Harvard Admissions Exam

This version of the Harvard Admission Exam (1869) has been going around among the graduate students. It includes sections on Latin and Greek translation and grammar, History and Geography, Arithmetic, Algebra, and Geometry.

Take a shot at the History and Geography section (no Wikipedia!):

Tennessee Tea Party Demands the Teaching of Children's History

No, not really. But they have released a statement regarding their priorities for history education:

No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.

According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the TN Tea Party believes that

Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government. 

So much to parse.

I'll leave the rest to others, but I was most struck by "the majority of citizens." We could quibble about who is and is not a "citizen," but I would say that this standard does not mean what they think it does.

Town of Windham Records

Birth Records, Windham, CT (Pic taken before I asked about pic policy, which disallows all photography, even without flash, but allows scanning, so who the heck knows. Even Harvard will let you photograph manuscripts w/o flash.)

I went home for a few days this week to attend my youngest brother's high school graduation (congrats, Wheeler!). While there, I stopped in at town hall to see if the town had any records relating to the Windham Center burying ground. It took a little while to find exactly what I was looking for, but I was not disappointed.

Windham, Connecticut was formally incorporated in 1692, but the oldest record I found in the town clerk's vault was a proposal for establishing a plantation on land "bequeathed . . . by Joshua Sachem sonne of Uncas," dated February 17, 1682.

The town has done a pretty good job of conserving its records. The 17th- and 18th-century vital records and town meeting minutes are enclosed in plastic sheets and bound into sturdy, red leather volumes. The bindings are a bit too tight, so the records don't lie flat when the pages are turned, but the plastic sheets are thick and hardy, so I don't think there's too much danger to the original records.

I found some good information about the burying ground, which was officially established in 1707. I haven't read through all of the 18th-century town meeting minutes yet, but I can always go back next time I'm in town.

While I was there, I also peeked at the vital records books. Page 173 of the ledger records the births, deaths, and marriages of some of Windham's enslaved residents (Job Hale, his wife Blosom, their children, Patience and Phineas; Hager and her daughter Dinah; Jenne and her daughter, Tamer):

In the 1850s, someone went through the old ledgers and compiled an alphabetical index for all of the vital records. This index became part of the Barbour Collection at the Connecticut State Library, but has not been digitized.

I've been forming a plan to see if I can get some Windham High students to work on a digitization project if I can wrangle some deal with the school to give them credit. It isn't hard work — the handwriting in the 19th-century index is beautiful and clear, so they wouldn't have to deal with the original records directly (though not all of the info from the originals made it into the index — for example, Jobe Hale and his family are listed, but their designation as "negro servants" is not). Then, we could scan the originals and make them accessible online. These records are not central to my dissertation in a way that would allow me to devote 6 months to working on them, but I could certainly direct the production of an online archive.

Grading

I'm spending the weekend grading a pile of final projects. While doing so, I am trying to walk that fine line between fairness and generosity of spirit.

In Which I Identify With Creationists

This weekend, I went home to see my family and assist with some early Christmas preparations. During my visit, I had a chance to examine my 14-year-old sister's world history homework, which was genuinely appalling.

Her teacher has adopted Gavin Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered America as a key text for their class and is, apparently, teaching it as factual information. Menzies' central argument is that a Chinese fleet commanded by Zheng He sailed from China in 1421, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and sailed on to North America, eventually establishing a colonial settlement in modern-day Rhode Island. Menzies (who neither reads nor speaks any Chinese language either ancient or modern) bases his argument on a handful of maps, speculative interpretation of DNA evidence, and the existence of structures such as the Newport Tower and the Bimini Road. He claims that records of the voyage were intentionally destroyed by Chinese officials, but provides a wealth of very specific and uncited information about the expedition. In short, it is a crackpot theory.

Good For Them

I applaud these teachers who have found a way to make a little extra money by selling their lesson plans online. To administrators who think that school districts should get a cut of the profits from the sale of teachers' original work, I say go jump in a lake.* If it's their original work, they own it and have every right to sell it. I especially applaud teachers for developing and selling lesson plans intended to modify scripted curricula like Open Court and Saxon Math.

