As they say in England, I was gobsmacked. Or as they say in the U.S., I was flabbergasted. Or as they said in earlier times, I was astounded.
'About what?' you might be asking (and if you're not, move along, please, and make room for the others).
I will tell you about what.
American History. More specifically, the apparent lack of teaching about American history in the schools of today.
What got me all worked up was an episode of Jeopardy! on the telly a couple of nights ago.
It was Teen Tournamemt week on Jeopardy! during which some very bright 16-to-18-year-year-old contestants work their way through a series of quarter-final games, semi-final games, and two days of final games until a winner emerges. It is important to be the winner, because the winner gets to take home $100,000 USD. As it says up there in the title of the post, this is a tragedy in three acts, so I'll give you three examples of what should be commonly known facts about which these bright teenagers didn't have a clue.
Act I. During a semi-final game, the contestants were Maya (a senior from Peachtree City, Georgia), Caleb (a sophomore from someplace I don't recall), and Joe, I think his name was (a senior from San Diego, California). All three of them were displaying their knowledge on a variety of subjects, handily offering up their answers, always in the form of a question, such as names of sitcoms (What is The Big Bang Theory? What is Friends?), hip-hop and rap artists (we won't even go there), and tidbits of science and other subjects (What is thermodynamics? What is synecdoche?). Their abject ignorance of American history didn't surface until someone chose that category.
One question had to do with the dispute between Britain and the United States over the boundary of the Oregon Territory in the nineteenth century. It was finally resolved peacefully by setting the border between the U.S. and Canada at the 49th parallel, but not before candidate for U.S. President James Knox Polk campaigned on his willingness to go to war with Britain over the boundary if necessary. I don't remember the exact wording of the question but it was something like "This or fight became a political slogan in a dispute during the 1840s over the northern border of the Oregon Territory".
Silence. No one buzzed in. Finally, just before the time expired, the young man from San Diego buzzed in and said, almost asked, "Forty-four?" and Alex Trebek said, 'No'. As every red-blooded student of nineteenth-century goings on should know, the correct answer is "Fifty-four Forty" meaning 54 degrees, 40 minutes North latitude. The disputed area (the area between 49 degrees North latitude and 54° 40' North latitude) is now known, friends, as the Canadian province of British Columbia. All's well that ends well, as someone once said (William Shakespeare, 1604).
Okay, that one was fairly esoteric unless you are an American History nut like me. So I relegated it to minor status and continued watching the show. One of the contestants then correctly identified the person who said 'Give me liberty or give me death' with the answer 'Who is Patrick Henry?' and I felt that hope was not lost.
I was wrong.
Act II. A few minutes later, someone chose the last remaining question in the category of American History, and Alex Trebek read the revealed fact: This man hoped that America would always have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Easy peasy. The last line of the most famous speech in America's history, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Silence. After a few seconds, Caleb buzzed in and said, 'Who is Thomas Jefferson?' When Alex said 'No', Joe from San Diego buzzed in and said, 'Who is Benjamin Franklin?'
Alex said 'No' again. Maya just stood there and never buzzed in at all.
Gobsmacked is too mild a term for how I felt. I found it very difficult to believe what I had just witnessed. These were not poor students, drop-out material. These were among the best and brightest our country has to offer. I was in shock. I was disillusioned. I was heartbroken. Not only was I gobsmacked, I felt like a resident of Pompeii on that day in 79AD when Mt. Vesuvius erupted.
Let us move on to Act III.
Act III.
As luck would have it, the category of the Final Jeopardy question was the American Revolutionary Era, and the fact turned out to be this:
The Quakers turned her out in 1773 when she married an upholsterer and took over management of his business.
I solved it by examining the clue. The word Quakers fairly screams Pennsylvania (William Penn and all that). Upholsterers deal with the sewing of heavy cloth. The answer had to be Betsy Ross of Philadelphia (the largest city in Pennsylvania, the place where the Quakers lived), the woman who supposedly made the first American flag for General George Washington. I say supposedly because that seems to be a myth that has been debunked. Besides, what other prominent women of the American Revolutionary Era were there? Martha Washington's husband was not an upholsterer, nor was Abigail Adams's, nor was Dolly Madison's. Paul Revere was a silversmith, so his wife was off the list as well.
