to understand, the motivations of those who wish to attack us. To be sure, some politicians throw out facile statements positing reasons for terrorists' actions. In 2001, former president George W. Bush famously proclaimed, "they hate our freedoms." Earlier this year, during a radio talk show, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee suggested that Islam is inherently violent. Such two-dimensional explanations, however, do not count as serious efforts to understand the enemy. They are simply another way of saying "bad guys.""

McCain comments on the legacy of Giap who died recently. "To defeat any adversary, the late North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap permitted immense casualties and the near total destruction of his country."

"The New Deal, a series of experimental projects and programs implemented during President Franklin Roosevelt's presidency in the 1930s, was designed to help the country recover from the Great Depression. For African-Americans, those initiatives offered social and economic programs that helped many people stake a greater claim on full citizenship for the first time. The exhibition, "Claiming Citizenship: African Americans and New Deal Photography," now at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, shows African-Americans taking advantage of opportunities that hadn't been available to them previously. "You can see how during the New Deal the government was experimenting with the possibility that all citizens deserved education, deserved medical care, deserved food security," said exhibition curator Rickie Solinger. The photos are drawn from the Library of Congress and the National Archives."

"Our brains are finely attuned to distraction, so today's digital environment makes it especially hard to focus. "Distractions signal that something has changed," says David Rock, co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute and author of Your Brain at Work (HarperCollins, 2009). "A distraction is an alert  says, 'Orient your attention here now; this could be dangerous.'" The brain's reaction is automatic and virtually unstoppable."

"How can a "normal citizen" affect change? Our nation cannot maintain greatness without first admitting to these moments, reflecting about them, and committing to produce the next generation of thinkers to bring us forward. Boards like this are my attempt to create those thinkers. I'd look forward to any similarly-minded history lovers adding to these, commenting, or sharing some boards of their own in the comments below."

A little known example of moral courage after the Birmingham Church Bombing

A New York Times columnist responds to a series of criticisms and counterarguments to his support of a strike on Syria.

"In 2012, inflation-adjusted incomes rose for the rest of us, but only barely. Meanwhile, the richest percentile got a 19 percent raise. They now account for 22.5 percent of total U.S. income. That's the fourth-highest share in at least 100 years (as far back as Saez keeps track). The only years with greater income inequality were the two years before the Great Recession, 2006 and 2007, and the year before the Great Depression, 1928."

"A 2011 study published in Political Research Quarterly, "Does Foreign Military Intervention Help Human Rights?" examines the effects of foreign military interventions on human-rights grounds in 145 countries from 1981 to 2001. "The empirical evidence offers robust support for the assertion that supportive and neutral military interventions deteriorate the level of respect for physical integrity rights," writes the author, Dursun Peksen of East Carolina University. "Supportive intervention is likely to increase the predicted probability of extrajudicial killing by 103 percent. Neutral interventions … increase the predicted probability of extrajudicial killing by 130 percent." Peksen concludes:"

The 1999 airstrikes in Kosovo have been widely cited as a precedent for a possible Syria strike, but according to Rubin, who worked in the State Department at the time and is now an executive editor of Bloomberg News, the only similarity between the two countries is that, in both instances, Russia and China opposed the attacks. "Today, after more than a decade, Serbs and Kosovars are beginning to reconcile," Rubin writes. "Such an outcome in Syria is doubtful. The United States and Europe are at odds with Moscow, the Security Council is deadlocked, NATO has stayed on the sidelines, and the Arab League has been ineffectual. There is no strategy to achieve a stable endgame." Rubin recommended that the administration stick to the chemical WMD argument, and not base its argument on the fact that America has a moral duty to save lives.

"This second edition of Howard Zinn on War is a collection of 26 short writings chosen by the author to represent his thinking on a subject that concerned and fascinated him throughout his career. He reflects on the wars against Iraq, the war in Kosovo, the Vietnam War, World War II, and on the meaning of war generally in a world of nations that can't seem to stop destroying each other. "

"Congressional debate over whether to authorize the president to use force in Syria can serve a useful purpose if it forces the administration to clarify what it hopes to achieve by using force against Syria and how it intends to achieve that object: in other words, our political aims and our strategy to achieve them.  Specifically, Congress should ask the administration to answer the following questions:"

"Here, then, are the most basic answers to your most basic questions. First, a disclaimer: Syria and its history are really complicated; this is not an exhaustive or definitive account of that entire story, just some background, written so that anyone can understand it."

"This lesson examines some of the obstacles to equal education that African Americans faced in the 20th century, the segregation that triggered the Civil Rightsmovement, and the different strategies people used to effect change. Students begin by reviewing the basic tenets of the U.S. Constitution that guarantee equal rights for all people, specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment, which was used toargue the case for school desegregation in the courts. Next, students work in small groups to study the impact of segregated schools and how individuals and communitiesresponded. Each small group focuses on a specific response or strategy. Finally, students come together to present what they learned, the advantages and disadvantages of thestrategy they examined, and what they might do in that situation and in a similar situation today."

"On this day in 1963, more than 200,000 people marched in Washington, D.C. with that question in mind. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of that march, we're revisiting the articles written by four American icons who helped lead the country toward that historic moment."

"With his "I have a dream" speech, Martin Luther King threw out a challenge to America. How has it been met, 50 years on?"

"For 20 years now we have seen this pattern: Something terrible happens somewhere -- and what is happening in Syria is not just terrible but atrocious in the literal meaning of that term. Americans naturally feel we must "do something." The easiest something to do involves bombers, drones, and cruise missiles, all of which are promised to be precise and to keep our forces and people at a safe remove from the battle zone. In the absence of a draft, with no threat that taxes will go up to cover war costs, and with the reality that modern presidents are hamstrung in domestic policy but have enormous latitude in national security, the normal democratic checks on waging war don't work. We "do something," with bombs and drones, and then deal with blowback and consequences "no one could have foreseen.""