The article contains no mention of the rise of scripted curricula, but I can imagine that it is a significant factor in driving online lesson plan sales. When I was a teacher, I would gladly have paid $50 for a unit plan called "Squeeze Some Meaningful Learning Out of This Crappy Open Court Unit Without Losing Your Mind." Or better yet, "A Beginner's Guide to Unspiraling Saxon Math."

I laughed when I read the quotation from Joseph McDonald, a professor of education at NYU: "“Teachers swapping ideas with one another, that’s a great thing,” he said. “But somebody asking 75 cents for a word puzzle reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession.”

Yep, nothing undermines the profession of teaching like regular teachers acting as if their own intellectual work is a valuable resource. They should all give it away for free because teaching is an altruistic calling, not a profession. That way, we can keep treating teachers like volunteers who do what they do purely out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than treating them like professionals who create original work and deserve to be rewarded for it.

* I should make it clear that I am assuming that most of the work in creating these lesson plans goes on outside of classroom time. When I was an elementary school teacher in California, I was compensated for one hour of prep time per week. I spent many, many more hours than that writing lesson plans. Other teachers refused to do unpaid prep because it undermined their bargaining position with the district, and I respect their decision to work only during those hours for which they were paid. The district treated us like contractors — we were given a budget of $125 per semester, which barely covered copy paper and whiteboard markers. My first year, I spent about $2,000 of my own money outfitting an undersupplied classroom with what I considered to be the bare essentials (pencils, a pencil sharpener, crayons, writing paper, construction paper, chart paper, used books, rulers, scissors, glue sticks, folders) and reasonable extras (paint, paintbrushes, magnifying glasses, supplies for science experiments, new books, a decent dictionary, pillows for the reading area, magnets for the whiteboard, jump ropes, playground balls, etc.). Family members kicked in for special extras — my students particularly loved the finger puppets purchased for them by my mother-in-law. I claimed the federal maximum ($250) on my taxes.

Teach the Controversy: Pangaea

Andrew Sullivan has a post up right now called "Looking at Race." It concerns a poll that asks Americans whether they believe that Africa and America were once part of the same continent.

At first, I thought, wtf does the existence of Pangaea have to do with race? Of course America and Africa were once part of the same continent, but the Atlantic Ocean has been around for about 100 million years, while our species is only a few hundred thousand years old. "Race" is not really a concept that maps well onto geologic time.

Then I looked at the breakdown of the results.

Yikes! Only 35% of white respondents said "yes," while 63% of black respondents agreed. I imagine that this gap is not reflective of overall scientific knowledge. Did all the white kids skip Earth Science? From this evidence, it seems that white people (particularly those who are Republicans, Southerners, or over 60) are less likely to accept the science of plate tectonics, perhaps indicating that they are still struggling with the idea that all people belong to the same species.

If it were just Republicans or Southerners who were willfully ignorant of continental drift, I might be able to explain it away by blaming Young Earth Creationism. But that racial gap is astounding.

White people do realize that our species originated in Africa, don't they? And that all humans of all races are related? Also — and I hestiate to point this out — white people are not actually from America originally.

One last thing — in his post, Sullivan says that he "would have said yes, but not too confidently." Really? Because I definitely covered Pangaea with my second graders. I thought that this was common knowledge, at least among elementary school grads.

Teach the Controversy 

Update: Some are saying that the question is flawed — that it doesn't really tell us how many Americans "believe" in continental drift. But that isn't the point, is it? The point of the question is to tell us how many Americans reflexively reject any idea that connects North America to Africa. It's a brilliant question because you can't just straight-up ask people if they are racist. Many people don't know what the term means, though they're pretty sure they aren't. You have to ask roundabout questions like this one.

Learning to Read in Puritan New England

Between the end of the 17th and the end of the 19th century, most New Englanders learned to read from The New England Primer. This book included an alphabet, short passages, and a catechism (John Cotton's Spiritual Milk for Babes).

You can find the illustrated alphabet on the wikipedia page. Note that there are only 24 letters (I/J and U/V are combined). You may recognize some of the couplets:

A:

In Adam's fall,

We sinned all.

B:

Thy life to mend,

This Book attend.

F:

The idle Fool

Is whipt at school.

