Slaves plant sweet potatoes on James Hopkinson's plantation c. 1862-3.
At The Baffler, Stuart Whatley writes
Dangerous Designs on (AP) American History:
Any city upon a hill invariably rests on a mound of bullshit, and the extent to which one knows it depends largely on one’s willingness to inhale through his or her nose. In this sense, we might simplify the ongoing debate over the College Board’s updated AP U.S. History framework as a debate over whether or not public schools should be cultivating future generations of mouth-breathers.
A wave of recent proposals in state legislatures across the south and southwest seems to advocate for the former. The College Board claims to be emulating “current thinking” in the field of history by encouraging a focus on larger concepts, historical argumentation, and critical thinking skills, rather than the previous, superficial focus on rote people, places and events (PDF). But state legislators in places like Georgia have proffered resolutions charging that the new framework favors a “biased and inaccurate view of many important themes and events in American history,” and that it maligns “American free enterprise” and that system’s role in the country’s development over time (PDF). (And this language apes similar resolutions in other states.)
The opening shot in this latest installment of the textbook wars was fired last year in an op-ed by Jane Robbins, of the American Principles Project, and Larry Krieger, a former AP U.S. History teacher. They complain that, under the new framework, the “units on colonial America stress the development of a ‘rigid racial hierarchy’ and a ‘strong belief in British racial and cultural superiority…’” while ignoring “the United States’ founding principles and their influence in inspiring the spread of democracy and galvanizing the movement to abolish slavery.”
What the new framework actually “stresses” is a matter of opinion, and one can only wonder what this particular alternative would actually look like. Surely it would impose upon AP history teachers the same pedagogical dilemma that “teaching the controversy” or “equal time” did a decade ago, when curricular Intelligent Design reached its apex before being summarily routed in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in 2005. Indeed, laissez faire free enterprise might be said to be the true American religion, but to teach its history within a starry-eyed exceptionalist framework is as intellectually untenable as “design” (creationism) is in biology. With the corporate class’s or its convenient militia’s view notwithstanding, historical scholarship on early American capitalism over the past few decades precludes anything of the kind.
As documented most recently in Cornell historian Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, the story of early American free enterprise is inextricable from the story of American slavery at its most hellish and depraved. In fact, the inclination to delink the two—or to suggest that capitalist free enterprise should be credited with actually replacing “pre-modern” chattel slavery—invokes the same revisionist legerdemain that has been used to disavow the most shameful elements of our history and perpetuate social inequities.
Baptist proves that, far from being some inefficient, regrettable eyesore, slavery was an indispensible unifying force in inchoate American political society; and economically, cotton picked by slaves modernized and industrialized the western world by supplying global textile markets—with massive returns for northern investors and southern slaveholders alike. Cotton output, and individual slave-worker productivity with it, were accomplished through what Baptist calls the “pushing system”—which is to say, keenly honed, systematic torture and, mostly in the case of the women, sexual violence. “Using torture,” he writes, “slavery’s entrepreneurs extracted an amount of innovation virtually equal in numerical measure to all the mechanical ingenuity in all the textile mills in the Western world.” [...]
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—2008 v. 2012: Is the presidential landscape changing?
Four years ago, the final electoral map in the race for the White House wound up looking markedly different than the one that resulted from the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections that elevated (and then returned) George W. Bush to the White House.
The "Obama coalition" of states propelled him to the presidency in an electoral college landslide, as the Democrat tallied 365 electoral votes with Republican John McCain able to secure only 173 electoral votes. Embedded in that coalition were states that Democrats had not been able to coax into their column since Bill Clinton was president. In the case of three states (Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina), the Democratic losing streak ran back to well before the Clinton presidency.
It's four years later, and quite a bit has changed. It is only a remote possibility (and that might be overselling it) that the map will look exactly the same as it did in 2008. Given public pessimism about the economy, and approval ratings that have been sub-50 for most of the past 12-18 months, one would expect that some of Obama's comfortable 2008 cushion will be eroded in 2012.
And while there are states that look considerably tougher for the president than they did in 2008, there are also a handful of states that have not been in the Democratic column in the past 15 years, but could conceivably fall their way in 2012.
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On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, CPAC is at the Gaylord National Resort, which is not made up. Aaron Schock is in hot water again, and it's not even tea time.
Armando chimes in with yet another great point on
King v. Burwell: conservatives now complain that Obamacare is too flexible! NV nutbar Michele Fiore says baking soda cures cancer. Is it because she'd like her home health care company to be able to administer such a treatment? Prison privateers have a new way to plunder from prisoners: video visitation. Gun laws and the new nullification craze. Yet another BillO lie exposed. Gop primary voters hate the Constitution. Bioethicist asks why gun issues are taboo on the campaign trail.
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