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Mr. Abiy succeeded partly by mobilizing ordinary citizens to take up arms to block the Tigrayan advance. “Nothing will stop us. The enemy will be destroyed,”

Drones have also hit refugee camps in Tigray and killed dozens of civilians. Despite recent releases of political prisoners by Mr. Abiy, which prompted a phone call with President Joe Biden, the prospect of a cease-fire seems distant.

The Ethiopian military suffered a major defeat in June when it was forced to withdraw from Tigray, and several thousand of its soldiers were taken captive.

But after he took office in 2018, he set about draining the group of its power and influence in Ethiopia, infuriating the Tigrayan leadership, which retreated to its stronghold of Tigray. Tensions grew.

In September 2020, the Tigrayans defied Mr. Abiy by going ahead with regional parliamentary elections that had he had postponed across Ethiopia.

Two months later, T.P.L.F. forces attacked a federal military base in Tigray in what they called a pre-emptive strike against federal forces preparing to attack them from a neighboring region.

The conflict threatens to tear apart Ethiopia, a once-firm American ally, and further destabilize the volatile Horn of Africa region.

Through it all, civilians have suffered most. Since the war started, witnesses have reported numerous human rights violations, many confirmed by a U.N.-led investigation, of massacres, ethnic cleansing and widespread sexual violence.

In western Tigray, ethnic Amhara militias have driven tens of thousands of people from their homes as part of what the United States has called an ethnic cleansing campaign.

Tigrayans make up just 6 or 7 percent of Ethiopia’s population, compared with the two largest ethnic groups, the Oromo and the Amhara, which make up over 60 percent.

But at home, the Tigrayan-dominated government systematically repressed political opponents and curtailed free speech. Torture was commonplace in government detention centers.

Mr. Abiy, a onetime T.P.L.F. ally, moved quickly to purge the old guard. He removed Tigrayan officials from the security services, charged some with corruption or human rights abuses and in 2019 created a new political party. The Tigrayans refused to join.

At the same time, he strengthened his ties to President Isaias Afwerki, the authoritarian leader of Eritrea, who nursed a bitter, longstanding grudge against the Tigrayans.

But by mid-2020 that peace pact had become an alliance for war on Tigray.

Children are dying of malnutrition, soldiers are looting food aid, and relief workers have been prevented from reaching the hardest-hit areas, according to the United Nations and other aid groups. Since July, a government-imposed blockade of Tigray has kept desperately needed aid from reaching the area. In late November, the World Food Program announced that 9.4 million people across northern Ethiopia required food aid.

The T.P.L.F. was born in the mid-1970s as a small militia of ethnic Tigrayans, a group that was long marginalized by the central government, to fight Ethiopia’s Marxist military dictatorship.

Ethiopia’s ties to the United States, once a close ally, have come under great strain. Mr. Biden has cut off trade privileges for Ethiopia and threatened its leaders with sanctions.

He freed political prisoners, abolished controls on the news media and helped mediate conflicts abroad. His peace deal with Eritrea and its authoritarian leader, Mr. Isaias, caused the Ethiopian leader’s international profile to soar and led to his Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.

But even before the war erupted in Tigray, Mr. Abiy had resorted to old tactics of repression — shutting down the internet in some areas, arresting journalists and detaining protesters and critics.

In a stark speech in November, Mr. Abiy called on soldiers to sacrifice their “blood and bone” to bury his enemies in “a deep pit” and “uphold Ethiopia’s dignity and flag.”

When Mr. Abiy came to power, Ethiopia was among the most repressive countries for journalists in Africa, and he quickly won global praise for a series of sweeping reforms.

But Mr. Abiy’s ambitious reforms quickly ran into stiff headwinds, including opposition from regional political parties and outbreaks of ethnic violence in several restive regions. His government began to revert to the old ways, shutting down the internet during political protests and detaining journalists under laws that had been introduced by the previous government.

After Mr. Abiy began a military operation in Tigray on Nov. 4, hoping to oust a regional ruling party that had challenged his authority, press freedoms deteriorated further.

Last week, government officials confirmed that they had revoked the accreditation of Simon Marks, an Irish reporter based in Ethiopia working for The New York Times.