In one section, pupils are given lists of words with the same syllable count. The monosyllablic words are fairly tame (God, child, grace, knit), as are the disyllabic words(boldly, father, husband), but things get a little strange in the 3+ categories. Here are the first four trisyllabic words from the 1727 version:

Abusing

Bewitching

Confounded

Drunkenness

Cheery, no? The polysyllabic lists aren't quite as dreary, though you will find "Discontented" in the four-syllable list and "Fornication" on the five-syllable list.

The primer also includes some short prayers, such as the well-known "Now I lay me down to sleep. . ." For obvious reasons, I found this one more interesting:

I In the Burying place may see

Graves shorter there than I;

From Death's arrest no age is free,

Young children too may die.

My God, may such an awful sight

Awakening be to me!

Oh! that by early Grace I might

For Death prepared be.

Happy Constitution Day!

When I was teaching in California, we were required to devote the week of September 17th to the study of the Constitution. At all grade levels. In the low primary grades, most teachers confined themselves to writing a "Class Constitution" that set out goals and rules for the year.

I had second graders, so they were able to handle a little bit more. As long as they finished the week knowing that the Constitution is a list of rules for how to run the government, I was happy. We also made a "Freedom Quilt" (I know, I know), which was a 6-foot long piece of construction paper on which each child decorated a square with "America is . . . " It was goofy and indoctrinating, but some of the kids actually wrote pretty touching things. Not too surprising when you consider that most of the kids in the class were first generation Americans or immigrants themselves.

Whenever we talked about America or immigration, the kids always had hair-raising stories to tell. One little girl told us about how her father had to fight off snakes in the desert and eat rats when he went back to Mexico to get her mother. A friend of mine who taught fourth grade had a student who told the whole class about how he and his mother swam to San Diego one night, only to be caught, be sent back, and try again. I never really knew what to say to them.

Anyway, happy Constitution Day, and good luck to all of those kindergarten teachers who have to find some way to work these lesson plans in. Making a construction paper flag counts.

An Open Letter to the Syllabus Writers

Dear Professors,

Welcome back! The first hint of fall is in the air, campus is teeming with meticulously coiffed freshmen, and it's time to distribute that syllabus you've been agonizing over all week summer. I know that this is a busy time of year for you, so I will keep my request short and simple.

When listing the articles that you would like your graduate students to track down and read, you must, at bare minimum, provide the full title and author's name. Citations such as "Smith, 'In Defense of . . .'" help no one. This goes double if the "article" in question has not been reprinted since it originally appeared in a 1927 edition of The New Masses (see also: Updating Your Syllabus).

I do not mind tracking down the obscure journals and hopelessly arcane essays of which you are so fond. Sometimes it's even fun — like a treasure hunt, except that instead of gold bullion, you get a treatise by Lionel Trilling. All I ask is that you give me the author's name, the full title, and (if you are feeling magnanimous) the name and/or date of the periodical in which each piece was published.

Looking forward to an interesting semester,

Your Grad Students

P.S. If you are going to assign an obscure article that is primarily concerned with refuting another obscure article, just assign both articles. I mean, I'm going to go track down the other one anyway because I am a good little student and it's early in the semester, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm the only one.

Blame is Not is Plan

I wonder where David Brooks gets his numbers. In his column today, he states that in 1960, the "average American" had almost 14 years of education. I assume this number comes from the book by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz that provides his other evidence. I don't know where they pulled that from, since, according to the census and every other source I can find, fewer than 20% of American adults had even a year of college education in 1960 and the median educational level was 10.5 years (12.3 among adults between 25 and 29). The graph at right is from Education of the American Population (1976).

Of course, if you define "average American" as "average white, male American," as Brooks does, his numbers are much closer to reality.

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. What struck me as the most bizarre was that, in a column on educational inequality and the achievement gap, Brooks completely ignores race.

By discussing the "average American" and focusing on the overall rate of high school completion, Brooks buries the lede, which is that the achievement gap is between students of different races. Yes, "socio-economic status" is a big part of the gap, but black, Latino/a, and Native American students are being out-performed by white and Asian students at all income levels. A lot can be achieved by erasing inequality between poor, middle-class, and wealthy students, but pretending that race does not matter is foolish.

