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I actually like that JFK assignment if the goal was to practice making an argument/debating.
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Apr 30, 2015 01:51
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Tao Jones posted:In 1856, a private American citizen led a mercenary army and took over Nicaragua as part of a complicated scheme on the part of the shipping industry to build a canal across Central America and southern interests looking to expand the reach of slavery. Remind me again why southerners constantly go into apologetics over slavery!?!?
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Apr 30, 2015 02:17
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Tao Jones posted:In 1856, a private American citizen led a mercenary army and took over Nicaragua as part of a complicated scheme on the part of the shipping industry to build a canal across Central America and southern interests looking to expand the reach of slavery. Yeah, the fact that Southern citizens were straight-up outfitting expeditions to privately take over South/Central American countries and bring them into the Union more or less for the sake of adding more slave state senators and were getting CHEERED ON for it (and were common enough that there was even a drat word for them) popped my eyes a bit when I first found out about it.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:37
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Abducting slaves from British ex-slave states was fairly common. I've read the correspondence between the foreign office and the state department and about 1/3 of the letters are 'can we please have our loving subject back he's not a slave tia'.
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Apr 30, 2015 02:39
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Tao Jones posted:In 1856, a private American citizen led a mercenary army and took over Nicaragua as part of a complicated scheme on the part of the shipping industry to build a canal across Central America and southern interests looking to expand the reach of slavery. To be fair, IIRC, he was supported by one faction in Nicaragua who cheered him on while he burned down the capital of the other faction. Then they chased him out and took control of the country. Classic bit of using expendable foreigners to gain control. They handled it well, some times it can backfire spectacularly.
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Apr 30, 2015 03:36
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It blew my mind that the Eastern Roman Empire lasted until 1453, I always assumed in high school they just kind of faded away a few decades after western Rome fell.
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Apr 30, 2015 03:39
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sullat posted:To be fair, IIRC, he was supported by one faction in Nicaragua who cheered him on while he burned down the capital of the other faction. Then they chased him out and took control of the country. Classic bit of using expendable foreigners to gain control. They handled it well, some times it can backfire spectacularly. A quick skim of the Wikipedia page mentions that they needed a coalition of Central American states to kick him out, and they only did so after he made noises about invading everyone else. The Wiki page for Nicaragua also mentions that after he got kicked out the side he fought against in the civil war ended up ruling for three decades. Not sure you can call that one well-planned or a win, but the wiki is pretty short on details and might be leaving out important bits and bobs.
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Apr 30, 2015 03:47
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Don Gato posted:It blew my mind that the Eastern Roman Empire lasted until 1453, I always assumed in high school they just kind of faded away a few decades after western Rome fell. Yup. "So then they split the empire into two halves and the western half immediately fell to barbarians and the eastern half trucked on a little longer but that was basically the start of what we think of as medieval europe. NOW LET'S TALK FEUDALISM!"
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Apr 30, 2015 03:50
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Tomn posted:A quick skim of the Wikipedia page mentions that they needed a coalition of Central American states to kick him out, and they only did so after he made noises about invading everyone else. Nah, looks like your research was more accurate than my half-remembered anecdote from a Central American guide book. The guys who invited him in only ruled "jointly" for less than a year after he legged it, so not quite as successful as I thought.
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Apr 30, 2015 03:57
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I was genuinely surprised to find there was a connection between the Byzantines and the Romans. I don't think I found that out until the Total War: Rome expansion came out and you they were a playable faction. I knew about the Byzatines and that they had a connection to Orthodox Christianity and they played a role in the Crusades, etc. but never even came close to realising there was some connection between Christian divisions and the Roman Empire. Also the 30YW and basically all continental European history was ignored in my history education. I mean we're in the UK, why would we need to learn about things that happened in Europe? It didn't get touched again until 6th form (16-18) when I learned about the formation of Germany and Italy as modern states and we learned a shitload about Russia. The former two would have been even more of a confusion if I hadn't been a Sharpe enthusiast and so at least had a passing knowledge of Napoleon and the so what the situation in Europe was when all these new states were getting put together.
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Apr 30, 2015 03:57
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MrNemo posted:Also the 30YW and basically all continental European history was ignored in my history education. I mean we're in the UK, why would we need to learn about things that happened in Europe? insular
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Apr 30, 2015 04:11
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Tomn posted:Yeah, the fact that Southern citizens were straight-up outfitting expeditions to privately take over South/Central American countries and bring them into the Union more or less for the sake of adding more slave state senators and were getting CHEERED ON for it (and were common enough that there was even a drat word for them) popped my eyes a bit when I first found out about it. Yeah, definitely. I'd learned about the Missouri Compromise as a fact and the Mexican War as a fact and understood on some level that the South wanted more slave states as a school student. The relationship between those facts and the logical consequence of "everything south of such-and-such a line will be a slave state" (to say nothing of the filibuster movement in general) wasn't really clear until I'd done a lot more reading as an adult. It still really blows my mind today, too. If it should ever be that I become a historian, filibusters and antebellum Southern politics are definitely up there in terms of important/terrifying parts of my country's history that have fallen by the wayside.
