American exceptionalism

One of the biggest jokes on the planet. Whatever the truth once was, how can you read stories like this and not feel the fetid breath of history (as in "He's history!" blowing down the nape of your neck.

Last month, the results of the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, tests were announced. It was the first time that Chinese students had participated, and children from Shanghai ranked first in every single area. Students from the United States, meanwhile, came in seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and an especially demoralizing thirty-first in math. This last ranking put American kids not just behind the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Singaporeans but also after the French, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Slovenians, the Estonians, and the Poles.

I'm sure we're ahead of somebody.

aren't we?

there is, of course, a slight trick to these results. Reassured?

"Toto, we're not in Europe anymore"

Or something like that. The Clemens household is all abuzz with plans for Halloween, mostly revolving around a 'Wizard of Oz' theme. Since I couldn't find a Winkie costume I am thinking of going to the annual History Dept. Gala Halloween Extravaganza and Costume Ball as ... Clemens.

To change the topic back to what the post is really about (what... where are my spectacles .... zzz ... oh!)

AMERICA!

It is not Europe. Andrew Sullivan, a non-American American wanna-be has a riposte to Pat Buchanan's latest declaration of the Unbearable Whiteness of Being America, has this to say (along with several other things worth reading):

The English, lulled by their marination in American pop culture from infancy, and beguiled by the same language, can live out their days in this country never actually noting that it is an alien land - stranger than you might have ever imagined, crueler than you realized, but somehow also more inspiring than you ever thought possible. This is the America I am trying to make my home, after 25 years. It is not the America of Pat Buchanan's or John Derbyshire's fantasies.

Derbyshire's latest controversy is due to his claiming giving women the right to vote was a 'bad thing.'

Deja vu all over again

From a column by EJ Dionne in today's Washington Post about the campaign between Herbert Hoover and FDR:

Hoover stopped short of declaring Roosevelt a celebrity. But Donald A. Ritchie reports in his excellent 2007 book, "Electing FDR," that Hoover saw Roosevelt as "his weakest and most vulnerable" foe and "did not respect him as a political rival."

History is so much fun. .

New books on Mormon History

I know something of Mormon history though not a lot. The Washington Post has a brief review of two new books about two disturbing events in that history. The main difference between early Mormon history and, say, early Christian or Islamic history, is the degree of documentation we have. It took place in the full glare of a civilization with widespread literacy, the printing press, and an obsession with making and recording history.

Why history is important ... or at least ironic

Here is a quote for The Atlantic Magazine found in today's 'Daily Dish:'

.... the temper of the times made it the special duty of a prosecutor and a court engaged in trying two Italian radicals before a jury of native New Englanders to keep the instruments of justice free from the infection of passion or prejudice. In the case of Sacco and Vanzetti no such restraints were respected. By systematic exploitation of the defendants' alien blood, their imperfect knowledge of English, their unpopular social views, and their opposition to the war, the District Attorney invoked against them a riot of political passion and patriotic sentiment; and the trial judge connived at—one had almost written, cooperated in—the process.

Sound familiar? A recent case? An overheated liberal law professor. No - it is Felix Frankfurter's* take on the Sacco and Vanzetti case back in 1921. We have certainly matured as a civil society since then.


*though he was a law professor at the time.

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History Science Fiction Theater 1832

Now here it the way to teach American history.