In a war that has already caused thousands of deaths, displaced at least two million people and led to charges of ethnic cleansing, news media coverage has become a “very sensitive” topic for the government, said Befeqadu Hailu, an Ethiopian journalist imprisoned for 18 months by the previous regime.

Mr. Marks, who works for The Times and other publications, has reported from Ethiopia since 2019.

A day earlier, Mr. Marks had returned to Addis Ababa from Tigray, where he interviewed civilians who described atrocities by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers, and women who said they suffered horrendous sexual assaults.

Officials told Mr. Marks that The Times’ coverage of Ethiopia had “caused huge diplomatic pressure” and that senior government officials had authorized the decision to cancel his papers.

The next test of Ethiopia’s openness is likely to be the June 5 election, the first for Mr. Abiy since being appointed prime minister in 2018.

The attackers destroyed and looted homes while using knives, machetes, hatchets and ropes to butcher or strangle victims

"The highly aggressive rhetoric on both sides regarding the fight for Mekelle is dangerously provocative and risks placing already vulnerable and frightened civilians in grave danger," Bachelet said in a statement.

There have also been reports of atrocities committed by federal forces since Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered air strikes and a ground offensive against Tigray's rulers for defying his authority. Tigrayan leaders have accused federal forces of killing innocent civilians while targeting churches and homes.

Government forces say they are currently closing in on Mekelle ahead of a promised "final phase" of the military operation that includes plans to surround the regional capital Mekelle with tanks.

CNN has been unable to verify claims from either parties due to a communications blackout. Internet, mobile phones and landlines are all down, making it difficult to contact those accused in the preliminary report.

Hundreds have died and more than 40,000 refugees have fled to neigboring Sudan since November 7, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Humanitarian organizations are struggling to provide services amid the tsunami of refugees.

The conflict has spread to Eritrea, where the TPLF has fired rockets, and also affected Somalia where Ethiopia has disarmed several hundred Tigrayans in a peacekeeping force fighting al Qaeda-linked militants.

The United Kingdom is "very concerned" about the escalating conflict in Tigray, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the UK parliament Tuesday. There is "risk of spill over and spread to the region", he added. The European Union and United States have also urged de-escalation since the conflict began.

It is unclear what impact the move will have on the economy, which is one of the fastest growing in Africa.

Despite the impressive development, Ethiopia is ranked 173 out of the 187 nations surveyed in the last UN Human Development Index and has high poverty indexes, mainly related to the rising population.

The Oromo, who constitute about 40% of Ethiopia's 100 million inhabitants, frequently complain that the government is dominated by the Tigray and Amhara who hail from north of the capital.

Any form of development the world over is going to upset someone, and the Ethiopian authorities have always said they would consult communities before bulldozing ahead.

Why Ethiopia is making a historic ‘master plan’ U-turn

The country's political stability is fragile and it faces numerous domestic and international disputes.

Ethiopia has up to 10 domestic armed rebellions,

long-standing rebel activity in the south-eastern state of Somali,

Besides the border dispute with Eritrea, which sparked a 1999-2000 war, the country shares volatile borders with Somalia and South Sudan.

Most of Ethiopia's population is based in the rural areas and engaged in subsistence farming.

While shelving the plan would be a major retreat for the government, it is a sign of political maturity of the EPRDF, which has consistently been accused by rights groups of being heavy-handed towards dissent since coming to power in 1991.

The TPLF says Abiy, their ex-military comrade and one-time political partner, has removed Tigrayans from senior security and government posts since he took office in 2018 and now wants to dominate them completely.

Debretsion Gebremichael, elected Tigrayan president in polls that Ethiopia does not recognise,

The Tigrayan leaders accused federal forces of targeting civilians, churches and homes

Abiy’s government has repeatedly denied an ethnic undertone, saying it is pursuing criminals and guaranteeing national unity.

Tigrayans represent about 5% of the 115 million people in Africa’s second most populous country.They dominated national leadership before Abiy took the premiership and began opening up the economy and a repressive political system that had jailed tens of thousands of political prisoners.

The TPLF has also fired rockets into neighbouring Eritrea, escalating the war beyond national borders. It has a long-standing enmity with President Isaias Afwerki’s government, which has denied sending troops into Tigray against the rebels.

