In the spirit of today's post about James Ussher and the date of creation, here's an all-too-true pie chart that made me laugh;
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And the worst part? While Whitney was the first to patent his particular kind of "modern" cotton gin, cotton gins had been invented previously in India. What's more, other people appear to have been working on similar improvements to the gins already being used. Whitney's cotton gin was a true new invention, but the popularity of his machine has overshadowed a more complex story. As ever, history is more complicated than I had ever been taught.
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Yea, the history taught in schools is downright dishonest. Everything invented after 1776 was invented by an American. Everything invented before that was invented by a Western European. Completely worthless, it's not education it's brainwashing.
My freshman year in college I had one of the greatest teachers in my life for U.S. History, a required course. He opened the first day of class with "OK, you've all been in school for twelve or thirteen years, and you think this class is a waste of time. You've taken U.S. history at least 10 times and you know it back forth up down and inside out. Well in this class I'm going to teach you what really happened." He introduced me to Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky. The idea of applying critical thinking to history was absolutely revolutionary to me, which is sad because it's what school should be about.
James Burke is pleased with this post.
AnonymousCoward:
Indeed. These matters always bring Connections to mind.
Rev Matt, I hear you, and raise you my High School American History teacher. Things I remember from his class include the point that just as we were trying to get permission to build a certain canal, there was a VCTPR (Very Conveniently Timed Panamanian Revolution), when there just happened to be a couple U.S. Navy gunships hanging around. And wouldn't you know it, the new regime practically begged us to take over the canal zone.
It wasn't all (or even mostly) America-bashing, but it was refreshingly complete.
And boy was he into critical thinking. After each weekly exam, we'd pass our paper to the person in front, and he'd read off the answers. You were allowed to disagree with any of his answers, and if you could argue persuasively that his answer was wrong, or the question was ill-posed or confusingly worded, you got credit. Also, one or two answers each week were deliberately wrong. To see if we were paying attention.
I loved that class!
So what does cotton gin taste like? I'm usually a beer guy, with an occasional shot of single malt on important days...