In this column, Brooks is advocating investing in education and closing the achievement gap, and I agree with him that these are top priorities. Yet, I think heaping the blame for educational stagnation on "family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years" is wrong x 10.

I was a TFA teacher, and no one has devoted more time and energy to finding research-based evidence on the achievement gap than TFA. If you have a few free hours, go read through the data and overviews on the TFA site. After only two years in the classroom, I totally agree with the TFA research that says that funding and family are not the major problems holding kids back: a lot has to do with teacher quality, expectations, and fostering a culture of achievement. Lots of factors go into teachers'/administrators' low expectations, but I really believe that many people in education hold lower expectations for African-American and Hispanic students specifically because of their race.

I taught at a school that with a predominantly Mexican-American student body, though there were also students from Central America, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, Portugal, and smaller populations of black and white students. Just like at the school I attended when I was a child, free lunch was the norm. Many of the students at our school came in with a full complement of educational disadvantages — parents with low levels of education, few English skills, low-income families, limited vocabularies in any language, etc. Some teachers dug in to fight the good fight, but others just threw up their hands and declared the situation hopeless.

It is undeniably true, as Brooks notes, that educational inequality starts early in life. By now, most educators are familiar with studies that have found that by age 3, the gap in language skills (a prerequisite for reading in any language) between the richest and poorest children is astounding. The error is in assuming that since children from some families start out at a disadvantage, they will inevitably lag behind their peers. In our current system, they will indeed lag, but it is NOT inevitable. Explicit vocabulary instruction, evidence-based pedagogy, and high expectations can do wonders for even the most disadvantaged students.

The trouble is that too many teachers and schools see poor students (particularly black, Hispanic, and Native American students) as unteachable. That might sound harsh, and I certainly don't mean all teachers or all schools, but there is a lot of that going around.

I've seen a lot of amazing teachers work wonders with kids and families, but I've also seen awful teachers who blame their own failures on the kids and the parents. A teacher cannot get the best results out of a student if that teacher assumes that the student is irredeemably lazy/ignorant/hyper/stupid/worthless. The things I've heard teachers say out loud about students would blow your hair back, and that's not even taking into account unconscious prejudices and systematic injustices (ex: systematically denying Latino students access to the Special Education services to which they are legally entitled — I'm looking at you, Alum Rock Union School District in San Jose, CA).

Brooks is right on his large point: investment in human capital is necessary to the nation's health. But honestly, blaming educational stagnation on the largely mythical declension of "the home" is not a solution. By all means, invest in early childhood education. But don't pretend that race is unimportant.

Chang's Paper Pony

In my earlier post on good history books for the K-3 crowd, I accidentally omitted Chang's Paper Pony. It's not easy to find a book about 19th-century Chinese immigration that a 7-year-old can read by herself, so you can't ignore the few that are out there.

I have found that many children's books on the subject of immigration (and slavery, Civil Rights, etc.) are what I always called "Kids' Books for Mom and Dad." You know the type — they're touching, lushly-illustrated books that look great but are never really a hit with the kids they're supposedly intended for. Mom and Dad love these books because they're works of art and have a Very Important Message, but kids rarely seek them out on their own.

I'll admit — I love KBMD and will probably buy dozens for my own children someday. I love some (When Marian Sang, Pink and Say, Nettie's Trip South) and some are pretty good (Baseball Saved Us, Teammates), but they were always the last ones on the shelves in my classroom during free reading.

Part of the problem is in the illustrations. Adults like black and white illustrations, but 95% of second graders find them boring. Kids LOVE photographs and colorful, dramatic illustrations. Charcoal sketches may be delicate and subtle, but the average elementary schooler will pass over that muted cover every time.

Another problem is the story. Kids' Books for Mom and Dad are usually about Something Very Important and, when history is involved, tend toward the epic. They're usually decent for reading one-on-one with a child because in that situation the parent can answer every question and elaborate on every vague statement, but KBMD are generally not good for independent reading. There is too much new information, typically handled in the least specific way possible.


