As a professional historian at Hamilton College, I teach my students that the United States was founded on the principles of limited government, voluntary exchange, respect for private property, and civil freedom. Does any sane parent believe that more than a tiny fraction of students graduate from college these days with a deep and abiding […]
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The evolution of the historical profession in the United States in the last fifty years provides much reason for celebration. It provides even more reason for unhappiness and dread. Never before has the profession seemed so intellectually vibrant. An unprecedented amount of scholarship and teaching is being devoted to regions outside of the traditional American […]
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The 1997 film Good Will Hunting features Matt Damon’s character in a conversation with Harvard students, touting Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States as a way to better understand the American past. The scene was cringe-worthy for at least two reasons. First, there was something more than a little off-putting about a movie whose lead character demonstrated […]
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Herb London and KC Johnson have already posted on the disappointing findings of the ACTA project What Will They Learn? But it is worth pondering some of the implications of the report. One of the more striking of them is the “Slightly less than 20% [of colleges surveyed] require U.S. government or history.” As KC […]
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Andrew Breitbart has shot onto the media-and-politics scene in the last two years with several well-publicized stories and controversies. What many people may not realize is the extent to which Breitbart’s adversarial approach to the media was formulated out of his college education. When Breitbart sat down with Peter Robinson for his show Uncommon Knowledge […]
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“There are any number of courses that deal with some group aspect of America, but virtually none that deals with America as a whole. For example, there is African-American history from 1619 to 1865 and from 1865 to the present, but there is no comparable sequence on America. Every course is social or cultural history that looks at the world […]
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A few years ago, the University of Iowa’s History Department conducted a search for a new hire in U.S. foreign relations. After the department denied a preliminary, or screening, interview to Mark Moyar—a highly qualified (B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard, Ph.D. In history from Cambridge), but also clearly conservative, historian—it came to […]
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Take a look at ISI’s latest civic literacy survey “The Shaping of the American Mind: The Diverging Influences of the College Degree & Civic Learning on American Beliefs.” One finding: more than half of students polled did not know the three branches of the federal government.
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</> Howard Zinn’s death yesterday affords us the opportunity to evaluate the remarkable influence he has had on the American public’s understanding of our nation’s past. His book A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980 with a first printing of 5000 copies, went on to sell over two million. To this day […]
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Candace de Russy’s January 7 post here, “Hate-America Sociology,” understandably attracted a lot of attention. It cited a 10-question Soc 101 quiz at an unnamed eastern college, complete with accusatory leftish questions and some simple-minded answers by a student who drew a mark of 100 for agreeing with the politics of his professor. A few […]
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Recently, a colleague forwarded to me a copy of an exam from an introductory sociology class found lying in a room at a public college in the east. It was graded 100%. The exam deserves to be quoted at length, as parts of it are virtually indistinguishable from the old Soviet agitprop of the Fifties: […]
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By Mark Bauerlein If you browse through the list of dissertations filed in American literary and cultural studies last year, you will find many conventional and sober projects that fit well with traditional notions of humanistic study. Here are a few sample titles: – “Rethinking Arthur Miller: Symbol and structure” – “Tragic investigations: The value […]
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