Reading The Cold War: A New History, today I learned about the Great Chinese Famine. I don't know how every single history class I took managed to pass over this one.
Because every history class you've ever taken starts in the ancient past and has a week or two on the syllabus for everything after WWII. Lose a day on the Egyptians, two days on Rome, three days on the Renaissance and a day on the Civil War and suddenly there's no time for anything after the Spanish American War. I've long thought that history ought to be taught backwards, from current events clear back to the magna carta. You'd get a lot more causality. Also a lot more controversy, which is why it isn't done.
I'm sure you're aware that some people do in fact teach history this way. It's gotten more traction in the last 10 years. I think someone wrote a book.I've long thought that history ought to be taught backwards, from current events clear back to the magna carta. You'd get a lot more causality. Also a lot more controversy, which is why it isn't done.
Can't. I found a lot of "education science" type literature. Including one really great teaching model: start in the present, isolate some important events, then sort of create one of those old Inspiration 6-style idea maps going backward in time. So midterm elections inspires discussions going back to last generation, maybe about Clinton, and then from Clinton you spin off to foreign policy or presidential scandals or the environment, and from there etc. It all seems relevant to students but it still takes you back hundreds of years by the time the semester's over. Basically this:
Yeah, this ain't it. This is remedial college social studies, and it presents history as a longitudinal "what did your parents think" problem. There's no attempt to, say, link Reagan's attitude against the Soviets to even Reagan's role as the mouthpiece of the HUAC - it's "what do you think of Reagan? Well, what did your parents think of LBJ? See? History!"
Totally agree. It's a way to interrogate why the world is both as great and as fucked as it is today. We have a narrative that says "Putin is a crazy person," precisely because no one has bothered to ask the question, "Why might Putin want to invade Ukraine?" which would require working backward to at least the time of Peter the Great.I've long thought that history ought to be taught backwards, from current events clear back to the magna carta.
Finished the book. I definitely agree that that's a better way to maintain interest in a train of thought, but part of me wonders if it'd end up being too broad an instruction if you follow all political / historical ideas back to their roots. I did enjoy the above's approach of scanning repeatedly over the same decades, each time focusing on a different major idea and picking relevant events though!
Yeah, I had a few teachers who made it a point to point out the euro-centric biases of their courses. And then didn't do jack to include anything but western history. I've noticed similar trends in books on architecture, art, and music history. Paul Graham picked Civilisation as the one book to read on art history if a person were to read only one book about art history, but it didn't have a single instance of non-Western art. I felt pretty let down at the time.