Ethiopia’s army is one of Africa’s strongest, but many officers were Tigrayan and much of its heavy weaponry was based in Tigray, on the front line of the standoff with Eritrea after a 1998-2000 war.

The Tigrayans are also a battle-hardened force with experience of fighting against Eritrea and spearheading the ouster of a Marxist dictatorship in 1991.

That was due to concerns over loyalty, not their ethnicity, the government said.

Ethiopia’s forest coverage was just 4% in the 2000s, down from 35% a century earlier.

The previous world record for the most trees planted in one day stood at 50m, held by India since 2016.

“Trees not only help mitigate climate change by absorbing the carbon dioxide in the air, but they also have huge benefits in combating desertification and land degradation, particularly in arid countries.

“This truly impressive feat is not just the simple planting of trees, but part of a huge and complicated challenge to take account of the short- and long-term needs of both the trees and the people.

preliminary investigations indicated that Eritrean soldiers had killed an unknown number of civilians in Axum, an ancient city in northern Ethiopia. It said the killings were in retaliation for an earlier attack by TPLF soldiers.Amnesty said Eritrean soldiers executed men and boys in the streets and engaged in extensive looting.

"They take us out one by one and torture us," the man said. "This is the third time I've been beaten by soldiers like this. People here start running and are scared every time they see someone wearing military uniform. The world has to hear our cries and do something -- we are living in terror"

CNN shared its report with Coons on Thursday. The Senator then raised the issue during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Ethiopia, calling for "accountability" for the mass detention.

Eritrean Information Minister Yemane Ghebremeskel denied the reports and dismissed previous CNN reporting, saying: "For how long will you continue to believe at face value any and all 'witness statements' ... We have heard so many planted or false stories."

President Biden said in a statement late Wednesday that he is "deeply concerned by the escalating violence" in Ethiopia and condemned "large-scale human rights abuses taking place in Tigray."

forces were digging trenches and standing firm.

phone and internet communication has been down.

Claims by all sides are hard to verify because

The conflict erupted on Nov. 4 and has killed hundreds, possibly thousands, and has sent more than 30,000 refugees into neighbouring Sudan. Rockets have been fired by rebels into neighbouring Amhara region and across the border into the nation of Eritrea.

Foreign nations have urged talks

Abiy accuses the Tigrayan leaders of revolting against central authority and starting the conflict by attacking federal troops in the town of Dansha on Nov. 4.

Abiy won a Nobel Peace Prize last year for ending a two-decade standoff with Eritrea

They say members of Fano, a youth militia loyal to the government, rampaged through Mai-Kadra killing ethnic Tigrayans. The government has repeatedly disputed that narrative, saying it was a youth militia affiliated with the Tigrayan rebels who killed ethnic Amharas, Ethiopia's second-biggest ethnic group.

She says she now feels safe in Sudan but worries about her future and about the bleak living conditions at the camps. Humanitarian workers are struggling to keep up with the flow of refugees and to build up an infrastructure to accommodate them.

In Ethiopia, the situation appears more severe. The United Nations has said that refugees in the Tigray Region have received no aid since conflict started. The more than 96,000 Eritrean refugees in Tigray, who have fled war and repression in the past two decades, the U.N. says, have run out of food rations. The U.N. has received reports that refugees are leaving camps because of violence.

The war is a power struggle between Ethiopia's new government and its old one; it's about what the Ethiopian political system will look like in the future. But in interviews with refugees, the war is about loss. Everyone, no matter which side they're on, is mourning. Some have lost loved ones; many others have lost homes. And every inch of the refugee camps in Sudan has become about grasping at some semblance of what they had before the war.

"I am so thankful that the pain and anguish my children have had to go through could now soon be coming to an end," Ms Hailemariam, who lives in Islington, north London, said last week in a statement released by human rights group Reprieve.

While Israel’s operations rescued thousands of Ethio­pian Jews from poverty, famine and war, the country has struggled to integrate the immigrants into its society. Successive government and private panels have found serious flaws in the absorption process, uncovering policies of forced segregation in schools, unfair housing plans that sent many Ethio­pian families to live in ghetto-like neighborhoods, mistreatment in the health-care system and deep-rooted suspicion of their Jewishness by Israel’s strict ultra-Orthodox rabbis. 

