

The Future of American History - benbreen
http://www.npr.org/sections/npr-history-dept/2015/07/29/421624129/the-future-of-american-history

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mrwilliamchang
Great quote towards the end of the article: "Not all students are convinced
they need to know a great deal about U.S. history anymore. Some​ believe in
the power of the global marketplace to shape their present and future lives,
and therefore see our hallmark U.S. institutions — the Constitution,
citizenship, federal government system ... ​and the histories attached to them
— ​as arcane compared to the new worlds that technology, innovation and
consumption are spawning."

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Gravityloss
What a strange world view. Who sets the laws then?

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cJ0th
corporations ? ;)

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walterbell
Are there academic history programs focused on the history of engineering,
science and technology? These will of necessity reference the surrounding
sociopolitical context, while bringing light to patterns that remain relevant
to modern STEM disciplines.

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digikata
This might be more of a resource than a program of study, but the Computer
History Museum runs an Oral History collection which collects first hand
discussions from the people at the point of development of many computing
technologies.

[http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/](http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/)

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WalterBright
"especially because I teach American history in a way that is more inclusive
and challenging of dominant myths than most of them were exposed to in high
school."

Sometimes I think that just what is politically correct has changed, and a
different set of myths is now taught.

"to teach painful histories — histories of slavery, Native American genocide,
Jim Crow and lynching, Japanese internment"

There's a heluva lot more to American history than the bad things.

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rrss1122
I agree with you - what is politically correct has changed. I think it often
changes to be what is most convenient to those in power.

There's a huluva lot more to American history than the bad things, but recent
trends I see make me fear that even the bad things will be swept under the
rug. You see stories pop up all the time of colleges restricting speech
because it hurts somebody's feelings. This is slowly starting to happen to
public speech as well. As the article says, history is painful to face, and
students today are more unwilling to put up with pain and more likely to
demand that they not be subjected to any pain.

Perhaps that just reflects what has been true of history, that it is often
rewritten to convenience the ruling class and pacify the peasants.

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WalterBright
One thing about myths - Stephen Ambrose wrote a book "Nothing Like It In The
World" about the building of the first transcontinental world. He wrote in the
Acknowledgements that:

"I had been taught to regard the railroad builders as the models for Daddy
Warbucks. The investors and builders had made obscene profits which they used
to dominate state and national politics to a degree unprecedented before or
since. John Robinson's book The Octopus: A History of Construction,
Conspiracies, Extortion, about the way the Big Four ruined California,
expressed what I thought and felt. What made the record of the big shots so
much worse was that it was the people's money they stole, in the form of
government bonds and land. In my view, opposition to the Union Pacific and the
Central Pacific (later the Southern Pacific) had led to the Populist Party and
then the Progressive Party, political organizations that I regarded as the
saviors of America. I wanted nothing to do with those railroad thieves."

However, once he got into it, he realized that about everything he knew about
the project was a myth, and finished it with a transformed belief that it was
the greatest American achievement of the 19th century.

(It really is a marvelous book, too.)

