The Future of American History

http://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/07/29/421624129/the-future-of-american-history

by benbreen • 11 years ago

14 12 11 years ago

walterbell• 11 years ago

Are there academic history programs focused on the history of engineering, science and technology? These will of necessity reference the surrounding sociopolitical context, while bringing light to patterns that remain relevant to modern STEM disciplines.

rglovejoy• 11 years ago

MIT has the Science, Technology, and Society Program:

http://web.mit.edu/sts/

WalterBright3• 11 years ago

While not a college course, James Burke's "Connections" series are excellent for that.

digikata• 11 years ago

This might be more of a resource than a program of study, but the Computer History Museum runs an Oral History collection which collects first hand discussions from the people at the point of development of many computing technologies.

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/

dpeck• 11 years ago

GT has an undergraduate major working with it, http://www.hsoc.gatech.edu/undergraduate/major, BS of History, Technology, and Society.

Took a fair number of classes in it while I was working on CS and generally enjoyed and learned a lot in them all.

mrwilliamchang• 11 years ago

Great quote towards the end of the article: "Not all students are convinced they need to know a great deal about U.S. history anymore. Some believe in the power of the global marketplace to shape their present and future lives, and therefore see our hallmark U.S. institutions — the Constitution, citizenship, federal government system ... and the histories attached to them — as arcane compared to the new worlds that technology, innovation and consumption are spawning."

Gravityloss• 11 years ago

What a strange world view. Who sets the laws then?

cJ0th• 11 years ago

corporations ? ;)

WalterBright3• 11 years ago

"especially because I teach American history in a way that is more inclusive and challenging of dominant myths than most of them were exposed to in high school."

Sometimes I think that just what is politically correct has changed, and a different set of myths is now taught.

"to teach painful histories — histories of slavery, Native American genocide, Jim Crow and lynching, Japanese internment"

There's a heluva lot more to American history than the bad things.

rrss1122• 11 years ago

I agree with you - what is politically correct has changed. I think it often changes to be what is most convenient to those in power.

There's a huluva lot more to American history than the bad things, but recent trends I see make me fear that even the bad things will be swept under the rug. You see stories pop up all the time of colleges restricting speech because it hurts somebody's feelings. This is slowly starting to happen to public speech as well. As the article says, history is painful to face, and students today are more unwilling to put up with pain and more likely to demand that they not be subjected to any pain.

Perhaps that just reflects what has been true of history, that it is often rewritten to convenience the ruling class and pacify the peasants.

WalterBright3• 11 years ago

One thing about myths - Stephen Ambrose wrote a book "Nothing Like It In The World" about the building of the first transcontinental world. He wrote in the Acknowledgements that:

"I had been taught to regard the railroad builders as the models for Daddy Warbucks. The investors and builders had made obscene profits which they used to dominate state and national politics to a degree unprecedented before or since. John Robinson's book The Octopus: A History of Construction, Conspiracies, Extortion, about the way the Big Four ruined California, expressed what I thought and felt. What made the record of the big shots so much worse was that it was the people's money they stole, in the form of government bonds and land. In my view, opposition to the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific (later the Southern Pacific) had led to the Populist Party and then the Progressive Party, political organizations that I regarded as the saviors of America. I wanted nothing to do with those railroad thieves."

However, once he got into it, he realized that about everything he knew about the project was a myth, and finished it with a transformed belief that it was the greatest American achievement of the 19th century.

(It really is a marvelous book, too.)

mieses• 11 years ago

About 70 academic historians signed an open letter opposing the new A.P. U.S. History framework so it's not surprising to see NPR jump on this.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/...

The Future of American History

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