“Many people in the community thought it was just a matter of time and if we tried to be like everyone else, not to focus on the differences but on the similarities, then it would pass. But we always got the message from the other side that we were different.” 

Baraku, also an immigrant from Ethiopia, was called to the park on the night of June 30. He said none of the teenagers were armed. “All the children are in shock and still very angry,” he said. “They are confused. We tell them this is their country and they want to serve in the army, but the police label them as problematic.”

n many countries, there’s a perception that Facebook bases its actions on its business interests more than on human rights. In India, home to Facebook’s most users, the company has been accused of not policing anti-Muslim content from political figures for fear of upsetting the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling party.

“Developments in our countries aren’t addressed seriously,” said Mishi Choudhary, a technology lawyer and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, a digital rights group in India. “Any takedown of content raises the questions of free expression, but incitement of violence or using a platform for dangerous speech is not a free speech matter but a matter of democracy, law and order.”

Volcanic ash, more generally known as tephra, sometimes hides in ice. It’s a special find because it can be geochemically tied to a specific volcano. “The tephra comes from the magma itself,

Sulfur is also indicative of a past eruption. Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, reacts with water in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles can linger in the stratosphere for years, riding wind currents, but they, like tephra, eventually fall back to Earth.

The ice also carries a time stamp. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues look for variations in elements like sodium, which is found in sea spray that’s seasonally blown inland. By simply counting annual variations in these elements, it’s possible to trace the passage of time, Dr. McConnell said. “It’s like a tree-ring record.”

In layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C., they spotted large upticks in sulfur and, crucially, bits of material that were probably tephra. The timing caught the scientists’ attention.

Researchers have previously hypothesized that an environmental trigger may have helped set in motion the crop failures, famines and social unrest that plagued the Mediterranean region at that time. But until now, “There hasn’t been the kind of data that these scholars brought forth to really get those theories into the mainstream,”

The match was spot on, Dr. Plunkett said. “There are some events that are tricky. With Okmok, there’s nothing else that looks like it.”

This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth’s climate.

“They’ve created, for a short term, global cooling events,”

Using climate models to simulate the impact of an Okmok eruption, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators estimated that parts of the Mediterranean, roughly 6,000 miles away, would have cooled by as much as 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

“It’s an incredible coincidence that it happened exactly in the waning years of the Roman Republic when things were falling apart,”

That climate shock came at precisely the wrong time, Dr. Clark said. “This was a period of Mediterranean-wide political, social and economic upheaval.”

Historical records compiled by Roman writers and philosophers note food shortages and famines. In 43 B.C., Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, and his army had to subsist on wild fruit, roots, bark and “animals never tasted before,” the philosopher Plutarch wrote.

For a society already reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, such trying conditions might have exacerbated social unrest, the researchers concluded. They might even have kick-started transfers of political power that led to the rise of the Roman Empire.

Rain patterns changed as well — some regions would have been drenched by 400 percent more precipitation than normal, the modeling revealed.

The links in the study are probable, but not definite. “They’re not being heavy handed and saying this is absolutely it,” Dr. Holmberg said.

Egyptian society, before the installation of the Aswan Low Dam in the early 20th century, was anchored by the annual summer flooding of the Nile River. These summer floods, sustained by monsoon rains in the highlands of Ethiopia, delivered irrigation and silt, both critical to Egypt’s agrarian society. “The whole rhythm of the year was built around responding to the flood,” Dr. Manning of Yale said.

But volcanic eruptions, even those on the other side of the world, could have disrupted that flooding, Dr. Manning and his colleagues recently showed. Using records from Cairo’s Nilometer — an octagonal marble column that was used for recording Nile flood height from 622 to 1902 A.D., the team found that flooding tended to be weaker, or entirely absent, during years when there was a large volcanic eruption somewhere in the world.

he culprit, the team reasoned in a paper published a few years ago, was cooling caused by sulfate aerosols. When Earth cools after a large eruption, its atmospheric circulation patterns change. That can shift the invisible meeting point of Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds — the Intertropical Convergence Zone — that affects where monsoon rains tend to fall. When less precipitation falls over Ethiopia, home to a major tributary of the Nile, there’s less water available for flooding that year.

