HY 150
INTRODUCTION
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskintroduction.htm

The crucial goal of all my courses is to create an environment where you, as the student, can begin to feel comfortable taking responsibility for your own education

I VALUE MY HONOR AS A PRECIOUS PART OF WHO I AM. WHEN I SIGN MY NAME, OTHERS MAY KNOW THAT THE WORK CONTAINED THEREIN IS MY OWN. I WILL NOT GIVE OR RECEIVE UNAUTHORIZED AID ON CLASS REQUIREMENTS, NOR WILL I TOLERATE OTHERS TO DO SO.

A PARABLE FOR SCHOOL

Then Jesus took his disciples up on the mountain and gathered them around him. And he taught them, saying,
"Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are the meek.
Blessed are the merciful.
Blessed are you who thirst for justice.
Blessed are you who are persecuted.
Blessed are you who suffer.
When these things being to happen, rejoice, for your reward will be great in Heaven."

And Simon Peter said, "Do we have to write this down?"
And Phillip said, "Will this be on the test?"
And John, stirred from slumber, said, "Would you repeat that?"
And Andrew, upset that Jesus had disturbed his conversation with Mary, said, "John the Baptist’s disciples don’t have to learn this stuff."
And Matthew said, "Huh?"
And Judas said, "What’s this got to do with real life?"
And Mary Magdalene said, "I hope it’s multiple choice test, I don’t do essay exams very well."
And Paul asked, "On the test will points be taken off for spelling and grammar mistakes?"
And Bartholomew stomped out the room, "My parents didn’t pay for this nonsense."
Later that day, Thomas saw Jesus and said, "I know I’ve missed a lot of classes, but I’ve had practice, work, and girlfriend problems. Did we do anything important today? Can I do extra credit?

Then one of the Pharisees, an expert in the law, said, "I don’t see any of this in your syllabus. Do you have a lesson plan? Is there a summary? Where’s the student guide? Will there be a follow-up assignment? I need an “A” to keep my scholarship. What’s the least I need do to get my “A”?”

. . . And Jesus wept.
 

EUROPE IN THE MODERN WORLD
COURSE DESCRIPTION, ORGANIZING THEME, OBJECTIVES, AND OUTCOMES
 

Human civilization is remarkably complex, widespread, and long-lived. Any particular people’s economic and cultural products, their specific historical evolution and their political and philosophical ideas and assumptions all express the values, aspirations, and definitions of society as a whole and of its individual members. This course will examine the development of European civilization, that is, who we are, through a study of ideas and institutions, with a special emphasis on those ideas and institutions expressed in the West’s great gift to the world—modernization. The process of modernization and the world’s reaction to it will be our unifying theme. Another major theme revolves around the concept that the roots of the present lay in the past. We will actively seek out those ideas and institutions from the past that we can recognize as part of our modern world.

We will seek the origin of values, institutions, and ideas in a historical way. Values are creative human responses to the necessities of time and place. We cannot satisfy by lip service alone the commitment to principles such as justice, equality, loyalty, freedom, and responsibility—in short, the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Rather we can satisfy it only by applying principles in circumstances where correct answers often are unclear. The concreteness of uniting the study of values with a historical narrative vividly exposes the drama lived by those who have confronted and are confronting the paradoxes and conflicts between values and reality/necessity.

The values that we hold dear are the product of our unique, western, historical evolution. To understand ourselves (What is it that makes us, us?), we must also delve into the choices made by others (people like ourselves) in the face of their necessities (necessities sometimes like those we face and sometimes quite different). Moreover, we must try to understand their efforts to reconcile their actions with their values—a problem that continues to bedevil us as well, both as a nation and as our individual selves. In stretching our imaginations to try to understand other peoples in other times and places, we come better to understand the human condition and to deal with it rationally and in a non-self-destructive way.

This course will cover the political, religious, social, economic, military, and cultural development of Europe and the modern world from the Scientific Revolution and the French Revolution to the future. Who are we? How do we define ourselves? How is that we became who we are?

ORGANIZING THEME
 

The central theme of this course is modernization.
1. You will be expected to convey an understanding of the differences between pre-modern and modern life.
2. You will be expected to convey an understanding of the process of modernization, the trauma of the process on society, and how the world has reacted politically, economically, and ideologically to modernization.

a. You will be expected to convey an understanding of the bourgeois/capitalist process of modernization and its advantages and disadvantages.
b. You will be expected to convey an understanding of the alternative, state-directed ("State Capitalism" mode of modernization and its advantages and disadvantages. You should convey an understanding of the two most important models of Third World state-directed development in the Twentieth Century: Russia and Japan.
 

COURSE OBJECTIVES
 

1. The main objective of this course is to introduce students to the history of Europe from the Scientific and French revolutions to the future. Our culture, "Western Civilization" found its origins in the Middle East and moved westward to Greece, eventually centered itself in Europe. We distinguish from the other areas of mass cultures: India, China, the Middle East, and the Amerindian of the Americas.
2. While the modern world melds together all mass cultures, each mass culture retains distinctive individuality. Students should understand why the West chose its route to the future.
3. A secondary objective is to show that every person has a place in the unfolding historical process. This perspective should foster human understanding as well as an understanding of self.
4. Another objective is that students will come to understand and be able to evaluate critically the influence of Europe’s role in developing the modern world. At the same time, the modern world is ultimately an amalgam of borrowings and interactions among all the world’s cultures.
5. What are the kinds of questions historians ask? What are the kinds of evidence and sources historians use? What sorts of answers do historians come up with? Just what is the value anyway of the historian’s "scientific" search for historical truth?

COURSE OUTCOMES
 

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to do the following:

1. Discuss the major themes and issues in Europe’s development in the world context from about the seventeenth century to the present and why different civilizations chose their particular developmental routes.
2. Appreciate the historical origins of modern culture, ideas, and development.
3. Identify the role Europe has played in the larger, modern world. Identify the effect the rest of the world has had on Europe.
4. Finally, students will come to understand the nature of the study of history, including the role of primary and secondary sources plus the judicious use of popular culture

WHAT IS HISTORY?
 

History studies human behavior in its sequential, or vertical, non-repetitive aspects. Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Political Science, on the other hand and more often than not, describe horizontal slices of human behavior and consciously try to draw verifiable and replicable generalizations.

However, just because history deals with the unique in human behavior, this does not mean that historians do not generalize. A mere listing of events, facts, dates, and names produces a chronicle; it is not history, because history tries to draw out meaning from seemingly random events. History is significant, and fun, only to the degree that it tries to understand, to interpret, and to give meaning to the unique events in human behavior over time.  This helps us find meaning in what we do.

Yet, "We never know anything, we only can define more clearly those things that we know nothing about." There are no clearly right and wrong answers in history. Intelligent people of good will and integrity can come to radically differing interpretations about the meaning of a specific event or series of events. This is what makes history fun. Objective tests lead students to suppose, falsely, that there is only one right, and many wrong, answers to any given historical question. In fact, we can often disagree as to just what the important questions themselves are!

Although their conclusions might differ, all historians, or at least the good ones, are united in method. The process is to gather "facts" and then draw meaning out of those facts. The process is "inductive," and therefore is more closely akin to the "scientific method" than it is to, say, "Religious Truth" which is "deductive" in nature. That is, those who rely on religion—or, for that matter, any other overarching theory of Truth, for example, Marxism—deduce facts based on their understanding of that Truth.

To give meaning to history is to create "synthetic history." This means to select, edit, and organize information to make it understandable. But not everything we as individuals do and say in any given day are rationally explainable. Why should the complex of motivations, sentiments, thoughts, and mere chance for historical personages be any easier to explain? The real explanation of historical events, more often than not, is that we just do not know. But I cannot say, "That’s just the way it was," because I would soon be out of a job. My job is to explain, not to say that everything is unexplainable. In this sense, to be confused is to demonstrate that you understand; to claim to understand merely shows how little you in fact do understand.

Is history what "really" happened, or merely what humans have recorded? Historical sources are written sources, although other studies of human behavior, for example, economics, sociology, psychology, and political science, can help illuminate historical questions. Other studies such as archaeology and literature are also invaluable.

I can’t prove to you that history will make you happier, more successful, richer, or a more appealing conversationalist at cocktail parties—to the contrary. All I can say is that I assume that it is better to know than it is not to know.

I can, however, suggest that studying history can be of value to you. Many businesses have discovered that, although, for example, engineering graduates have an easier time finding their first job and get better pay for it, after a time—say 15 years—their liberal arts-trained contemporaries often overtake them in prestige, rank, and pay. Why? Because the liberal arts tend to expose students to a fuller range of possibilities over time and place of human potentialities, the full range of potential problems and potential solutions. Liberal arts expand the imagination.

How can you understand who you are without knowing something about your basic, unquestioned assumptions about the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. You receive these concepts from your culture—Western Civilization—and they can either liberate you or imprison you, depending on your awareness of them. However, cultural values change over time and place.

So, then, what is our European culture? How can we answer that question without understanding how our culture developed over the six thousand or so years of Western (in its broadest sense) culture’s development? How can we answer that question without understanding the interaction between the West and other mass cultures. In other words, how can you know who you are until you know who all your forbearers—not only in the genetic, but also in the cultural sense—were? This is probably the ultimate purpose of this course. When you are through studying HY 150 one thing which ought to impress you is that over the years is that the range of problems and their solutions which we face have not changed all that much. It is difficult to say that we have learned much from history or that we are especially superior in any way to any of our ancestors.

IDEAS IN HISTORY
“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme”
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce”
 

History is the record of what has happened in the past, and it is also what is happening now. We use the word historic to refer to old things such as "a historic building," but we also use it to refer to new and unique events such as "this historic occasion."

The popular cliché that history repeats itself is clearly nonsense if taken literally. No matter how many similarities we might see between our society and its problems and those of some other people who came before us, these societies are obviously not identical. Nonetheless, some general patterns in history seem to repeat because of the unchanging nature of the human condition. People live within a diverse but limited range of physical circumstances that are necessary for their survival. Their environment cannot be too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. People have needs: water and food, clothes and housing, and protection from enemies. Beyond survival, people also need emotional, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual satisfaction that transcends and contributes to fulfilling their physical and material requirements.

History chronicles how our ancestors have accomplished all these things, and it suggests certain possibilities about our own society and ourselves. When the past and the present illuminate each other, then the study of history springs to life and becomes especially interesting, meaningful, and useful.

II. THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
One of the most valuable things you can derive from the study of history is a sense of which things change over time and which do not. Change, of course, attracts more attention than does continuity, but both belong in the human story and both are important. Material change is obvious in history; the clothes we wear, the buildings we live in, the tools and weapons we use clearly differ from the same items existing ten, a hundred, or a thousand years ago. However, all of them satisfy the same basic and unchanging human physical and material wants and needs. Ideas also change; our values, morals, and concepts evolve more or less rapidly. However, these, too, continue to aim at satisfying the same basic human emotional, intellectual, and spiritual demands and desires.

Historian Crane Briton has broadly defined an "idea" as "almost any coherent example of the workings of the human mind expressed in words." Everyone, of course, has ideas, not only the intellectuals and philosophers. We all "entertain ideas about right and wrong, have purposes that can be and are, stated in words, and are moved by all sorts of beliefs, creeds, superstitions, traditions, and sentiments."

We are aware of some of these; others we accept unconsciously. When confronted by peoples in other times and places with different "beliefs, creeds, superstitions, traditions, and sentiments" we come to examine our own particular values for their fitness and appropriateness. We may also come to understand that much of what we consider to be "human nature" in fact is not a biological but a cultural inheritance. Further, on the personal level, the unexamined life is a prison. Until we consciously come to grips with all of our assumptions—conscious and unconscious—we are imprisoned by our "beliefs, creeds, superstitions, traditions, and sentiments." We free ourselves by studying History.

Ideas differ greatly but they revolve around a certain set of topics that address a limited number of questions. The earliest human documents found, even ancient myths and legends, contain expressions of interest in questions such as these: Does the universe make sense? If so, what kind of sense? Does it have a purpose? What is our place in the universe? Why do we do what we do? What do we mean if we say that something is true or false, right or wrong, real or imaginary, good or bad, beautiful or ugly? And how do we determine the standards by which we judge these various attributes?

These are important questions. They may or may not have any final answers, but most of us think we have answers, or at least we act as though we do. These questions are really asking: What is? What could be?  What ought to be? In studying the history of ideas, we see what other people have thought, and by comparison and contrast we begin to have a clearer view of what we ourselves think. This study shows us how ideas are related to how people act and how ideas influence or are influenced by other aspects of human existence.

III. MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY AND WHY STUDY IT
A. WESTERN CIVILIZATION
The word civilization refers to a particular kind of human society. There was a time when Europeans thought that they were the only "civilized" people in the world. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, as Europeans began to explore and discover other areas of the world, they came to realize that there were other human societies as sophisticated as their own. When Europeans sailed around the tip of Africa to India and eventually to China and Japan, they contacted advanced societies (in some ways, more advanced than their own), which they considered” civilized." Because they had sailed east to discover these civilizations, Europeans began to refer to them as Eastern (as in "oriental," "the Orient," or "the Far East").  If those were "Eastern civilizations," then by contrast Europe became known as "Western civilization." The term was a mere convenience for dividing the world into two parts that we still sometimes use in oversimplifications like "East and West."

Western civilization had its beginnings in the rich river valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt some 5,000 years ago. For much of its history, this civilization surrounded and at times depended on the Mediterranean Sea. Its religious and moral foundations were established by the ancient Hebrews, its cultural and intellectual ones by the ancient Greeks. Over the millennia, this "civilization" drifted in a generally westward direction to Rome and then to a weakened Europe. Then, about 500 years ago, Europeans carried it across the Atlantic Ocean to North and South America and across the Pacific and Indian oceans to the other continents of the world.

We can pick centers of Western civilization—one city in particular for each epitomizing culture, wealth, power, and influence.  Five thousand years ago the choice might be Uruk or Memphis; 2,500 years ago, Athens; 2,000 years ago, Rome; 750 years ago, Paris or Constantinople; and today, Washington or New York.

B. WHY STUDY IT?
Studying Western civilization and Modern European History is important for at least three reasons.
1. First, we are products and members of this civilization and to know the civilization is to "know thyself."
2. Second, Western civilization has dominated much of the planet for half a millennium.
3. And third, Western civilization continues to influence most of the world today and will likely continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

Regardless of where your biological ancestors may have come from--Africa, Asia, Europe, or the Americas themselves—you are primarily a cultural product of the ideas, values, and institutions of Western civilization. If you live in the United States, you live in a society where the language, political and economic systems, and religions are almost entirely imports from lands on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The English language, the democratic republic, social-welfare capitalism, and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all originated in the Old World. The United States has, of course, modified all of these for better or for worse, and non-Western civilizations have modified our culture. But most of what we are today we find rooted in an ancient civilization 5,000 years old. Socrates advised that to be wise, one must know oneself. If you are to know yourself and why you think and act as you do, you need to explore and understand the cultural roots from which you sprang.

In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began to venture out on the Atlantic waters to explore a world about which they knew little, they discovered lands, peoples, and riches that they eventually came to dominate. Europeans carried their ideas, values, and institutions with them wherever they went, and often imposed them on non-Europeans. As a shorthand, we may call this process the "Westernization" or "Modernization" of the world's other previously autonomous center's of civilization: the Middle East, India, China, and the Americas. From this age of colonization until less than half a century ago, most of Africa and Asia were under European domination, and the Americas and Australia had become huge European colonies or offshoots. To the native peoples of these continents, domination by the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, English, and others often meant exploitation enslavement, and extermination. Domination also provided the political, economic, and social tools necessary for modernization.

Not until Europeans had exhausted their own resources and populations in World War II were the peoples of Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world able to free themselves from direct Western political, military, and economic domination. Even then, although these peoples had preserved or revived their own cultural traditions, they often adopted many Western ideas and institutions. Western science and technology continue to dominate the world, and non-Western peoples seek the power and material prosperity the West has created. Western institutions have become models for the rest of the world: the national state for political organization is an example. For a quarter of a century the Communist regime in China under Mao Zedong, was officially anti-Western and isolated itself behind a "bamboo curtain." Yet, China based its political, economic, and social system on the thought of three men, only one of whom was not Western—Mao himself and even he was educated in Europe. The other two were Marx and Lenin—the first a Jewish German philosopher, the second a Russian, atheistic intellectual and revolutionary.  Both were steeped in the philosophical traditions of the West.

Most people in the world want the material things of the West, but with these things go ideas, values, and ways of life. People also demand freedom and equality in the name of the Western idea of "human rights." Thus, whatever the fate of Western civilization—whether this civilization is declining or whether it is not—its influence on the history of the world in the past, in our time, and in the future seems undeniable.

III. CONCEPTS AND SKILLS OF LEARNING HISTORY
Learning history, like most other subjects you take in college, depends in large part on your verbal skills—reading with comprehension and retention of the material, and writing, and speaking clearly and correctly to communicate what you have learned. Other "higher-lever" skills that you will need are analysis and synthesis.

Two of the most important intellectual skills that you have are your abilities to analyze and to synthesize. Analysis means to take things apart; synthesis means to put them together. For example, most believe that if you can take apart and put back together some machine, you will understand it better because you will see how the parts relate to one another, fit together, and function. Instead of taking apart a real machine to improve or prove your understanding, you might do it mentally—using a drawing, diagram, or even a verbal description.

The same principle holds true for various kinds of information, such as that involved in the study of history. If you can break information down to specific facts or clusters of related facts, and reassemble them in a way that makes sense, you are showing a grasp of the subject. Historians use the techniques of analysis and synthesis then they write history. You need to employ these same techniques to learn history and to show in assignments and on examinations how much you have learned and understood.

A. ANALYSIS
When historians analyze a person, society, event, or development, they organize separate bits of information into various categories. They do this partly for convenience (to provide some order out of what at first may seem chaos) and for showing some initial connections and relationships. History as a scholarly discipline does not have a specialized terminology as do the physical sciences, natural sciences, and most other social sciences. You will usually be familiar with the words used to label the various categories.  It is essential, however, that you think carefully and understand fully what these adjectives mean when you read them in your textbook or hear them mentioned by your instructor in class.

Below is a list of these categories with brief descriptions of the things to which they refer. Following each description is a list of related words and terms. The list is not all-inclusive, and the descriptions are not precise definitions. By studying them, however, you should pick up a good working sense of what you need to know.

1. Environmental: the physical or material conditions in which people find themselves; the terrain, soil, weather, climate, geographical features that people confront and make the best or move on. Related terms: fertile, arid, mountainous, desert, maritime, plains, rivine, temperate, tropical, rugged, arable.
2. Economic: how people "make a living," that is, how they provide for the material needs and wants of individuals and society: food, shelter, and clothing; the production, distribution, and exchange of goods. Related terms: hunting-gathering, agriculture, domestication of plants and animals, technology, crafts, manufacturing, finance, fiscal, industrial, trade, commerce, money, private property, private enterprise, entrepreneur, merchant, capitalism, socialism, communism.
3. Social: how people organize themselves in society, that is, the interrelationships among individuals, groups with individual, and groups with other groups, because society evolved initially from the need to cooperate to survive. Related terms: family, community, band, clan, tribe, class (working, middle, elite, etc.), caste, marriage, nobles, commoners, monogamy, polygamy, patriarchal, matriarchal, patrilinear, matrilinear.
4. Political: how people are governed; matters of authority and obedience, including who makes the laws, decides on foreign relations like war and peace, collects taxes, dispenses justice, and provides services needed by the general public. Related terms: monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy, democracy, dictatorship, despotism, kingdom, empire, confederation, city-state, governor, bureaucracy, legislative, judicial, legal, constitutional, military, civil.
5. Religious: how people explain, relate to, and cope with the mysterious and the transcendent (what is above or beyond); what people accept on faith; a way of making things comprehensible when rationality is inadequate. Related terms: supernatural, gods, goddesses, deities, myths, polytheism, monotheism, priests, rituals, rites, immortality, revelation, spiritual, temples, altars, idols, saints, doctrines, dogmas, orthodox, heresy, miracles, creeds.
6. Cultural: how people express themselves through imagination and by creating objects and experiences that reflect, evoke, and intensify their thoughts and feelings and bring beauty and joy through painting, sculpture, music, dance, theater, and literature. Related terms: aesthetic, artistic, literary, drama, comedy, tragedy, monumental, legend, epic, poet, oral tradition, literary, symbolic, allegorical, metaphorical.
7. Intellectual: how people think and form ideas; how they see and create mental patterns to order their experiences and make sense of them and arrive at understandings sufficient to cope with life. Related terms: theory, philosophy, reason, rational, science, conceptual, ideology, mathematical, speculative, cosmology, hypothetical, analytical, synthesis.