Chang's Paper Pony is not a KBMD. It is a simple, accessible story that children can enjoy on a number of levels. On one hand, it's a story of a little boy who wants a pony. On the other, it's a jumping-off point for teachers and parents to introduce discussions about immigration, discrimination, and 19th-century America. The story is cute, but it's not the boring crap that they usually push on beginning readers, so it's great for late-blooming readers who are (understandably) bored by hundreds of books about anthropomorphic bunnies and Jimmy's new puppy. The pictures are engaging, the reading level is reasonable, and it's a serious story without getting too wrapped up in having a Very Important Message.

A must-have, especially for California teachers (great for low readers in grade 4 for CA history).

The Boston Coffee Party

On this date in 1777, John Boyle wrote the following entry in his journal:

A Female Riot. — About 100 Women from the North-Part of the Town, getting information of a Quanty. of Coffee being in the Store of Thos. Boylston, Esqr. which he refused to sell at the regulated Price, attacked him in King-Street, and demanded the Keys of his Store, which he refusing to deliver, they immediately placed him in a Cart, and threatened to Cart him out of Town, upon which he delivered them the Keys. — A Committee was appointed to keep him Custody while the Body was employed in getting the Coffee out of the Store, which they speedily effected, and went off with their booty.

This incident is better known from a letter written by Abigail Adams a week later. In 1990, Doreen Rappaport made the riot the subject of a charming children's book called The Boston Coffee Party. This was one of my very favorite books when I was in elementary school and I used it very successfully with my own second grade students.

In fact, I recommend all of the books in this series, including Sam the Minute Man, George the Drummer Boy, and The Long Way to a New Land. When I taught second grade, we had to use scripted curricula in all subjects (it was a Title 1 district and a Reading First school), but I had a little bit of wiggle room to add supplementary lessons during the English Language Development block. I tried to devise history units that focused on the historical experiences of children, and these books were great. The vocabulary is simple enough that a seven-year-old can read it on his or her own, but the issues raised are meaty. The Boston Coffee Party is my favorite because food riots are near and dear to my heart and because the protagonists are girls.

Other recommendations for introducing K-3 kids to history:

Nettie's Trip South: A young girl accompanies her journalist brother on a trip through the South just before the Civil War. There, she witnesses scenes of slavery and tries to understand them. The pictures in this book are black-and-white, so they may not grab the attention of all children. Be careful when reading this book with young children — I had several students cry during the slave auction scene. I liked starting discussions about slavery with this book rather than with a book about the Underground Railroad because it allowed students to build up some outrage before we start talking about resistance.

Mary Anning: Fossil Hunter: This is English history, but this is a great book and can be used for either social studies or science. Mary Anning (1799-1847) was the English fossil hunter responsible for discovering several important plesiosaur fossils. There are several biographies of Anning, but I like this one best — the sentences are short and easy to read, the pictures are pretty good, and the author explains how members of the Royal Society published Anning's discoveries without giving her credit. One of my brightest students was so offended by this injustice that she wrote about Anning in her journal practically every week for the rest of the year and dressed up as Mary Anning the next Halloween.

Sarah Morton's Day
Samuel Eaton's Day
Tapenum's Day: These books, illustrated with photographs of living historians from Plimoth Plantation, were a smash hit in my classroom. The books follow three children through their typical days in Plimoth c. 1625. The lesson comparing our daily routines to theirs practically writes itself. We spent a whole week on these books (making charts, writing compare/contrast essays, etc.). Other teachers spent the week teaching their students "Ten Little Indians" complete with construction paper headdresses and hand-on-mouth war whooping (I'm not exaggerating). If you must do Thanksgiving, do it with these books and Molly's Pilgrim.

No More Kings

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

Compulsory Reading

If you were ever that crazy kid who aways had a book tucked in a pocket wherever you went, you must read "Compulsory Reading" by Alison Bechdel over at Dykes to Watch Out For. 

To prove my bona fides as a compulsive reader, I offer this photo of myself at age 6. My family was camping on the coast of Maine, and yes, I am wearing my bathing suit and reading the "Childhoods of Famous Americans" biography of Molly Pitcher. My siblings are probably off swimming somewhere. 

I did get glasses at some point.