Ptolemaic-era records revealed that this reduced flooding had socioeconomic and political consequences. Revolts increased in the years following “Nile failure,” Dr. Manning and his colleagues found. Priestly decrees — intended to establish the political legitimacy of Greek rulers — also became more commonplace.

“There are still large unsourced mystery eruptions up until the early 19th century.”

Right now, roughly a dozen volcanoes are erupting. In all likelihood, they’re nothing to worry about — it’s doubtful you’ve even heard of them. But every once in a while, there’s bound to be a really big eruption. How its effects ripple around the world awaits to be seen.

The violence in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, which is home to several ethnic groups, is separate from the war in the northern Tigray region that erupted in November 2020 between Ethiopian federal forces and rebellious forces of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF).

Why, it is fair to ask, does the killing of 100,000 or more with conventional weapons elicit little more than a concerned shrug, while the killing of a relative few from poison gas is enough to trigger an intervention

16 million people died and 20 million were wounded during World War I

2 percent of the casualties and fewer than 1 percent of the deaths are estimated to have resulted from chemical warfare

1925 Geneva Protocol, which banned the use, though not the possession, of chemical and biological weapons

almost universally accepted and become an international norm. Syria, too, is a signatory

No Western army used gas on the battlefield during the global slaughter of World War II

Nazis were to gas noncombatant Jews, Gypsies and others.

chemical weapons have been categorized as “weapons of mass destruction,”

general revulsion against the use of poisons against human beings in warfare, going back to the Greeks,”

1675, when France and the Holy Roman Empire agreed in Strasbourg not to use poisoned bullets

1899 not to use “projectiles the sole objective of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases,

few known instances of poison gas being used since 1925

first two cases, gas was used by authoritarian regimes against those they considered lesser races.

1935-36, Mussolini used several hundred tons of mustard gas in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia

1940-41, the Japanese used chemical and biological weapons widely in China

Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped in and, in quiet diplomacy, “told the Japanese that we knew of the use and that there would be consequences.”

American use of Agent Orange in Vietnam was widely criticized

Mr. Kuon said that government forces were massing to carry out a counterassault, but that the rebels had the strength to hold the strategic city. There was no sign of a cease-fire, he said. “As I’m talking to you right now there is sporadic fighting” in a separate oil-producing state as well, he added.

Diplomats in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, worked to get the two sides talking, with the aim of negotiating a cessation of hostilities before the cycle of violence descended into a full-scale civil war. The Ethiopian foreign minister said that talks were expected to start Thursday morning between delegations of the opposing sides.

David Nash, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in South Sudan, said it was hard to know how many people had gathered on the riverbank for safety, estimating a total of about 70,000. “As far as we know it’s the biggest displaced-person population in South Sudan,” Mr. Nash said. “So far a big proportion is women and young children, so they’re the most vulnerable.” In cities like Juba and Malakal, civilians have taken refuge on United Nations bases, but the people here in Awerial were spread out in the open along the river. There was little in the way of shelter, and most people were sleeping under trees. As night fell, dozens of small cooking fires sparked to life, and scores of babies wailed into the evening hours.

“I remember the chain of thought,” he said. “I had to do prehistory, so I have to do some archaeology. But to do it seriously, I’m going to talk about how humans evolved, so, yikes, I’m in biology now. I thought: To do it seriously, I have to talk about how mammals evolved, how primates evolved. I have to go back to multicelled organisms, I have to go back to primeval slime. And then I thought: I have to talk about how life was created, how life appeared on earth! I have to talk geology, the history of the planet. And so you can see, this is pushing me back and back and back, until I realized there’s a stopping point — which is the Big Bang.” He paused. “I thought, Boy, would that be exciting to teach a course like this!”