B. SYNTHESIS
To synthesize material, the historian first collects information through various types of research, usually by examining written sources or "documents" from a particular place and time. The historian then takes these accumulated facts about peoples, places, things, and events and organizes them into the categories mentioned above. Then, to inform and entertain, he must tie the material together to create a story or narrative that makes sense and from which the reader can derive an understanding about the facts—what they mean or where they lead. There are two important elements in this written history: time and causal or conceptual relations.

1. TIME
Time is one of the most mysterious and important aspects of human existence. Time has no physical reality—we cannot see, hear, feel, smell, or taste time—and yet it enmeshes us. We cannot speed it up, slow it down, stop or reverse it; but we all know somehow that it exists. Things happen in time one after the other after the other; that is called chronological order. Keeping track of this order is an important part of historical study. History is sometimes incorrectly described as having an excessive concern with dates, but dates are merely markers on a scale used to measure time.

To understand the relationship of two events, we must know which came first. The first may have caused or influenced the second, but the second could not have caused or influenced the first—although it may affect our perception/understanding of the first. Confusing the order of events can lead to serious misunderstandings. Politicians and others can manipulate public opinion by drawing false but popular conclusions about people or events.

2. CAUSAL OR CONCEPTUAL RELATIONS
The major concern of the historian is to search for relationships that reveal meaning and lead to understanding. Things may be related in time simply by their chronological sequence—first this, then that, and so on. Think of the possibilities of relationships, however, when we consider just two things, A and B, together. There are six possibilities:
1. A might be the cause (or part of the cause) of B.
2. B might be the cause (or part of the cause) of A.
3. A and B might both be caused (in part) by a third thing, C.
4. A and B might both have caused (in part) a third thing, C.
5. A and B might have no practical connection with each other.
6. A and B might simply be similar to each other, so that knowledge of one helps understanding of the other.

IV. STUDY SKILLS
Each time you begin to study, it is a good idea to take a minute or two to prepare yourself mentally. Try closing your eyes and taking a few deep breaths; think about what you are about to do and how you are going to do it. Visualize yourself concentrating, focusing your attention, thinking clearly, and understanding and remembering the material. You do all this to clear your mind of distractions and to create a mental atmosphere that will help you succeed in your work.

A. READING A CHAPTER IN A TEXTBOOK
Reading for information and understanding (as opposed to reading a novel or poem for entertainment) must be an enterprise in which you are an active participant. Just as you cannot merely sit in class and expect information to fill your head automatically with information, so you cannot merely sit looking at words and expect them to fill your head. You should not be a bucket waiting for knowledge to flow in, but a searchlight seeking out knowledge and understanding.

1. Read the Preface, Introduction and Table of Contents to every book you read. In them, the author will give you a "scouting report." What is the author's purpose? How will he try to achieve it? Is the author successful? Why or why not?
2. Begin a chapter by surveying it. Look quickly over the material to get a sense of the main topics and their organization. A survey involves these steps:
a. Look at the chapter title and think about what it means.
b. Read the introductory paragraphs to get a general idea of what the chapter is about.
c. Read all the headings and subheadings, and think about how they fit into some pattern, how they relate to the chapter title, and what you have read in the introduction.
d. Read the summary paragraphs and think about how they restate what you have read before.
e. Ask yourself what you think the chapter is about.
3. Next, read the material slowly, carefully, and thoroughly. Do not pass over a section because it seems dull or difficult. The impression that something is boring or hard is all the more reason to concentrate on understanding it and making a special effort to see why it is important. Make marks or small notations in the page margins to remind you of important points or questions you may have.
4. Many students underline the text, but this is seldom a useful strategy—most students underline too much. A better strategy is to outline the chapter. Or try writing in the margin what each paragraph is about—not what it says, but what it is about. This strategy slows your reading down and makes you think about and absorb what you are reading. Good reading means more work in the beginning, but the payoff is better grades for less total work.
5. Above all, be an active reader by asking yourself questions as you go along. Stop at the end of every sentence or two and ask yourself what you have just read. If you cannot answer this question, you must read the material again. Follow the same procedure at the end of each paragraph, at the end of each section, and finally at the end of the chapter.

B. PREPARING FOR AND TAKING EXAMINATIONS
In most history courses you must take tests composed of objective, identification, and/or essay questions.
1: Objective questions require little writing. The most common types are multiple-choice, true/false, fill-in, and matching. The purpose of these questions may be to test your recall of specific facts or information, or to check quickly your comprehension of more general material, such as concepts.
2: Identifications usually require you to write some sentences or a short paragraph; their purpose is to test your knowledge of specific people and events, and their historical significance.
3: Essay questions require full answers that are several substantial paragraphs or pages in length. Essay questions test your ability to organize quantities to show your understanding of relationships, significance, and meaning.

The best preparation for tests takes place over the long term. This means learning small amounts at a time and engaging in frequent and consistent study.

STANDARDS AND EVALUATION

WRITING STANDARDS
Papers and essay exams must:
1. Express clarity of purpose, coherence in expression, and be rational in explaining the relationships of ideas. This organization evidences your understanding of what you are putting down on paper.
2. Display at least adequate use of evidence to support conclusions; such use of evidence requires acknowledgment of the biases and reliability of the sources used. Concrete examples show that you have command of your material.
3. Establish credibility by acceptable and adequate use of bibliographical support. Your ability to display command of all of your sources is crucial.
4. Maintain accurate use of facts, spelling, grammar, quotations, statistics, scientific and critical findings, and mathematical computations. If you don’t care enough to do these things right, how can you convince your reader that what you have to say is worth reading?
5. Display relevancy in relating material support to individual conclusions and in relating these conclusions to the major thesis of your work. Without focus, your work becomes a big gob of goo.
This attention to organization, concreteness, complete bibliography, accuracy, and relevancy raises an average writing to a superior level.

EVALUATION GUIDELINES FOR STUDENT WRITING
Content/Organization
A The writer completes the task set by the assignment, and the paper is excellent in nearly all respects. It exhibits the following characteristics:
Is well-argued.
Is well-organized.
Has a clear thesis stated.
Contains well-developed content that is specific, accurate, interesting, and appropriate.
Demonstrates the writer’s ability to produce and synthesize complex ideas.
Contains logical connectors and transitions, which contribute to a fluent style.

B The "B" paper shares most of the characteristics of the "A" paper. The reasoning is logical, and the content organized into coherent units. Areas of weakness may be:
Less careful reasoning than found in the "A" paper.
Minor problems in paragraphing and/or organizations.

C The writer has come to terms with the basic task of the assignment, and the paper is generally competent. The organization is sufficiently clear that the reader can move with relative ease through the discourse. The paper, however, has problems in some or all of the following areas:
It may have a weak thesis.
The development of minor points may be weak, but the writer provides evidence of the ability to support key ideas.
Connectors and transitions (for example, however, therefore, furthermore, although) may be lacking or illogical.

D The writer shows difficulty managing the task of the assignment in some way. For example:
The thesis may be vague, too broad, or too obvious to be developed effectively.
The thesis may lack adequate support.
Paragraphing and organization may be weak, but the reader is never completely "lost" trying to follow the train of thought.

F The writer fails to come to terms with the assignment. The primary task is ignored, misconstrued, badly mishandled, or redefined to accommodate what the writer wants to say or is able to say. This category may also describe a paper that is obviously "off-topic," regardless of the writing quality. In this case, the paper does not deal with the topic assigned and, therefore, does not fulfill the assignment.

Grammar/Punctuation/Spelling
A The paper is virtually free of errors in sentence structure, usage, and mechanics (including punctuation and spelling) and shows evidence of excellent control of language.

B The paper has few errors in sentence structure, usage, and mechanics; these few errors do not interfere with comprehension and are not distracting to the reader.

C The paper may contain some awkward or ineffective sentences and may show some problems with mechanics and usage. These errors, however, are not serious or frequent enough to consistently distract the reader from the content or to interfere significantly with comprehension.

D The paper contains errors in grammar, sentence construction, mechanics, and/or usage that often interfere with comprehension and/or are distracting to the reader.

F The paper has many grammatical mistakes or poorly constructed sentences and serious, frequent errors, in mechanics and usage that impede understanding. The difference between a "D" paper and an "F" paper lies primarily in the pervasiveness of errors.

GRADE EXPECTATIONS
 

Grading performance is a complex and difficult process. Grades reflect both effort and achievement, not effort alone.

The "A" Student—An Outstanding Student
Attendance: "A" students have virtually perfect attendance. Their commitment to the class resembles that of the teacher.
Preparation: "A" students are prepared for class. They always read the assignment. Their attention to detail is such that they occasionally catch the teacher in a mistake.
Curiosity: "A" students show interest in the class and in the subject. They look up or dig out what they don’t understand. They often ask interesting questions or make thoughtful comments.
Retention: "A" students have retentive minds. They are able to connect past learning with the present. They bring a background with them to class. They can apply ideas from other classes and subjects to this class.
Attitude: "A" students have a winning attitude. They have both he determination and the self-discipline necessary for success. They show initiative. They do things even when not required.
Talent: "A" students have something special. It may be exceptional intelligence and insight. It may be unusual creativity, organizational skills, commitment—or a combination thereof. These gifts are evident to the teacher and usually to the other students as well.
Work: "A" students understand that their "job" is school and it always takes first priority in time, attention, and interest. The "A" student work on average two to three hours a week preparing for each credit-hour spent in class. They typically stay ahead of the assigned work and often do more than the minimum required. The "A" student understands that it is extraordinarily difficult to maintain the highest grades when outside work, sports, or too intense socializing and drinking begin to consume too much time.
Results: "A" students make high grades on tests and other assignments. Their work is a pleasure to grade.

The "C" Student—An Average or Typical Student
Attendance: "C" students miss class more than "A" and "B" students. They put other priorities ahead of academic work. In some cases, their health or constant fatigue renders them physically unable to keep up with the demands of high-level performance.
Preparation: "C" students prepare their assignments consistently but superficially. Their work may be sloppy or careless. At times, it is incomplete or late.
Attitude: "C" students are not visibly committed to their class. They participate without enthusiasm. Their body language may express boredom.
Talent: "C" students vary enormously in talent. Some have exceptional ability but show undeniable signs of poor self-management or bad attitudes. Others are diligent but simply average in academic ability.
Work: "C" students often spend too much time in activities other than their academic education and their true interests lie elsewhere. They spend only an hour outside class preparing for each hour in class. They are always trying to catch up with assignments and often only partially fulfill them.
Results: "C" students get mediocre of inconsistent results on tests and other assignments. They have some concept of what is going on but clearly have not mastered the material.

