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The Vietnamese tribesmen who fought alongside American Special Forces

The indigenous Montagnards, recruited into service by the American Special Forces in Vietnam’s mountain highlands, defended villages against the Viet Cong and served as rapid response forces. The Special Forces and the Montagnards—each tough, versatile, and accustomed to living in wild conditions—formed an affinity for each other. In the testimony of many veterans, their working relationship with the Montagnards, nicknamed Yards, was a bright spot in a confusing and frustrating war.

The bond between America’s elite fighters and their indigenous partners has persisted into the present, but despite the best efforts of vets, the Montagnards have suffered greatly in the postwar years, at least in part because they cast their lot with the U.S. Army. In a war with more than its share of tragedies, this one is less often told but is crucial to understanding the conflict and its toll.

Minimum Wage Was Once Enough To Keep a Family of 3 Out of Poverty

Since the 1980s, the federal minimum wage has kept pace with neither inflation, nor the rise of the average worker’s paycheck. That means that while a federal minimum wage in 1968 could have lifted a family of three above the poverty line, now it can’t even do that for a parent with one child, working full-time, 40 hours a week and 52 weeks a year (yes, this calculation assumes that the parent takes no time off).
 

Conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination don’t stand up to scrutin

50 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 59 percent of Americans still believe it was the work of a conspiracy. I was once among them…

Then, one day, I looked up the footnotes in those books, most of them leading me to the multivolume hearings of the Warren Commission. I was shocked. The authors had taken witnesses’ statements out of context, distorted them beyond recognition, and in some cases cherry-picked passages that seemed to back their theories while ignoring testimony that didn’t. It was my first brush with intellectual dishonesty.

But it’s worth recounting the conspiracy buffs’ arguments that I found most persuasive—and why they collapse under scrutiny.

Kennedycare

In the spring of 1962, President John F. Kennedy launched a bold effort to provide health care for the aged—later to be known as Medicare. It culminated in a nationally televised presidential address from Madison Square Garden, carried on the three television networks. It was a flop. The legislation foundered amid charges that it was an attempt to socialize medicine and a threat to individual liberty—the same charges President Obama encountered over the Affordable Care Act five decades later.
 

America’s angriest white men: Up close with racism, rage and Southern supremacy

Up close with small-town white rage, with bitter, scary men who feel left behind by economic and cultural change.

“These are the sons of small-town America, the Jeffersonian yeoman of the nineteenth century, disfigured by global restructuring and economic downturns. They come from the “large and growing number of US citizens disaffected from and alienated by a government that seems indifferent, if not hostile, to their interests. This predominantly white, male, and middle-and working-class sector has been buffeted by global economic restructuring with its attendant job losses, declining real wages, and social dislocations. While under economic stress, this sector has also seen its traditional privileges and status challenged by 1960s-style social movements, such as feminism, minority rights, and environmentalism.”

The sons of these farmers and shopkeepers expected to—and felt entitled to—inherit their fathers’ legacy. And when it became evident it was not going to happen, they became murderously angry—at a system that emasculated their fathers and threatens their manhood. They live in what they call a “Walmart economy” and are governed by a “nanny state” that doles out their birthright to ungrateful and undeserving immigrants. What they want, says one guy, is to “take back what is rightfully ours.”

Student-Generated Klausuren, Fall 2013

I cleaned these up a bit (some more than others). All are legitimate klausuren and worthy of your consideration. You can and should use these to practice:

  • writing introductions and conclusions
  • thesis statements
  • outlines
  • topic and transition sentences
  • document analysis using APPARTS
  • pacing and timing (90 minutes flies)

To what extent is the Constitution a Democratic document?
To what extent does the Constitution provide a federal balance?
To what extent is power equally distributed among the three branches of government?
Thomas Jefferson: A complex Renaissance Man or a self-justifying hypocrite?
Was the American System good for America?
Was Civil War inevitable after the Crisis in Kansas?
Too much compromise? (compromise as a source of instability and sectionalism)
To what extent was slavery the primary cause of the Civil War?

The Supreme Court’s Cold War Relocation Plan

 

Oak Grove Park_Aerial copy
In 1992 the Washington Post revealed to the world the surprising Cold War emergency relocation plan of the United States Congress. In remarkably detailed reporting the newspaper told the Strangelovian story of a massive government bunker built beneath the posh Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in the late 1950s. The irony of lawmakers riding out World War III under a five star hotel while the public sheltered in place was hard to miss. Needless to say, CONELRAD was intrigued to find, years later, a reference to the U.S. Supreme Court’s oddly similar contingency plan

Some Wacky, Cruel, and Bizarre Puritan Names

Slate collected some of the best, worst, and strangest names the English Puritans came up with. Most of these are courtesy of the 1888 book by Charles Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature (seen here on the Public Domain Review’s website), which includes Parish records with details about some of the people who had these names.
20 Puritan Names That Are Utterly Strange
  1. Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar. Son of Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar, born 1676.
  2. Praise-God. Full name, Praise-God Barebone. The Barebones were a rich source of crazy names. This one was a leather-worker, member of a particularly odd Puritan group and an MP. He gave his name to the Barebones Parliament, which ruled Britain in 1653.
  3. If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned. Praise-God’s son, he made a name for himself as an economist. But, for some inexplicable reason, he decided to go by the name Nicolas Barbon.
  4. Fear-God. Also a Barebone.
  5. Job-raked-out-of-the-ashes
  6. Has-descendants
  7. Wrestling
  8. Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith
  9. Fly-fornication
  10. Jesus-Christ-came-into-the-world- to-save. Brother of “Damned Barebone”. I can only imagine this name shortened to “Save.”
  11. Thanks
  12. What-God-will
  13. Joy-in-sorrow. A name attached to many stories of difficult births.
  14. Remember
  15. Fear-not. His/her surname was “Helly”, born 1589.
  16. Experience
  17. Anger
  18. Abuse-not
  19. Die-Well. A brother of Farewell Sykes, who died in 1865. We can assume they had rather pessimistic parents.
  20. Continent. Continent Walker was born in 1594 in Sussex.

More great Puritan names here

Neville Chamberlain Was Right to Appease

Seventy-five years ago, on Sept. 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, handing portions of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Chamberlain returned to Britain to popular acclaim, declaring that he had secured “peace for our time.” Today the prime minister is generally portrayed as a foolish man who was wrong to try to “appease” Hitler—a cautionary tale for any leader silly enough to prefer negotiation to confrontation.

But among historians, that view changed in the late 1950s, when the British government began making Chamberlain-era records available to researchers