In the wake of McNeill’s rebuke, Western Civ was slowly replaced by World History, a more comparative class that stressed broad themes across cultures and disciplines. Over the past 30 years, World History has produced its own formidable academic institutions and journals; these days, three-quarters of all American students take World History

by the early ‘70s, as the Vietnam War heightened interest in nations outside Europe, Western Civ was on the decline. In pedagogical circles, a book called “The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community,” by William Hardy McNeill, a historian at the University of Chicago, persuasively argued that Western Civ was not merely biased against other cultures but also failed to account for the enormous influence that cultures had on one another over the millenniums.

Gates has insisted on tracking this venture as he would any Microsoft product or foundation project. The Big History Project produces reams of data — students and teachers are regularly surveyed, and teachers submit the results from classes, all of which allows his team to track what’s working and what isn’t as the course grows. “Our priority,” he told me from across the table, “was to get it into a form where ambitious teachers could latch onto it.”

They have monitored teacher feedback closely and decreased the course in size, from 20 units to 10. True to Christian’s original style, however, the high-school course links insights across subjects into wildly ambitious narratives. The units begin with the Big Bang and shift to lesson plans on the solar system, trade and communications, globalization and, finally, the future. A class on the emergence of life might start with photosynthesis before moving on to eukaryotes and multicellular organisms and the genius of Charles Darwin and James Watson. A lecture on the slave trade might include the history of coffee beans in Ethiopia.

“Most kids experience school as one damn course after another; there’s nothing to build connections between the courses that they take,” says Bob Bain, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan and an adviser to the Big History Project, who has helped devise much of the curriculum. “The average kid has no way to make sense between what happens with their first-period World History class and their second-period algebra class, third-period gym class, fourth-period literature — it’s all disconnected. It’s like if I were to give you a jigsaw puzzle and throw 500 pieces on the table and say, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m not going to show you the box top as to how they fit together.’ ”

Christian, who is 67, now travels the world as something of an evangelist for the spread of the Big History Project. (His TED Talk, “The History of Our World in 18 Minutes,” has been viewed more than four million times online.)

Few schools had teachers who were willing or able to instruct a hybrid course; some schools wound up requiring that two teachers lead the class together. Gates, who had hoped to avoid bureaucracy, found himself mired in it. “You’ve got to get a teacher in the history department and the science department — they have to be very serious about it, and they have to get their administrative staff to agree. And then you have to get it on the course schedule so kids can sign up,” he said. “So they have to decide, kind of in the spring or earlier, and those teachers have to spend a lot of that summer getting themselves ready for the thing.”

Perhaps the largest challenge facing the Big History Project, however, is Gates himself, or at least the specter of him. To his bafflement and frustration, he has become a remarkably polarizing figure in the education world. This owes largely to the fact that Gates, through his foundation, has spent more than $200 million to advocate for the Common Core, something of a third rail in education circles

Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University who has been a vocal critic of Gates, put even it more starkly: “When I think about history, I think about different perspectives, clashing points of view. I wonder how Bill Gates would treat the robber barons. I wonder how Bill Gates would deal with issues of extremes of wealth and poverty.”

“It begins to be a question of: Is this Bill Gates’s history? And should it be labeled ‘Bill Gates’s History’? Because Bill Gates’s history would be very different from somebody else’s who wasn’t worth $50-60 billion.”

perhaps, Big History might even become a successor to Western Civ and World History.

he also noted that Big History — which is already being offered in South Korea, the Netherlands and, of course, Australia — had significant global potential.

Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, told me that although he sees Big History as “an important intellectual movement,” he did not consider the class to be a suitable replacement for an actual history course. “At certain points, it becomes less history and more of a kind of evolutionary biology or quantum physics. It loses the compelling aspect that is at the heart of the word ‘history.’ ”

Wineburg’s deepest concern about the approach was its failure to impart a methodology to students. “What is most pressing for American high-school students right now, in the history-social-studies curriculum, is: How do we read a text? How do we connect our ability to sharpen our intellectual capabilities when we’re evaluating sources and trying to understand human motivation?” he asked. “When we think about history, what are the primary sources of Big History? The original scientific reports of the Big Bang?”

Barr, the principal in Brooklyn, however, came to feel that Gates’s course was better than the existing alternative. “If you were to interview many, many progressive social-studies teachers, they would tell you that World History is a completely flawed course. It’s spotty. It’s like fact soup. Kids don’t come out of it really having a sense of global history,”