PLAGIARISM
 

Using Sources
When writing for this course, you may freely make use of other people’s ideas and information from a variety of sources . . . if you give full credit to the sources of the ideas and information. Your sources may include published information such as books, periodicals, and brochures. They also may include correspondence, interviews, lectures, and similar sources.

There are two important reasons for accurately citing the sources of any borrowed ideas or information. The most obvious reason is academic honesty; it is dishonest to present someone else’s ideas as if they are your own, and it is unfair to the creator of those ideas not to give credit where credit is due. Academic honesty is the glue that holds intellectual enterprise together. Without it, no one has credibility, and we can trust no one. Explaining how you get your materials gives the reader a chance to judge its reliability and to look up more about the subject if they want.

There are two ways to include information from sources in your writing: you may quote directly or paraphrase, that is, restate the information in your own words. You should choose on a case-by-case basis. You should paraphrase when you can convey information more efficiently or effectively than conveyed in the original. You should quote directly ONLY when the source’s own words will add necessary credibility or special emphasis to the information you are presenting. You should consider quotes as treasures and spend them only as the miser spends. Be frugal.
When quoting OR paraphrasing you must ALWAYS cite your source by giving full information about where the information can be found. See style manuals for the proper citation form. In history classes, use the "Chicago" style of footnotes. If the information or idea is you own or is common knowledge and accepted as true by most people, you do not need to cite your source.

Finally, plagiarism is not only an academic offense, it is also unnecessary. Papers based on expert sources, fairly acknowledged, is what your professors are looking for.

STUDY SUGGESTIONS
 

Study often; study 3 hours out of class for every hour in. Studying for nine hours a week at two sittings is less effective than is studying for an hour six or seven—or better yet, nine times a week.

Study without distractions. Turn off the TV and music; get away from noise, conversation, and commotion. Concentrate and focus on your objective.

Be interested. Learning and discovery can be fun—if you let it. But even things that are usually fun sometimes can be boring. Have the mental discipline to work through the boring stretches.

Think small. Do not be overwhelmed by the amount of material. Learn it bit by bit. You will find that the words, names, and terms eventually begin to build on, and reinforce one another. Eventually, patterns and relationships become clearer, and then you will have both the general concepts and specific facts that support them.

Don’t get lost in the swamp of detail. Read and study from the top-down. Keep in your eye the major themes, ideas, trends, patterns, etc. Use detail to inform the "big picture." By studying in this way, ironically, you will learn more detail almost by accident because each small fact now makes sense.

Visualize. Picture yourself doing well—being relaxed, focused, and interested, and learning the material. Try to create mental pictures or images in your mind’s eye of the people, things, and events you are studying. Translate the words into something you can mentally see, so that they are more "real" to you and less abstract. Use the maps and pictures in the textbook to help create these images.

Repeat. Go over the material again and again until you know it. Go over it quickly again several days later to refresh your memory and think of how it fits with whatever historical subject you are studying.

Question yourself. Do not wait for the instructor’s questions on an exam; if you have not learned the material before this, it will be too late to help you. You must be your own examiner as you study. Self-examination is the key to self-knowledge. What is important in this case is the knowledge of what you know and what you do not know.

Don’t play games. It is risky to try to figure out what the instructor is going to ask on an exam and then to limit your study accordingly. You should consider all the material to be important. If it were not, your teacher would not have asked you to learn it.

Take complete notes in each class. Professors speak because they believe they are saying something that is worth your time listening to. Their ego demands that they test you on what they’ve said. It is impossible, even for the best student, to remember everything without the memory aid of notes. The best way to handle notes is to take the best, most complete notes you can in class—no doodling, etc. This is interactive learning at its purest. That night or the next, copy those notes into your word processor. You will recall things you didn’t have time to write down in class; you will be able to reorganize your notes so that they make the best sense. Initially this takes longer, but in the end this procedure costs less time and produces better grades.

Seek help if you need it. Do not be afraid to talk about course material with your instructor. Talking about the material and asking questions are effective and usually enjoyable ways to learn and to reinforce what you have learned. The sad, sad truth is, however, that for most students who have difficulty, it is because they have not applied enough time or seriousness of purpose to their studies.

Have a reason. From time to time, reflect on why you are taking the course or why you are studying. Perhaps you want a high grade or the course credits; perhaps the course is required. You may take a longer view and study because you want to become an educated person and to understand your society and yourself better than you do now. It may simply be that you want a better job.

Think of yourself as a student. To be a student is an honorable occupation, a privilege, and an important part of who you are. Learning continues throughout your life, and the skills you acquire now will continue to help you retrain and reeducate yourself as is becoming increasingly necessary in our society.

School takes practice. We well understand that athletic skills take practice to develop. In practice, we often make mistakes, but through hard work, concentration, dedication, striving, and time, the process of practice, even when we make mistakes, makes it possible for us to excel for the game. Things of the mind, including writing, reading, note taking, clarity of thought and exposition—these too take practice.

Be confident. Think of yourself as doing well in the course. Hundreds of thousands of other students in the country are studying World Civilization and other kinds of history, and they are learning it. You can too. But confidence without hard work to back it up is mere braggadocio

IS HISTORY IMPORTANT?
IS OBJECTIVE HISTORY POSSIBLE?
MYTH AND HISTORY
 

Too many in the United States, including many in higher education, do not sufficiently appreciate the role that the teaching and learning of History plays in creating definitions of who we are. Below are several examples of the ambiguity of History, that History is more than “just objective facts.”  Interpretation creates meaning and determines how we use History.
 

January 10, 2004
Giant Horseman Stirs Passions
New York Times
Ralph Blumental
 

SANTA FE, N.M. — Four hundred years after he colonized what is now New Mexico for Spain, Don Juan de Oñate (half of him, anyway) lies here with scattered pieces of his horse as if dismembered on a battlefield of titans. But by the end of next year, if all goes according to plan, this helmeted giant will rise, four and a half times as large as life, at the airport in El Paso, though without a vital attribute — his name.  Oñate will be simply "the Equestrian."

As foundry workers cast and assemble what will be the world's largest bronze horseman—an 11-ton, four-story-tall monument to Oñate by John Sherrill Houser.  The project intended to beautify El Paso continues to stir up ugly skirmishes in the culture wars. Oñate's complex legacy is the issue. Oñate founded the first European settlement west of the Mississippi and celebrated the first American Thanksgiving in 1598 on the Rio Grande, nine years before settlers landed at Jamestown.  If remembered today, it is for savageries that some scholars dispute.

"He is infamous for his cruelty to the Acoma Indians, killing hundreds of Indians, punishing 24 with amputation of a foot," Representative Norma Chavez, an El Paso Democrat in the Texas House, said in a recent speech and newspaper column.  But Mr. Houser and some historians question whether Oñate ever carried out the sentences, even in response to an Indian massacre of his own men, and contend that he was no more brutal than his era and his enemies. "In a wild and woolly time, he was a hell of a brave guy," said Mr. Houser, 66.

Torn both ways, in November the El Paso City Council approved $713,000 from revenues of the El Paso International Airport toward Mr. Houser's $2.3 million project, then already more than six years in the making with $1.3 million raised privately. But the Council voted to deny Oñate glory by giving the work a generic name. The Council also decided the statue would fit better at the airport than downtown. Mr. Houser had wanted it by the Camino Real El Paso, a 1912 hotel named for the southwest trail that Oñate made famous.  It would also be near the first of his planned sculpture series of 12 Western travelers, Fray García de San Francisco, founder of a mission that became El Paso.

Still, Mr. Houser, a second-generation monumental sculptor whose father helped carve the presidential likenesses on Mount Rushmore and whose son, Ethan, 30, also a sculptor, is working with him on Oñate, is not quarreling. "Whatever they call it, it's the way I made it," he said. "Unfortunately for them, it says Oñate all over the place." As for the airport location, he said, "I think it's a fine place." If the idea was to call people's attention to history, Mr. Houser said, "it's done that—although now they don't want to recognize it."

A City Council panel selected Oñate as a subject after officials, searching for ways to revitalize the aging downtown, approved Mr. Houser's concept of statues commemorating 12 famous travelers, as popularized by the Western painter and writer Tom Lea. Leon Metz, an El Paso historian and columnist who served on the panel, said Oñate was the second selection, and a hotly argued one, after the city founder Fray García.

Oñate remains a mystery man to most Americans, in the words of Marc Simmons, a historian and an author of more than 40 books, including a 1991 biography of Oñate, "The Last Conquistador." "As it happens," he wrote in the book, "Oñate was among the best of the lot when it came to treating the native peoples."

Oñate's nefarious reputation rests largely on his response to a murderous rebellion by Acoma Indians at their mesa-top pueblo, Sky City, 60 miles west of Albuquerque, in 1598, according to the Simmons book. Crushed, tried and convicted, Oñate, who could have decreed death, gave them harsh sentences. He condemned men over 25 years old to servitude and to have a foot cut off. He gave men and women over 12 twenty years of servitude. Two Moqui tribesmen were to have their right hand cut off. And he ordered children under 12 taken to missionaries who would raise them. Fifteen years later, in Mexico City, Oñate was tried, found guilty, and condemned to exile for using excessive force against the Acoma and unjustly hanging two Indians.  But in a recent article, Dr. Simmons said research by John L. Kessell, professor emeritus of the University of New Mexico, had thrown doubt on whether Oñate's had carried out his sentences. "Unless more Spanish documents come to light, we will probably never know one way or another," Dr. Simmons wrote.

He derided the dispute over the statue as a travesty and accused critics of "selective indignation." "You have to look at him not by today's gross sensitivities," he said of Oñate. Otherwise, he said, "you would not have a statue to anyone." He asked: "Could you deny George Washington his place because he was out fighting Indians?" The Acoma themselves committed atrocities against other tribes, he said, adding that everyone "has ancestors who knocked somebody on the head." Dr. Kessell, in an e-mail message after the City Council renamed the statue the Equestrian, called the move "a generic joke" and added: "There are probably still Confederate sympathizers who would applaud if we renamed the tall man seated in the Lincoln Memorial simply, ‘The President.’" Members of the Acoma tribe have denounced the Oñate statue, but a tribal historian, Petuuche Gilbert, and the tribal governor, Fred Vallo, did not return repeated calls for comment. The tribe's Web site (http://www.puebloofacoma.org/) says the pueblo, situated on a 367-foot-high sandstone rock, is considered to be the oldest inhabited village in the United States, and it adds: "Acoma was nearly destroyed when Governor Juan de Oñate and 70 of his men retaliated for the killing of 13 Spanish soldiers by the Acomas when they tried to steal grain from the pueblo storehouses in 1598."