The familiar music played as the seconds ticked by, and soon it was time to reveal the answers. Caleb and Joe wrote nothing. When Alex Trebek said that Maya wrote the right answer, Betsy Ross, Maya exclaimed in disbelief, "I did??" and walked away as champion of the day, $25,000 richer.
Earlier in the week, in the same category, other teen contestants had not been able to identify American presidents from pictures of them, including Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Andrew Jackson, and Lyndon Johnson, although someone did correctly identify Franklin D. Roosevelt.
To put this post in perspective for readers in the British Isles and the British Commonwealth of Nations, it's unthinkable, rather like not knowing who Queen Victoria was.
What shall we say to these students?
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in themselves; it is in the American education system. Apparently the exposure of young minds to what went before has been deemed unimportant and unnecessary.
We may all live to regret that decision.
Showing posts with label American history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American history. Show all posts
Monday, November 19, 2018
Friday, October 12, 2012
Today is the real Columbus Day
...as opposed to the phony Columbus Day last Monday that was foisted upon us by our federal government during Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration to ensure that government workers enjoyed a three-day weekend every year during October, one of their many three-day weekends each year, if I may be so bold as to point out the obvious to you.
Accordingly, I have decided to dig into my archives and re-publish an old post:
American History, rhymeswithplague-style
In the European version of things, the New World (that is, actual land in the Western Hemisphere as opposed to more ocean) was discovered by the Vikings or Leif Ericson or somebody more than a thousand years ago. This event was commemorated in the British comedy film, Carry On, Norse.
(Note.The native population of the New World, who pointed out that the European version of things is not always accurate, were considered irrelevant and a bit of a nuisance.)
Later, during the year that Michelangelo sculpted this and this for Lorenzo de’ Medici, Queen Isabella I of Castile sent out one Christoffa Corombo of Genoa, Italy, and his merry men in three ships called the Nina, the Piñata, and the Santa Gertrudis. Christoffa Corombo, whose name morphed into Christoforo Columbo in modern Italian and Christopher Columbus in English, was known as Cristóbal Colón in Spain. This is fortunate, because Cristóbal and Colón are the names of two places on the isthmus of Panama, where Spanish is the predominant language, and Panamanians might otherwise have thought Cristóbal was part of a gypsy fortune-teller’s act and Colón referred to the part of the body between the stomach and the anal sphincter.
It’s not every day a person gets to use the word isthmus, and I am honored to have been able to use it today.
Lorenzo de’ Medici died in Florence, but we aren’t going to go there.
Christoffa Christoforo Cristóbal Christopher Isabella’s new friend set out from Spain on August 3, 1492, and returned a few months later saying he had claimed the entire New World for Spain on October 12, 1492, just because he had landed on a small island in the Bahamas. He returned to Lisbon, Portugal, in March 1493, and made four voyages in all to the New World, causing thousands of schoolchildren over the ensuing centuries to have to recite this little poem from memory:
“In fourteen hundred ninety-three,
Columbus sailed the deep blue sea.
He had done the same thing too
In fourteen hundred ninety-two.
He liked to sail so he sailed some more
In fourteen hundred ninety-four.
Though hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers fourteen ninety-five,
He made more trips ’til Spain said ‘Nix’;
He died in the year fifteen naught-six.”
Or something like that.
Portugal was definitely not a happy camper and wanted Pope Alexander VI to divide the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal. He did so, although by whose authority is a little murky, along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, leading King Ferdinand II of Aragon, Isabella’s husband and also her second cousin, to wonder aloud, “How much is a league, exactly?”
A century later the English navy defeated the Spanish armada, Portugal had faded into obscurity, and it became a moot point how much a league is exactly, because the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Swedish (and, for all I know, the Maltese, the Luxembourgers, the Lithuanians, and the inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides) began to explore the northern part of North America and claim it for themselves. Spain had everything else in the new hemisphere from Mexico south except Brazil, which belonged to Portugal, and that is why to this day Brazilians write San Paulo as São Paulo.