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Apr 30, 2015 05:28
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MrNemo posted:I was genuinely surprised to find there was a connection between the Byzantines and the Romans. Me too, actually. I used to play Byzantines a lot in Medieval Total War and I had no real idea where they came from.
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Apr 30, 2015 06:14
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Grand Fromage posted:I actually like that JFK assignment if the goal was to practice making an argument/debating. Keep in mind that this was a teacher known almost exclusively for being a coach and teaching "health" classes alongside gym. I'd like to think that he subscribed to the "Keep one lesson ahead of the class" method of teaching.
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Apr 30, 2015 06:14
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Odobenidae posted:Keep in mind that this was a teacher known almost exclusively for being a coach and teaching "health" classes alongside gym. I'd like to think that he subscribed to the "Keep one lesson ahead of the class" method of teaching. That's not a method, that's your first year.
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Apr 30, 2015 07:26
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GoutPatrol posted:That's not a method, that's your first year. After a good 20 years of teaching the same two no-effort classes, one might imagine it congeals into a 'method'.
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Apr 30, 2015 07:30
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HEY GAL posted:Professional British historians of the English Civil War are still really bad at 30YW stuff; they'll mention completely normal practices as though they were the first to discover them. You guys are pretty Depends on the area. ECW writers tend to be a certain type. Medievalists can't afford to be closed off in the same way.
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Apr 30, 2015 10:24
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HEY GAL posted:Professional British historians of the English Civil War are still really bad at 30YW stuff; they'll mention completely normal practices as though they were the first to discover them. You guys are pretty Pre-A-levels (the 16-18 period of school) European history literally consisted of 'England owned the North of France and we beat the French at Agincourt. Somethingsomething loss of Calais, the War of the Roses. Anyway at this point we've had an Empire and the Americans got annoyed and then there was the problem in somewhere called the Balkans involving the Germans and the Russians. Then we went to help the French because of the Belgians, who lived North of France somewhere. Yes Pilkins we are friends with the French now. Well we don't like them but we really don't like the Germans because they're planning to have a world spanning Empire but only managed to get some crap in Africa. Why are friends with the French? Well do you remember the French revolution? No? Good, it's complicated but the French aren't as bad as the Germans. Now trench warfare...' If that sounds jumbled and confused and like it's missed a lot of important things, well, there's a good reason for that. In fairness there was some stuff on the discovery of the New World and how that caused Spain to collapse, which was important because we'd all learned about the Spanish Armada and knew that Spain had at one point been relevant and this was why they weren't now. Then we covered some of the origins of the British Empire, largely focused on the slave trade with a brief mention that the 13 Colonies revolted and formed a new country. And in case anyone is wondering this wasn't even super patriotic flag waving type teachers, it was just a very British centric view of history that only bothered mentioning countries or events as they affected British history right up until near the end of mandatory education when we got some of the Great Depression because I guess the national syllabus figured that would teach us about economics. I even did Classical Civilisation at GCSE (the easy option versus Latin or Greek) and basically just learned about Roman mythology and got to read Ovid in translation. Which was fun but I really didn't learn anything in terms of history out of that.
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Apr 30, 2015 10:26
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Odobenidae posted:Our "Social Studies" teacher had us choose who we thought killed JFK: Either The CIA, The Cubans, The Russians, or the First Lady, and write about it for our final exam. This class was also optional, IIRC in high school you only had to take social studies for the first two years. I would have killed for an actual "History" class. Sounds like you had Science Fiction class. Now I'm envious. On history in school, my memories about that are a jumbled mess since I spend so much time in school reading history books from our local library, which blotted out a lot of what we were actually supposed to learn out of my brain. From what I still remember: -Pre WWI-stuff like Romans and stuff -WWI -WWII -Greeks and Persians -WWII -WWII Also something about World War II, I think
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Apr 30, 2015 12:48
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My Canadian history class is what I remember the most, and it largely consisted of: -Debating if George Brown was a virgin -Canada fought wars but they were really not important and please stop talking about Vimy. -Writing a paper on if Canadian media is worth supporting Then the other 90% of the class was categorically studying oppression of Native peoples. Also we got to play with Prime Minister action figures and pass around the teacher's collection of Canadian spoons. It was a great class. 