Alexandro Lozano, a recently elected El Paso City Council member and commercial artist who visited Mr. Houser in his Mexico City studio, praised the statue. "I was astounded by its size and beauty," he said despite his deep reservations about putting it up. "To make a point, cutting feet and arms from women and children is not very nice," he said. Mr. Lozano also questioned its appropriateness for the airport. "It's a huge thing," he said. "We don't have a space for that thing. You can't even see it—just the bottom part of it, if you know what I mean."

Mr. Houser says he is confident that his Oñate, by whatever name, will rise on schedule, and he has plans for other towering creations, some perhaps even larger and equally controversial. His list of travelers to come includes the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and the Wild West gunfighter John Wesley Hardin.

Ira Berlin
"Overcome by Slavery"
New York Times
July 13, 2001
 

WASHINGTON—On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring slaves forever free, but the subject remains much alive. On the big screen, we have had "Glory," "Amistad," "Shadrach," and "Beloved." On television, the four-part series "Africans in America" was followed by Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s controversial sojourn through Africa, during which he confronted African complicity in the slave trade. Such programs have come hard on the heels of new monuments, miles of freedom trails, dozens of exhibitions, and new museums dedicated to slavery.

In the past year, scholars have published some 50 scholarly works on slavery. Add dozens of Web sites, children’s books and novels and at least one parody, "The Wind Done Gone." And, if that was not enough, there was the DNA confirmation of Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings.

The resonance of the Jefferson- Hemings affair provides a reminder of how much slavery has become part of contemporary politics. Bill Clinton realized this early on; hence the debate over The Apology and his appointment of the Commission on Race and Reconciliation. Congress has also gotten into the act, mandating that Civil War battle sites supervised by the National Park Service address slavery. Disputes over the Confederate flag and Confederate History Month have roiled politics in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Virginia, and California has required insurance companies to divulge if they have ever insured slave property. Finally, there is the matter of reparations, which has found advocates in some of the nation’s prominent litigators.

It would be comforting to conclude that recognition of slavery’s importance to the development of our economy, politics and culture has driven Americans to a consideration of the past. But there clearly is more to the current interest in slavery. There is a recognition that American racism was founded in slavery, and a general, if inchoate, understanding that any attempt to address race in the present must also address slavery in past.
This attempt has become pressing as American society perceptibly grows more segregated, the benefits of economic growth are unevenly and unfairly distributed among races, and a previous generation’s remedies for segregation and inequality are discarded as politically unacceptable.

In short, behind the interest in slavery is the crisis of race. The confluence of the history of slavery and the politics of race reveals that slavery has become a language, a way to talk about race, in a society in which blacks and whites hardly talk to each other at all. In slavery, Americans have found a voice to address some of their deepest hurts and the depressing reality of how much of American life—jobs, housing, schools, and access to medical care, justice, and even a taxi—is controlled by race.

But while slavery serves as an entry point for a dialogue on race, it is not an easy one. For slavery carries with it deep anger, resentment, indignation and bitterness for some, embarrassment, humiliation and shame for others. We can see the complications in introducing slavery into what had been a lily-white representation of Colonial Williamsburg—by staging a slave auction. The local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People objected, finding the re-creation insulting to people of African descent—a painful reminder of what no one wanted to have recalled. The director of the project, Christie Coleman, refused to retreat, insisting that slavery was an integral part of the history of colonial Williamsburg. The N.A.A.C.P. conceded Ms. Coleman’s point.

Presenting slavery at Colonial Williamsburg has since become routine, and the results have been astounding. Visitors get caught up in the reenactments. Some offer to help slaves escape. Others protect slaves from abusive masters. Some turn on slave owners, and not merely to debate the issue; several visitors have had to be physically restrained. Lest we think that it is only the visitors who forget they are witnesses to a re-enactment, the actors—mostly young black men and women—have been caught up in it as well. They report that while playing slaves they were often treated as slaves, not merely by visitors but by others as well, setting in motion nightmarish fantasies.

Viewing the present through the lens of the past is useful, necessary and perhaps inevitable. But it is also dangerous. If the re-enactment in Williamsburg and the new interest in slavery show how the past can illuminate, they also show how the differences between past and present can become blurred rather than clarified.

At the beginning of the 21st century, almost a century and a half after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Americans are again struggling with slavery, and in so doing hope to vanquish slavery’s legacy: the burden of race. The films, reenactments, museums and books, as well as the politics, are part of that struggle. In turning to the past to understand the present, it has become obvious that Americans will not be, in Lincoln’s words, forever free until they have mastered slavery as slavery once mastered them.

Ira Berlin is author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America.

 

The New York Times
We Need to Learn More About Our Colorful Past
By MAURICE A. BARBOZA and GARY B. NASH
Published: July 31, 2004

Myth and History Collide
 

Back in 1925, American society tended not to advise young white males about the consequences of intimacy with the black maid. Even if the 22-year-old Strom Thurmond considered himself a father, the standards of the time did not require him to give the daughter born of that intimacy any love, support, or acceptance. He did, however, irretrievably give her his bloodline.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the offspring of Mr. Thurmond and his family's black maid, 16-year-old Carrie Butler, recently announced that she intended to join the Daughters of the American Revolution [D.A.R.] based on her Thurmond bloodline. Reared apart from her father, Ms. Washington-Williams did not have the same privileges as Mr. Thurmond's white children during his life, yet she is seeking the right to some of the privileges of her lineage.

She is not the first to do so. Ms. Washington-Williams said she was motivated by the battle of Lena Santos Ferguson to join a Washington chapter of the organization and by Ms. Ferguson's quest to honor black soldiers. Ms. Ferguson's grandmother, a black Virginia woman, had married a white man from Maine whose ancestor, Jonah Gay, was a patriot. In the 1980's, Ms. Ferguson fought a four-year legal battle for full membership and to enter her local chapter. It wasn't until the organization was faced with the potential loss of its tax-exempt status in Washington that she was permitted to join.

Perhaps more significantly, Ms. Ferguson demanded, and received, a settlement agreement that bars discrimination and requires the D.A.R. to identify every African-American soldier who served in the Revolutionary War. It was important to Ms. Ferguson that black women know of their ancestors' contribution to the founding of this nation and that they embrace it.

At the time of Ms. Ferguson's settlement, the D.A.R., as an organization, likely knew of many black soldiers who served in the Revolution, yet the organization was not open with the information nor was it receptive to black members. Ms. Ferguson's settlement required the D.A.R. to publish the names they had and to do research to identify more black soldiers, those who were somewhere, undiscovered, in historical records.

On this matter, the D.A.R.'s behavior has been troubling. By early 2000, six years after the settlement agreement, they had published the names of only 1,656 black patriots in eleven D.A.R.-issued pamphlets. Yet some historians estimate 5,000 African-Americans served in the Revolutionary War. The organization's own genealogist, James Dent Walker, said estimates were "deceptively low" and that "no one took the time to examine the records."

The settlement required the D.A.R. to do historical and genealogical research to find the names of black soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War. Yet, while doing this research, the D.A.R. has failed to use census records and other historical documents that could help identify the races of soldiers. It has also used a narrow classification system for race, one that increases the potential for underreporting: the D.A.R. includes only men described in historical records as "black," "Negro" or "mulatto," on their lists of black soldiers. However, whites of the period used a far greater range of colors to describe African-Americans. They meticulously recorded color distinctions among slaves.  They used labels like "brown," "yellow," and "copper" (among others) in advertisements for the return of runaways. Excluding those "colored" patriots puts them off-limits to prospective black D.A.R. members who might otherwise make the connection.

Yielding to pressure, in 2001, the D.A.R. published African-American and American Indian Patriots of the Revolutionary War. The number of names grew to 2400 names from 1,656, including an additional 744 previously assumed to be "white." But there are still many more African-American soldiers to be identified, and while it acknowledges a handful of "brown" soldiers as black, as well as many "yellow" ones, the D.A.R. still holds to a narrow definition of an African-American.

This may give a clue to the D.A.R.'s resistance: when confronted with 64 "brown" soldiers who could have sired members, the organization conceded that as many as 57 may be listed in its index of proven Revolutionary War soldiers (patriots whose descendants became D.A.R. members). Yet, for generations, descendants of "brown" patriots married "light" or "white" mates, thus increasing the chances that white society, including organizations like the D.A.R., would be a safe harbor for their offspring. When the lists are complete, many people whose families assimilated into white society and cloaked their African heritage may learn, for the first time, of their complicated ancestry.

And in the black community, many people are unaware of their Revolutionary War heritage or reluctant to embrace it—whether their ancestors were white or black. They may fear ostracism from other blacks who may view white ancestry as a source of shame and a reminder of the injustices and indignities of slavery. The Daughters of the American Revolution's efforts to hide the complicated realities of the past have fueled these types of feelings. But every American, regardless of color, must realize that the past is not pretty, linear, or easily explained.

Maurice Barboza, a founder of the Black Patriots Foundation, is the nephew of Lena Santos Ferguson. Gary B. Nash is a professor of history at U.C.L.A.

Richard Rothstein
"Lessons: Politics and Curriculum: How History Is Taught"
New York Times
November 7, 2001
 

In 1954, my eighth-grade history teacher in Queens said we could not use the term "Civil War" but must adopt a textbook phrase, "War Between the States." Her instruction was not really about history, but about the controversies of her own day. By saying the war a century earlier had mostly concerned states’ rights, teachers and textbooks minimized the role of slavery and dampened support for a nascent civil rights struggle.

Today’s texts again call it the Civil War. I was reminded of this by recent Asian protests over how schools in Japan teach about World War II. Koreans, for instance, have denounced a new Japanese text that says Japanese troops "advanced on," rather than "invaded," the Asian mainland. The book also ignores the "comfort women," Koreans used as sex slaves by Japanese soldiers.