Literacy in Concord, MA

Concord, MA is known for its illustrious literary history. But what can gravestones tell us about literacy in Concord in the 17th and 18th centuries? Because it is so close to Boston, Concord's burying grounds boast a large number of professionally carved gravestones. The quality of these stones is generally very high, and they rarely exhibit the creative spelling and awkward line breaks often found in rural cemeteries.

But these gravestones do occasionally contain misspellings that shed light on the limits of literacy in Concord (at least among stone carvers). The John and Anna Howard stone (1718) in the South Quarter Burying Place is somewhat crudely carved (both the lunette design and the letters are amateur) and contains the interesting misspelling "wife fo." It is unlikely that a literate person would misspell the word "of." It's even stranger that no one gouged out the mistake and amended it. Perhaps the carver was copying an epitaph written by a more talented artisan and most of the people who saw the stone couldn't read it well enough to correct him.

The Mary Meriam stone (1731) at Old Burial Hill has two interesting mistakes: the misspelling of "relict" as "reliks" and the division of the word "anno" into "an" and "no." The former mistake is unique to this stone, but the latter appears on several other stones by the same carver. This suggests that the carver may have been literate in English but did not recognize Latin. When presented with a Latin word, he transformed it into English homophones.


Another curious misspelling can be found on the Joseph Hubburd stone (1768): "Here lies Burred . . ." This is a strange mistake, especially since any gravestone carver must have carved the word "buried" hundreds of times. Perhaps this is just a mistake — the carver's mind wandered and the "r" looked enough like an "i" that his eye just skipped over it. Then again, perhaps the misspelling reflects a regional pronunciation (like the "depated" stones).


I'm also going to assume that this person's name was "Humphrey Barret," and not "Humprey Barret." 

UPDATE: Cranky Yankee's comment made me reflect on this a bit, so I want to make it clear that I'm not arguing that phonetic spelling is evidence of a lack of literacy. The most educated men and women in America often spelled as the spirit moved them until the end of the 18th century (and beyond). Rather, I'm saying that some of these mistakes ("fo") hint at a low level of literacy while others ("an no") merely reflect a lack of familiarity with Latin.

Update:

Thanks to commenter RJO for supplying some details about the carver of this stone: John Worster. 

I'm posting a photo of the John Meriam stone (1724) for a couple of reasons. First, Worster (or a letterer in his shop) misspelled the month ("Feruary"). I also think that it supplies evidence that the letterer thought that "AN" and "NO" were separate words. It looks like he likes to put big spaces between words when he needs to take up room, rather than splitting words into syllables (see lines 1, 4, 8, and 9). 

The space between AN and NO might be a spacing issue rather than a Latin issue. I'm not sure I'm right, but I think I can make a good case for the latter.

California Teacher Fired for "Afro-centric" Lessons

This is disgusting. Karen Salazar, an English teacher at Jordan High School in Watts, was fired after administrators determined that her lessons were "Afro-centric" and inappropriate. Salazar used excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X and rap lyrics in her class and encouraged students to become politically active. The administration isn't talking, so there aren't a lot of specifics on what they found objectionable, and I'm sure they're scrambling to cover their asses with something halfway plausible. Ms. Salazar was well liked by her students, she has a Master's degree, and her mentor teacher gave her positive evaluations. What more could a school ask of its teachers?

Other bloggers have covered the details of the case and commented, so I won't rehash the basics, other than to add my voice to the outrage.

I spent a very brief time in Watts during my training for Teach for America. While the school building was terrible and the instructional materials ancient, the master teachers and administrators who oversaw our training there were passionately committed to their students and saw education as political activism. Obviously, I didn't meet the administrators at Jordan, who seem to have their heads up their asses.

It should go without saying that teachers should teach students how to apply critical thinking skills to everything, even the curriculum in front of them. Isn't that what college-level work is all about?

The most odious thing about this case is that it lays bare the destructive assumption that "standard" histories of the United States or canons of literature are not themselves political constructions. It reminds me of that fight in Philadelphia a few years ago when white residents got angry about the new African-American history requirements for high school students. The assumption is that the "basic" history is a military-political history of the nation state and anything else is pandering to an interest group. "Literature" means English novels and romantic poetry, and anything else is godless commie propaganda. I know I shouldn't be surprised by this ubiquitous type of dumbassery, but it still gets under my skin.