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Apr 30, 2015 14:43
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Tao Jones posted:Yeah, definitely. I'd learned about the Missouri Compromise as a fact and the Mexican War as a fact and understood on some level that the South wanted more slave states as a school student. The relationship between those facts and the logical consequence of "everything south of such-and-such a line will be a slave state" (to say nothing of the filibuster movement in general) wasn't really clear until I'd done a lot more reading as an adult. This kind of represents the problem in teaching history. Actual history is really fascinating at the ground level, dealing with human beings and their motivations for the decisions they make. That takes an enormous amount of focus on a lot of tiny things, though, which consumes a lot of time. Time that schools don't have. Hence they're forced to broad-brush most of history, and you're lucky if they can spend the time to focus on any one thing in detail. You're even luckier if the one or two things they can focus on are actually interesting to you personally. Our 4th grade history was focused on Michigan history specifically. We learned all about the French Voyageurs, Cartier, LaSalle, Champlain, those guys. Fur trapping and the general development of 16th century North America. I understood that stuff really well. I had no real idea how it fit into the rest of US history for a long time, though. We did dioramas of the massacre at Fort Michilimackinac, though, so that was gorily cool.
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Apr 30, 2015 14:51
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Deteriorata posted:Our 4th grade history was focused on Michigan history specifically. We learned all about the French Voyageurs, Cartier, LaSalle, Champlain, those guys. Fur trapping and the general development of 16th century North America. I understood that stuff really well. I had no real idea how it fit into the rest of US history for a long time, though. This seems to be how history is typically taught and I'm not sure that the microscope approach seems to really work. Most students never really get exposed to the big picture until university. Before then they're just studying random snapshots in history with no context between them, which many students fail to retain because they're never told the significance of the episodes they learn about or how they relate to each other--they're just memorizing facts in a vacuum. Then a year or two down the road they go over the same material again since so many students forgot it the first time.
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Apr 30, 2015 15:18
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It really makes me appreciate my curriculum. I don't think we ever memorised a year or a date.
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Apr 30, 2015 15:21
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Grand Fromage posted:Me too, actually. I used to play Byzantines a lot in Medieval Total War and I had no real idea where they came from. Did they even call themselves Byzantines at some point or that is just something modern historians came up with? I was under the impression that they had always considered themselves part of the Roman Empire. Unless maybe hundred's of years after the fall of the West they slowly but surely rebranded themselves like an evil corporation would?
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Apr 30, 2015 16:00
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Dalael posted:Did they even call themselves Byzantines at some point or that is just something modern historians came up with? I was under the impression that they had always considered themselves part of the Roman Empire. Unless maybe hundred's of years after the fall of the West they slowly but surely rebranded themselves like an evil corporation would? Most people find it very confusing to refer to a Roman empire that is centered 1000 miles away from Rome. It's more of a thing today so as to distinguish their independent history from the period when the Empire was united.
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Apr 30, 2015 16:08
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Dalael posted:Did they even call themselves Byzantines at some point or that is just something modern historians came up with? I was under the impression that they had always considered themselves part of the Roman Empire. Unless maybe hundred's of years after the fall of the West they slowly but surely rebranded themselves like an evil corporation would? Byzantine Empire is a creation of Victorian historians. They referred to themselves as Romans until the very end of the 1300s, when they were willing to concede that and began calling themselves Hellenes in a desperate attempt to get help from the west against the Turks.