This, too, is not only about history. It reflects debates about Japan’s current policy toward Asia. The interplay of politics and curriculum is the subject of "Censoring History" (M. E. Sharpe, 2000), edited by Laura Hein and Mark Selden. The book recalls a slogan from Orwell’s "1984": "Who controls the past controls the future." That is true not only of totalitarians; every nation tries to shape the future when it teaches history.

In Germany, war crimes in World War II are acknowledged more forthrightly than in Japan, partly because German policy now favors European unity. Remorse for aggression and genocide was needed to win the confidence of former victims. But German texts give little attention to how the country’s big businesses participated in forced labor and extermination policies. Many of those companies are still important, and so it is not surprising that the curriculum papers over their wartime roles. In contrast, Communist East German texts before reunification stressed corporate collaboration with the Nazis.

Curriculum controversies have also flared elsewhere. A decade ago, when a Mideast peace seemed more feasible, Israeli texts described the many Palestinians who were forced from their homes in the 1948 war. Now that peace prospects have receded, books focus on the Palestinians, also numerous, who left voluntarily.

Asia provides several examples of the interplay.

After Japan’s surrender in 1945, officers of the American occupation force and Japanese democratic leaders blamed the schools there, saying they had inculcated blind obedience. Early postwar texts encouraged questioning authority in general and the emperor in particular—even 19th-century peasant rebellions got attention—and did not mince words about Japanese aggression. But when the cold war took hold, occupation leaders wanted Japan to remilitarize against the Soviet Union. Criticism of wartime policy was muted as textbooks aimed to stir patriotism. The pendulum swung back in the 1970’s. Books again mentioned World War II atrocities, like Japan’s massacre of civilians in the Chinese city of Nanjing. This textbook shift occurred when Japan wanted other Asians to feel less threatened by Japanese economic leadership.

The protests this year about Japanese aggression and use of comfort women in World War II stem from a new text by Nobukatsu Fujioka. Mr. Fujioka, leader of a conservative group, was angry at what he judged as slights to Japanese honor—for example, the United States’ blocking Japan from leading a bailout of East Asian nations in the 1997 currency crisis. He aimed to write a text that instilled national pride.

In South Korea today, students learn that World War II began in 1895, when Japan invaded their country. Leaders hoping to discourage future Japanese influence want to portray the war as a reflection of continuing Japanese imperialism. However, Korean texts gloss over collaboration by the nation’s elite with Japanese colonial authorities in the first half of the 20th century. Telling that story could tarnish some leaders’ present legitimacy. For similar reasons, historians in France also argue about what children should learn of their country’s collaboration with the Nazis.

American texts once described slaves as content with their lot, and slave masters as benevolent. Books today describe both the inhumanity of American slavery and the genocide practiced against Indians.

But many textbooks still tiptoe around causes and conduct of the Vietnam War, to avoid stirring up political divisions dating from that era. For example, many historians say President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the war for fear of domestic political accusations that he had lost a nation to communism, not only for national security reasons. Most texts don’t discuss that. Arguments about textbooks only partly concern what is true. From the many facts to teach, we often select those that support adult goals. Because a democracy must argue about goals, we also argue about how to teach history. The fights will not end, and should not.

 

Scholars Argue Over Legacy of Surgeon First Lionized, Then Vilified
New York Times
October 28, 2003
By Barron Lerner
 

J. Marion Sims is one of the most controversial figures in the history of medicine. Originally lionized as the “father of gynecology,” a later generation of critics reviled Sims as racist and sexist. Today, as an operation introduced by Sims is bringing relief to thousands of women in the developing world, a few scholars are quietly hoping to rehabilitate his name. But it is not going to be easy.

Born in South Carolina in 1813, Sims did not seem destined for greatness. He was a lackluster student who showed little ambition after receiving his medical degree. But he changed after a chance event in 1845. While evaluating a woman with a slipped, or prolapsed, uterus, Sims, then living in Alabama, had her kneel and place her chest close to her knees. This position not only moved the woman’s uterus back into place, but it allowed him an excellent view of how childbirth had damaged her anatomy. Sims used this insight to tackle a most dreaded complication of childbirth, usually caused by prolonged labor. With this disorder, known as the vesico-vaginal fistula, connections develop between a woman’s bladder and vagina.

Afflicted women continuously drip urine from their vaginas, producing, in the words of one 19th-century physician, “a most intolerable stench.” Even worse, fistulas sometimes develop between the bowels and the vagina. By placing women in his new position, Sims reasoned, he could better visualize the damaged tissues and could surgically repair the fistulas. The logical women to test his theory, he believed, were slaves. By all accounts, Sims, like a vast majority of his antebellum Southern white counterparts, was a strong proponent of slavery.

Thus, when Sims wanted fistula patients, he simply bought or rented the slaves from their owners. Sims operated on at least 10 slave women from 1846 to 1849, perfecting his technique. It took dozens of operations before he finally reported success, having used special silver sutures to close the fistulas. Three of the slaves—Lucy, Anarcha and Betsy— all underwent multiple procedures without anesthesia, which had recently become available. Sims’s records show that he operated on Anarcha 30 times. Sims’s persistence aroused some alarm, and several physicians urged him to stop experimenting. In response, he later reported that the slave women had been “clamorous” for the operation and had even assisted him with surgery. Sims’s contemporaries and early biographers heralded his feat. His skillful experiments, according to his obituary in The New York Times in 1883, “were of great advantage to members of his profession in treating female diseases.” An inscription near Sims’s birthplace termed him “a blessing and a benefactor to women.”

Admirers erected statues of Sims in South Carolina, Alabama, and New York City, where in 1855 he opened the first hospital to serve only women. The New York statue stands in Central Park at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street. One of Sims’s modern legacies is the almost total absence of vesico-vaginal fistulas in the developed world, because of advances in childbirth and the operation he pioneered. >From this lofty perch, Sims had a long way to fall. And fall he did, beginning in the mid-1970’s, as Americans dealt with the volatile issues of racial and sexual equality. Historians, many of them sympathetic to the civil rights and women’s movements, saw an urgent need to revise Sims’s history.

One of the first scholars to weigh in was Dr. Graham J. Barker-Benfield, then a historian at Trinity College in England, who argued that Sims had used slave women as guinea pigs to advance his career. The women, Dr. Barker-Benfield wrote in 1974, had “endured years of almost unimaginable agonies” undergoing repeated surgery. Rather than being willing participants, the women had been powerless to refuse. Writing in 1985, Diana E. Axelsen, a philosopher at Spelman College, described Sims’s patients as “victims of medical experimentation.” Wendy Brinker, a South Carolina filmmaker, nicknamed Sims “Father Butcher” and asked why the state’s monument to him still stood.  Underlying these pronouncements was the belief that Sims’s early biographers had been guilty of “presentism,” evaluating past events based on their own values at the time. Living in an era that uncritically celebrated white male doctors, the historians contended, these writers had viewed Sims far too favorably.

More recently, a few scholars have been trying to revise this revisionist history. “To deify or vilify Sims is not the answer,” said Dr. Deborah Kuhn McGregor, a historian at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Dr. McGregor uses Sims’s story in her book “Sexual Surgery and the Origins of Gynecology” to discuss the complex ways that race and sex influence medical practice. One of Sims’s strongest defenders these days would have to be Dr. L. Lewis Wall, a Washington University surgeon who believes that the scholars who pilloried Sims were guilty of the same presentism they had identified in others’ work.

Dr. Wall has a special reason for coming to Sims’s defense. He routinely travels to Africa to repair vesico-vaginal fistulas. Contending that the rest of the world has lost interest in the victims of this disorder, who may still number in the millions, he has founded the Worldwide Fund for Mothers Injured in Childbirth (www.wfmic.org). “These kinds of pathologies no longer exist here,” Dr. Wall noted. But women with fistulas are “absolutely miserable and absolutely outcasts, reeking of urine 24 hours a day,” he said, noting that he can restore both the health and dignity of such women.

But does this justify what Sims did? Many do not think so. When Dr. Wall presented a paper on Sims at a recent meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, members of the audience challenged the idea that his admirable efforts as a surgeon gave him valid historical insights. Ms. Brinker is not even sure that Sims’s procedure worked, pointing out that his logs do not have follow-up data of his “cured” patients. “It was all about his glory,” she argues.

Probably the only way to resolve the debates over Sims would be to hear the voices of the slave women who were his subjects. But aside from Sims’s statements, their words have not been preserved. At the very least, Dr. Wall suggests on his web site, someone should build a statue to Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsy. The story of J. Marion Sims is a reminder of how history gets rewritten over time. The hope, of course, is that each new account gets closer to the truth.

 

New York Times
Hijacking India's History
December 30, 2002
By Kai Friese
 

NEW DELHI  While some of us lament the repetition of history, the men  who run India are busy rewriting it. The landslide victory earlier this month of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Western India state of Gujarat will, regrettably, only bolster their efforts. The B.J.P. has led this country's coalition government since 1999. But India's Hindu nationalists have long had a quarrel with history. They are unhappy with the notion that the most ancient texts of Hinduism are associated with the arrival of the Vedic "Aryan" peoples from the Northwest. They don't like the dates of 1500 to 1000 B.C. ascribed by historians to the advent of the Vedic peoples, the forebears of Hinduism, or the idea that the Indus Valley civilization predates Vedic civilization. And they can't stand the implication that Hinduism, like the other religious traditions of India, evolved through a mingling of cultures and peoples from different lands. Last month the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the central government body that oversees education for students up to the 12th grade, released the first of its new school textbooks for social sciences and history. Teachers and academics protested loudly. The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts, like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948. The authors of the textbook have promised to make revisions to the chapter about Gandhi. But what is more remarkable is how they have added several novel chapters to Indian history.

Thus we have a new civilization, the "Indus-Saraswati civilization" in place of the well-known Indus Valley civilization, which most agree appeared around 4600 B.C. and lasted for about 2,000 years. They want to add  "Saraswati"—an ancient river central to Hindu myth—to show that the Indus Valley civilization was actually part of Vedic civilization. We have a chapter on "Vedic civilization"—the earliest recognizable "Hindu culture" in India and generally acknowledged not to have appeared before about 1700 B.C. - that appears without a single date. Besides their I.Q., the council has also promised to test the "S.Q.," or "Spiritual Quotient," of gifted students. The Council has not elaborated on the details of this plan; the council's National Curriculum Framework for School Education says only that it will devise "a suitable mechanism for locating the talented and the gifted." School textbooks, of course, do not cover more recent history. So we will have to wait to see how such books might treat this month's elections in Gujarat. They followed the brutal pogrom of last February and March, in which more than 1,000 Muslims were murdered and at least 100,000 more lost their homes and property. The chief minister of Gujarat, who is among the B.J.P. leadership, justified this atrocity as a "natural reaction" to an act of arson on a train in the Gujarati town of Godhra, in which 59 Hindu pilgrims lost their lives.

