Tag Archives: american history

a patriot’s history — any real reviews?

by

So, today, I see a barista at my local Starbucks reading, A Patriot’s History of the United States. For a moment, I thought it was Zinn’s People’s History, because the authors of Patriot’s History borrow so heavily from his cover and book design. We know that Patriot’s History is the usual drivel, in no small part because of its paucity of meaningful footnotes. Not so shockingly, the authors seek to “correct” liberal historians, not recognizing that historians come in many ideological shapes and sizes. But, mostly they fail to appreciate that history is built around social science principles–evidence (in this case the use of primary sources), engagement in the broad scholarly literature, and careful reasoning. Social science like science is not infallible but it has the lovely value of being cumulative and falsifiable. (Of course, this book comes from the same folks who reject the science of global warming, so this is hardly surprising.)

Anyway, I wondered if this book had been reviewed by anyone with any scholarly credentials. It has. See David Hoogland Noon, Schweikart, Larry and Michael Allen. A Patriot’s History of the United States in The History Teacher, May 2007. Well worth reading.

Sounds of History

by

Two of Cathy Davidson’s recent blog entries at Hastac feature videos on  Tinkering and Sound. They’re both fascinating links, but especially the 2002 interview with Emily Thompson about Sound. Thompson (who won the MacArthur is brilliant) and her work was part of the inspiration for the Teaching American History project I developed, the Sounds of American History. Thompson explores how the transformations in what people heard and how they listened. She argues that people heard a new kind of sound, produced by modernity and that they listened differently, too, as consumers of a commodity. Machines did not just change society; they changed how we sensed and perceived life itself.