A panel moderated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University Professor and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Studies, discusses President Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves, his ability to lead the Union during the Civil War, and his personal qualities.
Questions centered on Lincoln, ranging from his humility in leadership to his manipulation of others.
Mexican president Felipe Calderon speaks about his administration’s progress against drugs and organized crime, saying that his government has captured over 22,000 criminals and seized over “one billion personal doses” of drugs over the past year, his first of six in office. He also added that Mexico has re-planted 600,000 acres of forest in the past year, starting to reverse a national trend of de-forestation.
Calderon called illegal immigration from Mexico to the US a “textbook example” of a country with surplus capital needing a country with surplus labor. He expressed his support for more integrated North American markets, saying that “closing the border is a very, very big mistake.”
The White House will shelve Bush administration plans to build a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, according to people familiar with the matter, a move likely to cheer Moscow and roil the security debate in Europe.
The U.S. will base its decision on a determination that Iran’s long-range missile program has not progressed as rapidly as previously estimated, reducing the threat to the continental U.S. and major European capitals, according to current and former U.S. officials.
Journalist and author T.R. Reid set out on a global tour of hospitals and doctors’ offices, all in the hopes of understanding how other industrialized nations provide affordable, effective universal health care. The result: his book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.
Reid is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post — in whose pages he recently addressed five major myths about other countries’ health-care systems — and the former chief of the paper’s London and Tokyo bureaus.
Listen to this Fresh Air Episode
Russia PM says he and Dmitry Medvedev would take joint decision over roles, raising prospect of Putin era continuing…
What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies, all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. How? That’s our question this hour. We gaze down at the bottom-up logic of cities, Google, even our very own brains. Featured: author Steven Johnson, fire-flyologists John and Elizabeth Buck, biologist E.O. Wilson, Ant expert Debra Gordon, mathematician Steve Strogatz, economist James Surowiecki, and neurologists Oliver Sacks and Christof Koch.
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Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? We peer inside the brains of people contemplating moral dilemmas, watch chimps at a primate research center share blackberries, observe a playgroup of 3 year-olds fighting over toys, and tour the country’s first penitentiary, Eastern State Prison. Also: the story of land grabbing, indentured servitude and slum lording in the fourth grade.
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98 Pages of terms and definitions complied by my beloved 2009-2010 APUSH class
A list of 1,600 terms from apstudent.com
Here is the 174 page course manual for APUSH. It offers a course description as well as a truncated sample exam. You need not read the whole thing. But peruse the sample exam, pages 140-170. Maybe even take it as a pretest.
Here is the truncated version (2 pages). Please read this carefully and come to class with at least two questions, two comments, and one concern, all written one sheet of paper.
Columbus, Indians, and Human Progress
Zinn was raised in a working-class family in Brooklyn. He flew bombing missions for the United States in World War II, an experience he now points to in shaping his opposition to war. In 1956, he became a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, a school for black women, where he soon became involved in the Civil Rights Movement, which he participated in as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). When he was fired in 1963 for insubordination related to his protest work, he moved to Boston University, where he became a leading critic of the Vietnam War.
He is perhaps best known for A People’s History of the United States, which presents American history through the eyes of those he feels are outside of the political and economic establishment.
Here is an autobiographical clip from YouTube
In his autobiography, You Can’t Stay Neutral on a Moving Train, Zinn said, “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.” RIP.
You have advanced kidney cancer. It will kill you, probably in the next year or two. A drug called Sutent slows the spread of the cancer and may give you an extra six months, but at a cost of $54,000. Is a few more months worth that much?
Read Singers’ take on the rationing debate
This lecture opens with a discussion of the myriad moments at which historians have declared an “end” to Reconstruction, before shifting to the myth and reality of “Carpetbag rule” in the Reconstruction South. Popularized by Lost Cause apologists and biased historians, this myth suggests that the southern governments of the Reconstruction era were dominated by unscrupulous and criminal Yankees who relied on the ignorant black vote to rob and despoil the innocent South. The reality, of course, diverges widely from this image. Among other accomplishments, the Radical state governments that came into existence after 1868 made important gains in African-American rights and public education. Professor Blight closes the lecture with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the waning radicalism of the Republican party after 1870, and the rise of white political terrorism across the South.
As Hitler and Mussolini prepared to storm Europe, fascism began to generate interest in the United States. In Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, an American president uses an economic crisis as a pretense to take over the media, imprison dissenters, and build his own private army (the Minute Men) into an indomitable force.
From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all.
Leading constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor tells Laurie Taylor that the age of the mass political party is over, but it still rules in our system of government.
Mass political parties started in the 1870s as a response to the advent of mass suffrage. 50 years ago, nearly one in ten people belonged to a party; it has now declined to one in 88, yet they still have a huge role in administering power in our democracy. It is that anomaly which constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor claims lies behind the frustration and disillusionment that so many people feel towards our political system. He discusses his book, The New British Constitution, with Laurie.
Alas for countless pundits and inspirational speakers, it is apparently not the case that the Chinese word for crisis is spelled by joining the characters for danger and opportunity. But that common fallacy nevertheless captures an important metaphorical truth: whatever the perils it brings with it, a crisis can be a grand opportunity. Among those who have understood that truth was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Writing to his fellow Democrats in the 1920s, Roosevelt noted that their party could not hope to return to power until the Republicans led the nation “into a serious period of depression and unemployment.” The Great Depression soon brought a far longer and deeper period of woe than F.D.R. foresaw. But the crisis of the 1930s also provided an object lesson in the relationship between economic danger and political opportunity — a lesson Barack Obama is now trying to follow. Obama, too, came to office in the midst of an economic crisis, and in the solutions he has offered, it appears he has often looked to the example of F.D.R., whose presidency — and the very idea of activist government that it represents — is very much back in the public mind this year. Roosevelt pushed through policies that aimed not just to deal with the immediate challenge of the Great Depression but also to benefit generations of Americans to come. Pulling off a similar feat will require Obama to persuade Americans to see opportunities in the present crisis as well.
In 680, near Karbala in Iraq, a man was killed in the desert. His name was Husayn, and he was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. His death was a crucial episode in the growing split between two groups of Muslims – who would come to be known as the Sunni and the Shia.
And yet this dispute did not begin violently. Arguably, it was not at first a political or theological schism either, but a personal disagreement. And the two groups agree on many of the fundamentals of the religion.
So how did this profound split develop?
Listen to Melvyn Bragg conduct this round table discussion
MEXICO CITY – “The PRI comes back” shouted the front page headline of the daily newspaper El Universal on Monday, the day after the political party known as the PRI swept midterm elections.
But the story was all in the photograph, a shot of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari as he left a voting booth. He was not running for any office, but the photograph seemed to ask why Mexicans were returning to power the party identified with Mr. Salinas, who left office 15 years ago amid political scandal and economic chaos.
His party, the PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party, governed Mexico with a blend of patronage and corruption for more than 70 years before it was voted out in 2000. But on Sunday, the PRI won effective control of the lower house of Congress and a broad swath of the country’s largest cities, as well as five out of six gubernatorial races.
The results were a blow to President Felipe Calderón, whose conservative National Action Party, or the PAN, failed to hold on to even its traditional strongholds.