The ruling party's conducted its election campaign against the literal backdrop of the Godhra incident: painted billboards of the burning railway carriage. They did not accord the murdered Muslims the same tragic status, although their pleas for justice created a backlash that played neatly into the campaign theme of Hindu Pride. It was, of course, a great success. The carefully nurtured sense of Hindu grievance has been nursed rather than sated by acts of mob violence: the destruction of the 15th-century mosque in Ayodhya, for instance, or the persecution of Christians in earlier pogroms in Gujarat's Dangs district. The B.J.P., with its Hindu-supremacist cohorts, the R.S.S. (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the V.H.P. (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), has a seemingly irresistible will to power. (The R.S.S. and the V.H.P. are not political parties but "social service organizations" that have served as springboards to power for B.J.P. leaders like Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat.) In vanguard states like Gujarat, thousands of students follow the firmly chauvinistic R.S.S. textbooks. They will learn that "Aryan culture is the nucleus of Indian culture, and the Aryans were an indigenous race . . . and creators of the Vedas" and that "India itself was the original home of the Aryans." They will learn that Indian Christians and Muslims are "foreigners."

But they still have much to learn. I once visited the bookshop at the R.S.S. headquarters in Nagpur. On sale, were books that show humankind originated in the upper reaches of that mythical Indian river, the Saraswati, and pamphlets that explain the mysterious Indus Valley seals, with their indecipherable Harrapan script: they are of Vedic origin. After I visited the bookshop I stopped to talk to a group of young boys who live together in an R.S.S. hostel. They were a sweet bunch of kids, between 8 and 11 years old.

They all wanted to grow up to be either doctors or pilots. Very good, I said. And what did they learn in school? Did they learn about religion? About Hinduism, Christianity? They were silent for a few seconds - until their teacher nodded. A bespectacled kid spoke up. "Christians burst into houses and make converts of Hindus by bribing them or beating them."

He said it without malice, just a breathless eagerness, as if it were something he had learned in social science class. Perhaps it was.

Kai Friese is a journalist and magazine editor in New Delhi.
 

Japanese Approval Of Texts Elicits Anger
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post, April 5, 2005
 

TOKYO, April 5  --  The Education Ministry approved a controversial new series of school textbooks on Tuesday that critics say whitewash Japan's militaristic past. The move ignited immediate outrage among some of the country's World War II-era victims.

The Chinese ambassador, Wang Yi, lodged a protest with Japan's Foreign Ministry, while officials in Beijing blamed a violent anti-Japanese protest there over the weekend on Japan's "irresponsible attitude" toward history.  Outrage was fiercest Tuesday in South Korea, where President Roh Moo Hyun has warned of a "diplomatic war" with Japan following Tokyo's reassertion of its claims to a small group of islands that are held by South Korea.

Japanese officials said they made changes to parts of the new textbooks to clarify points about Japan's colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. But South Korea's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Lee Kyu Hyung, said the newly approved texts were still "far from sufficient when universal values and historic truth are taken into account."

The statements and counterstatements were the latest chapter in a decades-long feud between Japan and its neighbors over questions of the island's wartime guilt and responsibility. Critics, mostly in the two Koreas and China, contend that Japan has consistently denied its wartime aggression.  The outcry intensified in 2001 after the Education Ministry here approved a new junior high textbook that was drafted by a group of Japanese nationalists and that omitted key details about Japan's wartime atrocities. The book has since been adopted by a handful of Japanese schools.  On Tuesday, the Education Ministry approved a newer edition of the same text that critics say further distorts the past and portrays imperial Japan as a liberator rather than an occupier of its Asian neighbors. The text shuns the word "invasion," for instance, and leaves out critical accounts of events such as the Japanese army's massacre of civilians in Nanking, China, in 1937.

Other texts for the 2006 school year were toned down. The term "comfort women"—a euphemism for wartime sex slaves, mostly from Korea and China—disappeared from all eight junior high history books approved by the national government Tuesday. One book maintained a reference to wartime "comfort stations" for Japanese soldiers. In contrast, all 2001 editions of the books had specific references to the practice of sexual slavery, according to Japan's Kyodo news service.

The Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, which drafted the most controversial of the new books, hailed the approvals as in-step with current thinking in Japan.  Some schoolbook publishers and government officials have argued that it is time to remove "self-deprecating" historical references. That argument has troubled Japan's neighbors because it comes at a time when Japan continues to move away from postwar pacifism and is considering changing its U.S.-drafted constitution in which it renounced the right to maintain a military.  The government approved "the textbook that most faithfully reflects the goal . . . of deepening love towards our country's history," the society said in a statement.

In Seoul, a cluster of about 3,000 angry demonstrators picketed the Japanese Embassy and burned effigies of the Japanese ambassador. Authorities stopped one Korean man from stabbing himself in protest of the new texts.  "The Republic of Korea expresses regret over the fact that some of the 2006 Japanese middle school textbooks . . . still contain content that justifies and glorifies wrongs committed in the past," the South Korean Embassy in Japan said in a statement.

Such sentiments were echoed by people in Japan concerned about resurgent right-wing nationalism. Japanese opponents said on Tuesday that they would fight adoption of the texts by local school boards.  Calling for a "restraint from emotions," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi neither criticized nor applauded Tuesday's decision. The Education Ministry is headed by one of his most conservative cabinet members, Nariaki Nakayama.

Special correspondent Sachiko Sakamaki contributed to this report.
 

MARRIAGE QUIZ

Answer True or False
See answers below

 
1. Women are more eager to marry than are men.

2. Women who are their intellectual and occupational equals threaten men, who prefer to be with much younger, less accomplished women.

3. There are more long-term marriages today than in the past.

4. Americans have become much more tolerant of all sexual activity.

5. The growth in the number of couples living together and even having children without formal marriage ceremonies or licenses reflects a sharp break with centuries-old tradition.

6. Educated married women are increasingly “opting out” of work to stay home with their children.

7. Men and women who hold nontraditional views about gender roles are less likely to marry and more likely to divorce than those with traditional values.

8. Divorce rates in the 1950’s were lower than at any other time in the 20^th century.

9. Throughout history, philosophers and theologians have always believed that strong marital commitments form the foundation of a virtuous society.

10. American women have more positive attitudes toward marriage than do Japanese women.

11. Divorce has always been a disaster for women and children.

12. The preferred form of marriage though the ages has been between one man and one woman.

13. Born-again Christians are just as likely to divorce as are more secular Americans.

Marriage, A History From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage

By Stephanie Coontz. Viking. 432 pp.

History can provide a solid basis for our understandings of the present—the perspective we need to help us make sense of the lives we lead.  Judgments about the current state of affairs unanchored in History, always provide skewed, unsustainable and dysfunctional points-of-view.

Adapted from reviews by:

Judith Warner, Washington Post, Sunday, June 26, 2005

and

Francine Prose, New York Times, June 12, 2005

Stephanie Coontz's new book traces the evolution of marriage from the Stone Age to the Internet Age, and extends Coontz’s now-classic work of American social and economic history, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap . In that 1992 study, Coontz took apart many of the received notions and clichés through which Americans have constructed their ideas of what forms "normal" family life, focusing especially on the "Ozzie and Harriet" 1950s.

Now, in Marriage, a History, she takes a longer and broader view, examining matrimony over the millennia and across various cultures. One of her central theses echoes the sobering discovery that each generation must make anew: the most seemingly modish and outrageous sexual behavior has been around for longer than the young might care to imagine.  She neatly, entertainingly and convincingly deconstructs many of our most-cherished and least-examined beliefs about the bonds that tie men and women together, for better and for worse.

Coontz begins by addressing the multiplicitous meanings of marriage—as interpreted, for example, by African and Indonesian tribes in which husbands and wives neither live together nor pool their financial resources.  She also discusses matrilineal societies. She describes some Chinese and Sudanese who, to form stronger kinship ties, encourage their children to contract ''ghost marriages'' with mates who have everything to recommend them except that they're no longer among the living.

Soon, however, the book turns to societies more like our own, in which we generally understand marriage to involve shared living quarters, a joint bank account, and possibly even children. Coontz writes persuasively about the relative novelty of the ''love-based marriage,'' which she tracks back to the 18th century, when social unease caused by the French and American Revolutions caused gender roles to become more codified and rigid.

Coontz debates the idea that there is a "biological" basis for marriage—that it is, as many have argued, the human version of the instinctive pair-bonding seen among many animal groups. Primates, our closest animal kin, she notes, don't come together to create such bonds. And, she deadpans, "One scientist who believes there is such a biological base in humans claims that it last about four years."

Coontz rejects the theories that marriage came into existence among our Stone Age ancestors so that men could, alternately, protect or subjugate women. The "protective or provider theory of marriage," according to which human society evolved via women's trading sex for food and protection, she writes, is "the most widespread myth about the origins of marriage."

She rejects, too, the "oppressive theory" according to which marriage came into being to allow men the free exchange and exploitation of women. Too many women benefited from it, she says, for the institution to be summed up simplistically as an exercise in pure oppression. In some ancient cultures, it was men, not women, who were exchanged. And sometimes individual women, like Cleopatra, took the bull by the horns (as it were) and played the marriage game to their advantage, though the frequency of such experiences probably shouldn't be exaggerated.

Coontz argues that, rather than existing to oppress or protect women within the bounds of an exclusive and isolated male-female relationship, the marriage bond evolved because it served the needs of much larger kinship groups. It creates cooperative ties for sharing resources and keeping the peace that stretched far beyond individual families or tribes.

She also rejects the notion that the breadwinner/homemaker model that we associate with normal or "traditional" marriage is either normal or traditional. In the past, she argues, the economic needs of families required both spouses—and their children, for that matter—to work, usually side by side. The idea that a man's place was out in the world of lucre and a woman's was one of nonremunerative homemaking became a cultural ideal only in the 19th century. Moreover, not until the mid-20th century could most families in Western Europe and North America actually survive on the earnings of a single breadwinner. This economic development, though, was—and has continued to be—understood as a sentimental and moral achievement.

