August 05, 2006

A Colonial Abortion Drama via Boston 1775 and metafilter
  • What a great find, jb! This is the best kind of history to read; it's like the voices of the dead talking right to you.
  • Wow, sooo cool, jb. Very interesting read.
  • Good link, jb! How great would it be to have this in your history book at school?
  • A Midwife's tale is a good read about the place women filled in the late 1700s in New England. The Amazon reviews, as usual, will give you an idea about the content. If you haven't read it, you should.
  • Think it may boil down to how difficult would it be in the US to get a school board to approve such a textbook? Excellent post, jb!
  • Bees, in the US we do NOT like to deal with realities in our schools.
  • That is very true, and I can say that most textbooks are approved on the state level rather than at the school board level (though that can happen, too). Also, most books in the country have already been approved by the most conservative states, most notably Texas, which has one of the most conservative textbook adoption boards in the nation. (This holds true mostly for history and health books... for now, Texas is pretty cool about the whole evolution thing in science books.) Because Texas has such a large school system, textbook publishers don't want to risk their books not being accepted in such a large market, so they make *all* of their textbooks Texas-friendly. This means that, for a long time, Northern states got the Southern take on the Civil War and more liberal states have a hard time finding good (read: non-abstinence only) sex ed texts. A good place to read about this is James Loewen's book Lies My Teacher Told Me (though, with the knowledge that Loewen wrote a history book that ran afoul of Mississippi's adoption board... mostly because the book was true).
  • At the risk of certain certain people to have apopletic seizures and foam at the mouth at the very site of a post from me in a thread, there is a very excellent, and very readable, book on the subject of the inadequadecy of American testbooks, Lies My Teacher Told Me. The author does an excellent job of comparing and contrasting some of the most popular testbooks. He uses A People's History, which is also an excellent book, as his control book. Needless to say all the textbooks come up short when compared to Zinn's book.
  • This site was actually produced by LarryC over at metafilter, who teaches university level American history. So not so many worries about people trying to control his curriculum, at least, not yet. (It's ridiculous that people try to control university curriculum, and still in the name of "protecting the children". If they are children, they shouldn't be in university.) I haven't read A Midwive's Tale, but Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 is an excellent book on women's history in the period.
  • I don't know if it's a good thing that Loewen used Zinn's book as his control. I've never heard anything against Zinn's book, but it has a very specific purpose, and thus a very specific (and not necessarily always appropriate) focus. Loewen should have used scholarly histories if he wanted to assess the accuracy and currentness (as in following on the most recent research) of history textbooks.
  • Frankly, allowing politicians to make decisions about what should or should not constitute academic content is a sure recipe for disaster. In a rational society one would hope such decisions would be be made by experts in each particular field. All countries fall into this trap from time to time. But when the education inflicted on the majority of people is deficient -- well, one has only to look at the decisions recently made [or which were allegedly made] by the American electorate to understand the far-reaching consequences of such failure.
  • And I STILL know people who rant and rave that "liberalism is being forced down their children's throats" from kindergarten through grad school.
  • Loewen also read up on scholarly research. As an historian, I would figure (or hope!) he was up on that already. I think he just used Zinn to figure out how to write a textbook.
  • I wish my mom would have come to my grad school. Maybe she could have asked them to feed us some fresh vegetables in the dining hall occasionally. But she had this whole, "you're an adult, you're 28 29, for gad's sake" thing going. Clearly she's one of those toxic parents who would let their kids get away with anything, like getting married and holding jobs and having children.
  • That sounds terrible, jb! My mom was great. She had pet names for me like "stupid" and "worthless," and put a lot of time and effort into keeping me out of college. She used to say heartwarming things like, "If I don't like the way you raise your kids, I'll just take them away," or "You're a whore for sleeping with more than one man" or "You're bringing demons into this house, you Satan worshipper!" Oh, and she smoked through her pregnancies because she was worried that her babies would come out too big or too smart. Thanks Mom!
  • I'm sensing some...bitterness.
  • Nunia, I smoked through your mom's pregnancies as well, and now I feel awful about it.
  • If it weren't for you, Ralph, my IQ would have been "off the charts" instead of mere "genius." Thanks for being so selfish!