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Apr 30, 2015 16:11
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Deteriorata posted:This kind of represents the problem in teaching history. Actual history is really fascinating at the ground level, dealing with human beings and their motivations for the decisions they make. That takes an enormous amount of focus on a lot of tiny things, though, which consumes a lot of time. Time that schools don't have. Of course, those were current events
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Apr 30, 2015 16:35
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I was always under the impression it was popularised by Gibbons, partly as a way of Enlightenment era thinkers being able to distinguish between their revered Classical figures and the superstitious medievals that lived in Constantinople. It was really a neat way to maintain that distinction between the fall of Rome and civilisation and the Dark ages pre-Renaissance. That whole idea is pretty hard to maintain if you've got a single polity with an academic and technological tradition that continues uninterrupted. Explanations start to get pretty complex as to why certain modes of life were no longer viable and technological achievements were no longer replicable when you can't just point and say 'and then the barbrians burned it all down and the superstitious Church came in and ruined everything. gently caress you religion DAD!' At least that's my summary of Gibbons. Also I can appreciate why I and so many other had such a limited historical education. As others have said the problem with history is that you need breadth to appreciate any of the depth of historical study (the life of a Roman Plebeian might be kind of interesting but it's probably not going to hold your attention without knowing the context of his whole station within society and why that society might matter to you, personally, in the first place). On the other hand without the microscope/depth approach then history turns into a big list of dates and names because, it turns out, a lot of poo poo happened in the world prior to most of us being born and without giving some more information and background that's all you can do. So we all get a cherry picking of 'important' historical periods and get just enough depth in each to learn some biograpical information about those names and some events that happened in those years. Added to that how kids don't pay attention and how bad memory can be at that age and you've got the modern education system. Actually as much as I really enjoyed studying late 19th century British politics (and really missing out on pre-Palmerston was a huge handicap in understanding what I did learn) I think I'd have had some real problems with my education if I'd come through without knowing about WWI and WWII. Although I didn't actually learn much about what happened in WWII, it pretty much went 'the war started and then the Holocaust...' For instance did you know there was this bear... Actually sorry wrong thread. Back on topic somewhat, I really appreciated the love of learning you found in certain parts of the Ancient world combined with people who engaged in political life and the attempt to actually realise philosophical ideas. Marcus Aurelius is of course the paragon of this, an actual philosopher king (even if he was kind of whiney in his diaries). Socrates was reputed to have been a super tough soldier and clearly played a role in contemporary Athenian politics and Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. What other awesome examples do we have of academics and politics combining in the ancient world?
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Apr 30, 2015 16:40
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We learned about the Byzantine Empire in primary school religious studies (as per a student's right to religious education that reflects their background). Hell, I think we learned more about late Roman Empire (like how Christians weren't actually thrown to lions) there than in "proper" history (where it was basically limited to a map of Justinian's reconquests).
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Apr 30, 2015 16:47
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:It really makes me appreciate my curriculum. I don't think we ever memorised a year or a date. In primary, I had to memorize exactly two dates: 1492 and 1789.
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Apr 30, 2015 16:50
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Deteriorata posted:Most people find it very confusing to refer to a Roman empire that is centered 1000 miles away from Rome. It's more of a thing today so as to distinguish their independent history from the period when the Empire was united. You could say the Roman Empire is only in Rome, if you want, but Rome's around the world.
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Apr 30, 2015 16:56
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In completely unrelated news, About half a year ago in this thread I noted that the fine editors at WIkipedia had decided that Romulus Augustulus was an usurper who ruled the Western Roman Empire instead of an Emperor. It has been since changed to state that Romulus Augustulus was an Emperor (alleged usurper). It just tickles me for some reason.
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Apr 30, 2015 17:00
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Can anyone comment on what was considered beautiful for the Romans and Greeks? I ran across a couple very dubious articles which said that the Greeks thought women should have a unibrow and I am having a hard time finding actual sources.
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Apr 30, 2015 18:46
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Fell Fire posted:Can anyone comment on what was considered beautiful for the Romans and Greeks? I ran across a couple very dubious articles which said that the Greeks thought women should have a unibrow and I am having a hard time finding actual sources. People who don't look like you.
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Apr 30, 2015 18:51
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How did the Romans feel about spiders?
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Apr 30, 2015 18:52
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I actually don't know. Most premodern cultures had a preference for plumper than the typical westerner likes today, and pale skin since those dirty poors were the ones doing labor and getting tanned. Greeks seem to have had a thing for light hair, likely because it would've been rare.
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Apr 30, 2015 18:53
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Fell Fire posted:Can anyone comment on what was considered beautiful for the Romans and Greeks? I ran across a couple very dubious articles which said that the Greeks thought women should have a unibrow and I am having a hard time finding actual sources. Unlike Qajar paintings, I don't think I've ever seen a classical statue that sports monobrows.
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Apr 30, 2015 18:53
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They were into hair plucking. I think the unibrow thing comes from one dude who read way too much into one mosaic of a Greek woman with a unibrow, if I'm remembering right.
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Apr 30, 2015 18:55
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Among the common people, was there racism towards people of non-roman territories, and did that change once it got conquered? Or was it more dependent on what deities they worshipped, ie if they started praying to roman deities that made them part of "us". If there was an idea of "us" present at the time.
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Apr 30, 2015 18:58
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We've talked about that one a lot, if you have search you can find a bunch of discussions. The short version is "race" based discrimination is a fairly modern idea. The Romans had lots of ways of being assholes and discriminatory, but what we would consider racism was not among them. Romans were people who spoke Latin (or Greek I guess if you're one of those weird effete easterners) and accepted Roman culture. Anyone could become Roman, it was a value they held dear enough that their founding mythology is built around it.
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Apr 30, 2015 19:01
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