"Never before had so many people shared the experience of courting their own mates, getting married at will, and setting up their own households," Coontz writes of the post-World War II period. "Never had married couples been so independent of extended family ties and community groups. And never before had so many people agreed that only one kind of family was 'normal.'" Today, it's the normality of 1950s-era "family values" rather than the uniqueness of that social and economic postwar situation that looms large in the American collective imagination.

The biggest myth that Coontz takes apart, however, is the idea that marriage today is in a unique and unprecedented state of crisis. Marriage is in flux, she admits.  People are marrying and having children later than ever, more people than ever are cohabitating or remaining single, and many more children are being born out of wedlock, at all levels of society.  But there's nothing new about all this change or instability. It's been part of the institution since the 18th century, when the traditional model of marriage as a political and economic bond contracted by families fell away.  A new and revolutionary relationship replaced it: the love bond.

Critics have been crying "crisis" since then. And, Coontz writes, they've been right, because "personal satisfaction" is an inherently unstable foundation. "From the moment of its birth," she writes, "this revolutionary new marriage system already showed signs of the instability that was to plague it at the end of the twentieth century. . . . The very features that promised to make marriage such a unique and treasured personal relationship opened the way for it to become an optional and fragile one."

Coontz is perhaps at her best when she calls into question the pearls of wisdom offered by today's traditionalists, pro-marriage pundits, and advice-mongers. Books such as The Rules and its sequel, The Rules for Marriage (published just as one of its two authors filed for divorce), are fatally flawed, she argues.  They tend to rest on cliché, not on the latest sociological or psychological data. As a result, they can give some outdated advice, such as encouraging women to play dumb to catch a man or to down-pedal their education and careers in favor of early marriage and child-rearing. This may have been sound advice once upon a time, when male breadwinner/female homemaker marriages, with all their attendant benefits and limitations, were the norm, but it no longer makes sense economically or any other way.

Surveys now show that young women don't want to marry older, more powerful men and that young men don't want to live with less-educated and lower-earning women. It used to be true that highly educated or extremely successful professional women had a harder time getting married.  Now female college graduates and women with higher earnings are more likely to marry than are women with less education and lower wages.

The people having the greatest problems getting and staying married today, Coontz notes, are the poor. And what's hurting their chances is not a lack of family values (the very people who have the weakest family ties are often those who hold the most traditionalist views, she points out), but a lack of education and employment. Many women must leave the workforce when their children are born, and this more "traditional" division of labor "often destabilizes their relationships and increases their stress rather than relieving it," she writes. "The big problem doesn't lie in differences between what men and women want out of life and love. The big problem is how hard it is to achieve equal relationships in a society whose work policies, school schedules, and social programs were built on the assumptions that male breadwinner families would always be the norm. Tensions between men and women today stem less from different aspirations than from the difficulties they face translating their ideals into practice." Relationships between men and women, she implies, are basically healthy—probably better than they've ever been in the past. It's our society that's sick.

Coontz reminds us that divorce and illegitimacy rates have at times been higher than they are today. Moreover, the notion of same-sex marriage has occurred to lovers in other eras and places. Meanwhile, it's a strength of her book that she willingly embraces contradictions.  For example, many countries and cultures today fear a dramatic shift in the emotional, social, economic, and political consequences of a couple's decision to join whatever they and their neighbors recognize as a formal and binding union.

Nearly every page has some useful or provocative tidbit, especially for the would-be historical novelist. Consider, say, the dramatic possibilities in the statement that ''under Athenian law, a man's seduction of another's wife was punishable by death, but the rape of another man's wife merited only a monetary fine.'' And try to imagine the domestic intrigue of a royal court like Charlemagne's, filled with his concubines and his daughters' illegitimate offspring, thanks to his high tolerance for extramarital sex. What sort of union might have followed from the 1413 Derbyshire marriage contract drawn up with one name left blank, ''because the bride's father hadn't yet decided which daughter to marry off''? We can even perversely enjoy the words of a psychiatrist, writing in 1953, that a 20-year-old woman without ''a man in sight'' had better start worrying that she'll never find a mate.

Adapted From:

A Conversation With Stephanie Coontz

Where Have You Gone, Norman Rockwell: A Fresh Look at the Family

By Claudia Dreifus

New York Times

June 14, 2005

BOSTON—While many historians spend their lives sifting through documents about American presidents or Civil War generals, Dr. Stephanie Coontz's territory is both more mundane and contentious.

Dr. Coontz, 60, a professor of family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, researches how people have formed families through the ages. Her special expertise is the history of marriage. Viking has just relieved her fifth book on the topic, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage. Publisher's Weekly said Dr. Coontz "presents her arguments clearly, offering an excellent balance between the scholarly and the readable in this timely, important book."

Dr. Coontz's own family includes her husband, Will Reissner, a 60-year-old recent retiree from Northwest Airlines, and son, Kris Coontz, 24, a firefighter about to begin medical school. "I study what I live," Dr. Coontz said over a glass of wine. She was visiting Boston last month, promoting the new book.

Q. How did you develop a specialty in the history of marriage?

A. When I started on this in the 1970's, it was weird. I had trained in political and economic history. In 1975, which was the height of the women's movement, I thought I'd write a book on women's history. But in searching for a topic, I realized there were few places in history where men and women interacted.

Finally, it hit me: "Oh, look at the family. That's the one place." In the 1970's, family history wasn't yet thought of a serious field for study. I was terrified of other historians laughing at me. I called my book "The Social Origins of Private Life." It should have been "As Pompous as You Want to Be." Every sentence was academic jargon, and if I said X, I qualified it with Y. The new book isn't like that.

Q. What is the book's central thesis?

A. That marriage has changed more in the past 30 years than in the previous 3,000. This has happened largely because women have changed so dramatically. In my lifetime, marriage has transformed from a rigid institution with strictly define gender roles to what we often have now—partnerships. Until the mid-20th century, it was the man's duty to support the family. It was the wife's to provide sex and housekeeping. That's gone.

In three decades, we've gotten rid of all the legal and political requirements that women be subordinate to their husbands. At the same time, women have gained economic independence, so they are not subordinate. We've also eliminated laws penalizing children labeled illegitimate. Taken together, this is as dramatic a change in human history as the Industrial Revolution.

Q. Didn't the romantics of the late 1700's try to reform marriage?

A. Yes, this was part of the Enlightenment, the demand to marry for love. This horrified the defenders of what was then traditional marriage—arranged marriage. They said, "If love matches become the norm, we'll get people living together without marriage, homosexual partnerships, divorce and illegitimacy."

They were right. The love match was destabilizing. But the radical implications of the "love revolution" wouldn't be actualized until women got reliable birth control and independent incomes.

Q. Some critics wonder whether the changes in marriage have been good for children. Are you sympathetic to their concerns?

A. The situation for modern families is not easy. But you know, when people romanticize the marriages of the past, they say, "Marriage is about making sure that every child has a mother and a father." But for thousands of years, marriage was about getting in-laws, making alliances, deciding which child had a right to parents and inheritance. Illegitimate children had no rights. A lot of these traditionalists idealize a paradise that never was.

Q. Why are the 1950's often thought of as the golden era of American families?

A. Some of that is economic. The 1950's were a time of optimism, when a cohort of G.I.'s returning from World War II moved to subsidized suburbs and started families all at the same time. The economy was expanding, as were national hopes, and there was this shared experience.

By contrast, we are living now in an era where social disparities are widening. At the same time, women are working at paid jobs, and they are not at home. Some people wonder what will happen to children when women are no longer compelled to do the child care. Americans believe you can have a winner-take-all economy, because the nuclear family will take care of all altruism and obligation. So when it looks like the nuclear family isn't going to do that, it's frightening. I think this fueled many of the social-issue voting during the last presidential election.

It all came to a head because of the gay and lesbian issue. America is one of the most sexually conservative nations in the West, especially about homosexuality. So for many voters, gays' seeking marriage while heterosexuals were revolutionizing it was the last straw.

Q. What do you make of the fact that divorce rates are especially high in many "red" states like Oklahoma and Alabama?

A. I see it as a sign that families are changing so rapidly that stated values are poor predictors of actual behavior. Educated individuals are more likely to have a value system that says it's O.K. to be divorced, but they are less likely to do it. Blacks are more likely to disapprove of cohabitation than whites, but much more likely to cohabit. Oklahoma and Alabama have high divorce rates. Massachusetts, the poster state for liberalism, does not.

Q. Magazines sometimes run articles on female tycoons who quit to become soccer moms. What are those articles really about?

A. Wishful thinking, I suspect. The trend measurements don't show that's happening. What they show is that the rapid influx of mothers with young children into the workplace has leveled off and fallen, slightly. In 1998, almost 60 percent of women were returning to work before their kids were 1. Now it's 55 percent. This may be a sign of the revolution consolidating rather than reversing itself. Many women now have the confidence to say, "I can negotiate longer leaves, and if I can't, I'll quit and find something else later."

Q. You say that a key part of the marriage revolution has been women's ability to control their fertility. Would these changes continue if abortion became illegal?

A. That will not send women back into the home. There will be an increased polarization between the options of wealthy women and poor women. Rich women will find ways around restrictive abortion laws, and poor women will be stuck. I think the marriage revolution is just a too big social change to be reversed.

Q. What's the upside to the marriage revolution?

A. How much men have changed in these past 30 years. You never used to see men with their children. Husbands may now believe they do more housework than they in fact do, but they are doing some. When I see the wonderful, respectful relationships that my son and his friends have with the women in their lives, I see something new.

Q. What's the marital history of the marriage historian?

A. I've had the complex life I write about. I was a single mother for 12 years. I'd been engaged. The wedding fell through. I then discovered I was pregnant and opted to have the child on my own. I was a professor. I was in my mid-30's. I could manage it financially. Twelve years later, another man, Will—he had been my college sweetheart—reappeared in my life. We married, and he became a second father to my son.

My story shows what I sometimes write about. You can't judge a family's health by the form it's in at a given moment. Nowadays, people get to good places by some weird routes. It's also true that people can take traditional routes and end in bad places.

Adapted from

“Taking Marriage Private”

By STEPHANIE COONTZ

Published: November 26, 2007

Olympia, Wash.

WHY do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they did not, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, confirmed its validity.

For sixteen centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage based on a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows—even alone by the haystack—the Catholic Church accepted their marriage as valid.

In 1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in church. But people who married illicitly had the same rights and duties as a couple married in church: their children were legitimate; the