The Geographic Revolution in Early America

This afternoon, I read chapter 3 of Martin Bruckner's The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006).

I was primed to enjoy this piece - I am completely on board with the argument that language, maps, and education are key to creating imagined communities. I agree that efforts to exert authority over people are often most effective when they are matters of education and acclimation rather than coercion. Furthermore, I find the subject matter (education, national identity, symbols, etc.) fascinating.

Still, I found this chapter less than satisfying. It's difficult to articulate exactly what bothered me, but I've come up with three criticisms:

• The writing is disappointing. I suppose this is a subjective criticism and some might disagree with me, but the prose seemed deliberately opaque. Take this sentence as an example:

  Being sounded aloud, the place-name now signaled spatial demands, invoking territorial rights and borderlines for both readers and listeners.

  What does that mean? I'd like to say that the context provides an explanation, but it does not.
  
  Similarly, does anyone know what "direct prop" means? As in

  Examining Ralph Earl's portrait of Mrs. Noah Smith and her family, a closer look reveals that the nation's outline becomes the direct prop of the young man holding the geography book.

  I do not know what this means, and Google was unable to help me. Perhaps it is terminology from a theory with which I am unfamiliar (Prof. Bruckner is an English prof). The outline of North America is only partially visible in the painting - in fact, it is the only part of the world map that is hidden.
  
  Finally, for an essay on the power of language and symbols, the language is either remarkably careless or calculated to make points that don't stand up to scrutiny. For example, in discussing Americans' "eager[ness] to sever all representational ties with the formal imperial power," Bruckner describes English as "the very language of the oppressor." I'm not sure it is wise to call England "the oppressor" without a larger discussion about the implications of the term. After all, the white population of colonial America considered themselves to be Englishmen, and the degree to which any sort of "oppression" triggered the American Revolution is not a settled question.
  
  
• Bruckner uses a lot of slight-of-hand logic to make his argument. In the introduction, he discusses both Federalist and Anti-Federalist objections to the language of the Constitution. Essentially, Federalists thought that language was inadequate to express the complexities of the proposed government, and Anti-Federalists thought that the language should be simple enough that anyone could understand it and it could not hide the document's true intent. After describing the controversy, Bruckner writes:

  The perceived linguistic crisis was resolved at least temporarily by the framers' shared culture of geographic literacy. When the time came to ratify the nation's founding document, the signers of the Constitution ceremoniously bypassed both the alphabet and the vexing ambiguity underlying the English language. As Robert A Ferguson has pointed out: "The signers of the Constitution appear neither in alphabetical order, nor by presumed importance or seniority, nor in haphazard fashion. They are grouped, instead, by state with the states themselves appearing in geographical order from north to south . . ."

  Do you see what he did there? He said the crisis was "resolved" and then presented evidence that does not prove it. How does the order of the signatures address concerns over the limits of language or the fear that the Constitution's ultimate goals were concealed by confusing wording? The geographic orientation is interesting and supports his larger argument in the chapter, but it doesn't resolve the problem he says it resolves.
  
  Bruckner does this several other times in the chapter. When explaining Noah Webster's frustration with "the inherent flexibility underlying all languages, the fact that linguistic forms do not always follow rules but evolve constantly and are shaped by individual oral applications, local habits, and social settings," Bruckner states:

  Webster resolved this dilemma by turning to the discourse of geography, in particular the spelling of place-names.

  Really? He "resolved" the problem of English's notoriously unpredictable spelling and ungovernable evolution? It would be more accurate to say that he "attempted to address" this dilemma or "sought to impose order," but Bruckner can't resist the grand statement. Such wild overstatements provide continuity between paragraphs, but they aren't good history.
  
  
• Bruckner fails to ask many of the obvious questions. This irked me most of all. This post is way too long already, but one example will suffice: Bruckner makes the unassailable point argument that many people hoped to standardize American orthography and pronunciation during the early national period, but doesn't ask the next question: "What is the standard?" Did Webster compile local pronunciations and disseminate them, or did he hope to enshrine his own pronunciations as the standard?
  

Maybe I'm just being picky, but I was annoyed. I was ready to enjoy this assignment, but ended up filling up the margins with questions and corrections. Disappointing.

