"Historians Disagree About Everything, or So It Seems"

"Famous philosophers have warned of the danger of overly realistic history. In his 1692 classic, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke denounced seventeenth-century history instruction because it celebrated soldiers and conquerors and thus implanted 'unnatural cruelty' in young minds. In the early 1800s, the great Swiss educator Johann Heimlich Pestalozzi banned history from the elementary school curriculum because he believed history exposed innocent children to 'learning about the wickedness and evils of the world before they were able to understand their significance.' Thus, traditionalists and progressives fight fierce battles over standards, curriculum, and textbooks. From their past, traditionalists want God, heroes, pride, nationalism. From their past, progressives want reason, complexity, honesty, and cosmopolitanism."

Peter Gibbon in a 2017 Humanities article asks, "how do we offer a realistic portrait of America's past without extinguishing idealism?"

"We're No Longer a Radio Network, We're a Sad Political Glee Club"

"'National Public Radio was kind of a body blow to Pacifica,' Lasar says. 'It was a more professional and less strident alternative.'
"In Los Angeles, ousted KPFK program director Ruth Hirschman (now Ruth Seymour) built KCRW into a powerhouse. Many of Pacifica's volunteer programmers were happy to let 'corporate' NPR surpass them in listenership; Pacifica was 'community radio.'
"'The central underlying problem at Pacifica,' Marc Cooper says, 'is that in the end, what dictates everything is the individual programmer's desire to hold onto his or her airtime. Management has always been weak.'"


Hillel Aron in the LA Weekly depicts the decline of Pacifica Radio.

"A Repudiation of the Politics of the Age of Obama"

"Zinn was deeply influenced by anarchists, and this anti-statism kept him from doing what most of the left has been doing of late—identifying with the holders of state power. Some of Zinn’s friends, Duberman writes, resented his 'never speaking well of any politician.' When many considered John F. Kennedy to be a champion of black civil rights, Zinn declared that the president had done only enough for the movement 'to keep his image from collapsing in the eyes of twenty million Negroes.' Going farther, Zinn argued that African Americans should eschew involvement with any state power, and even counseled against a campaign for voting rights.'When Negroes vote, they will achieve as much power as the rest of us have—which is very little.' Instead, they should create 'centers of power' outside government agencies from which to pressure authorities."

Thaddeus Russell in Reason reviews Martin Duberman's Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left.

You're in Suspicion

"To many voters the badness of 'The Jefferson Lies'— which argues, among other things, that Jefferson in fact saw no need for a wall of separation between church and state—was a truth held to be self-evident. In expert commentary solicited by the network, which is hosted by George Mason University, Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, the authors of 'Getting Jefferson Right,' denounced Mr. Barton’s 'distortions,' writing, 'As Jefferson did with the Gospels, Barton chooses what he likes about Jefferson and leaves out the rest to create a result more in line with his ideology.'"

Jennifer Schuessler at The New York Times reports the results of a History News Network's poll to find "the least credible history book in print."