Monthly Archives: January 2011

Amazing What Politicians Used To Say

Obama gave his state of the union address last night–my morning commute was full of recap and commentary. It ran the gamut, as the joke goes, from A to B. We have two options: cut taxes and decrease spending, and cut taxes and decrease spending more. In that light, it’s interesting to see how American […]

January 26, 2011 – 3:38 pm | By admin | Posted in History | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Privacy and Corporate Personhood

The Supreme Court is now hearing the case of FCC vs AT&T, in which AT&T is attempting to thwart a Freedom of Information Act request into its records by claiming that it has privacy rights as a person does. My guess is the Court will side with AT&T and continue the trend of making corporations […]

January 21, 2011 – 2:25 pm | By admin | Posted in History | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

Saving the AHA

Hello, fellow historians. Do you love the AHA, your profession association? No, me neither. And why not?  Because it appears to do little except organize a large and mostly disagreeable annual conference and publish the glossy, unusually sized American Historical Review, which you no longer have room for. It’s expensive to join. Its membership is […]

January 19, 2011 – 1:11 pm | By admin | Posted in History | Tagged , , , | Comments (11)

Virginia History Textbooks Continued

Our county, Arlington, has announced they will pull Our Virginia from the classroom “until a corrected digital edition becomes available, probably at the end of this month.” It’s better than doing nothing, but it’s really not a good result. The County will go back to the same company, Five Ponds Press. Five Ponds will remove […]

January 14, 2011 – 2:36 pm | By admin | Posted in History, teaching | Comments (1)

Those VA History textbooks

There has been a lot of reporting  about the many many errors in the history texts used in the  Virginia public schools, including the really nasty one about the black confederates but many many more.  But what’s really terrible about it isn’t the wrong dates. It’s the complete lack of historical argument. I spent some […]

January 7, 2011 – 12:59 pm | By admin | Posted in History, teaching | Tagged , , , | Comments (14)