Creationists at the Museum

This is incredibly disturbing.

As a once and future teacher, I find this both maddening and sickening.

The very worst part is at 2:04, when the creationist is asking the kids a ridiculous question and is expecting the kids to chant "no." The little girl at the front of the group starts to say "yes," then switches mid-vowel to "no."

Young Earth Creationism offends me as an historian, both on empirical and methodological grounds.

Empirically, a literal Biblical history does not conform to what we know about the ancient world. A strict Biblical timeline indicates that the Flood occurred in 2348 B.C.E and that the Tower of Babel incident took place around 2200 B.C.E. That really doesn't allow very much time for the Chinese to develop the distinctive society of the Shang Dynasty by 1600 B.C.E. (and this assumes that the Xia dynasty is entirely mythical, which is not likely). There is quite a lot of debate about when Native Americans first peopled the "New World," but the question is whether the migration happened 10,000 years ago or 15,000 years ago (long after the supposed Creation). I won't even get into the historical discrepancies between the Biblical account of verifiable dates during the life of Jesus (i.e. Herod's death, the dates of the Roman census, etc.). My point here is not to chronicle the many points at which the Bible diverges from the evidence we have about the ancient world. I only mean to say that the legends and metaphors of the Bible can not be nailed down to specific historical dates (poor choice of words?).

Beyond the empirical problems presented by both archaeology and the historical record, Young Earth Creationism offends my methodological sensibilities. I am no scientist, but historians' tools are distantly related to the scientists' tools (perhaps the same Phylum or Class - I'll let a biologist choose the best analogy). Historians aren't so big on the experiments, but we do build arguments based on available evidence. We then spend vast amounts of energy correcting, refining, extending, and synthesizing the work of others.

Creationists do not operate this way. They do not value evidence that contradicts the Bible, and they refuse to be skeptical about the Bible. A good historian is pathologically skeptical about even the most reliable source - we make our livings examining the biases of written records. Studying biology or geology while presupposing the infallibility of the Bible is like studying history while presupposing that English-speaking peoples are infallibly more intelligent, moral, and righteous than non-English-speaking peoples. You're certainly entitled to your views, even if they are batshit crazy, but that doesn't make them good history (or good science).

The thing that confuses me about Young Earth Creationists, Intelligent Design proponents, and the rest of the anti-evidence crowd is that they seem not to understand how the academy works. The people in this video and the people who run the Discovery Institute (no link - look them up on Google if you need to) believe that there is a vast orthodox conspiracy upholding tenuous theories. Don't they know that academics salivate over the tiniest flaw in their colleagues' work? Whole careers are built on exploiting minor differences in interpretation or correcting small errors in earlier published work. If someone really could supply evidence - solid, testable, plausible evidence - that evolution is a crock or that radiometric dating is hopelessly flawed, they would be embraced and feted by the scientific community. The reason that IDers and Creationists don't have a tremendous following among scientists is that they haven't presented plausible evidence, not because scientists are unwilling to challenge orthodoxy.

Now, being a good little historian, I have to add the obvious caveat: many people have presented theories that turned out to be true but were not immediately accepted. The difference is that they built and tested their theories based on evidence. They challenged orthodoxy by proposing new theories that conformed to the empirical data they collected in their experiments. Just because the scientific community has not immediately accepted all good theories does not automatically make Creationism or ID scientifically plausible.

I will be among the first to criticize science for naturalizing political and social arguments. Scientific authority is often employed for non-scientific purposes, and science has been at the forefront of professionalizing, medicalizing, and naturalizing authority for morally questionable purposes. The list of atrocities backed by science is not as long as the list of atrocities backed by religion, but that is mostly a function of science's relatively recent divergence from religion as an organizing explanation for the universe. Still, Creationism is odious because it exploits people's ignorance rather than engaging in responsible conversations about the limits of scientific knowledge.

Video via Pharyngula.

*Update: I would like to add that I agree with the many commenters over at Pharyngula who have pointed out that the reporter's math is pretty bad. Clearly, a person who lives to be 800 does not have children during year 800. The Bible says that Noah was only about 500 years old when his children were born, so the reporter's math is clearly off.