Eventually the French had Quebec, downtown Pittsburgh, the federal prison in Joliet, Illinois, and Louisiana, which at that time included Montana. The English threw the French out in 1763, however, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, which had begun, conveniently, in 1756. The French got to keep Louisiana for another forty years, which is why one of the first sentences everyone learns in French is “Quelle temp est-il?” and another one is “Laissez les bons temps roulez!” Then they sold it to Thomas Jefferson, who considered going to New Orleans during Mardi Gras one of his unalienable rights.
Not to be outdone, the American colonists threw England out in 1776 after Patrick Henry cried, “Give me the Statue of Liberty or give me death” but Lord Cornwallis didn’t surrender until 1781 at Yorktown, not to be confused with York (Pennsylvania), New York (New York), or Yorkshire (home of Leeds, York, Sheffield, Bradford, and Hull, which, despite what you may think, is not the name of a Wall Street law firm).
Shortly after that, everything became George W. Bush’s fault.
[Editor's note. “American History, rhymeswithplague-style” was originally published on August 23, 2010, which was not Columbus Day either. --RWP]
Accordingly, I have decided to dig into my archives and re-publish an old post:
American History, rhymeswithplague-style
In the European version of things, the New World (that is, actual land in the Western Hemisphere as opposed to more ocean) was discovered by the Vikings or Leif Ericson or somebody more than a thousand years ago. This event was commemorated in the British comedy film, Carry On, Norse.
(Note.The native population of the New World, who pointed out that the European version of things is not always accurate, were considered irrelevant and a bit of a nuisance.)
Later, during the year that Michelangelo sculpted this and this for Lorenzo de’ Medici, Queen Isabella I of Castile sent out one Christoffa Corombo of Genoa, Italy, and his merry men in three ships called the Nina, the Piñata, and the Santa Gertrudis. Christoffa Corombo, whose name morphed into Christoforo Columbo in modern Italian and Christopher Columbus in English, was known as Cristóbal Colón in Spain. This is fortunate, because Cristóbal and Colón are the names of two places on the isthmus of Panama, where Spanish is the predominant language, and Panamanians might otherwise have thought Cristóbal was part of a gypsy fortune-teller’s act and Colón referred to the part of the body between the stomach and the anal sphincter.
It’s not every day a person gets to use the word isthmus, and I am honored to have been able to use it today.
Lorenzo de’ Medici died in Florence, but we aren’t going to go there.
“In fourteen hundred ninety-three,
Columbus sailed the deep blue sea.
He had done the same thing too
In fourteen hundred ninety-two.
He liked to sail so he sailed some more
In fourteen hundred ninety-four.
Though hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers fourteen ninety-five,
He made more trips ’til Spain said ‘Nix’;
He died in the year fifteen naught-six.”
Or something like that.
Portugal was definitely not a happy camper and wanted Pope Alexander VI to divide the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal. He did so, although by whose authority is a little murky, along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, leading King Ferdinand II of Aragon, Isabella’s husband and also her second cousin, to wonder aloud, “How much is a league, exactly?”
A century later the English navy defeated the Spanish armada, Portugal had faded into obscurity, and it became a moot point how much a league is exactly, because the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Swedish (and, for all I know, the Maltese, the Luxembourgers, the Lithuanians, and the inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides) began to explore the northern part of North America and claim it for themselves. Spain had everything else in the new hemisphere from Mexico south except Brazil, which belonged to Portugal, and that is why to this day Brazilians write San Paulo as São Paulo.
Eventually the French had Quebec, downtown Pittsburgh, the federal prison in Joliet, Illinois, and Louisiana, which at that time included Montana. The English threw the French out in 1763, however, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, which had begun, conveniently, in 1756. The French got to keep Louisiana for another forty years, which is why one of the first sentences everyone learns in French is “Quelle temp est-il?” and another one is “Laissez les bons temps roulez!” Then they sold it to Thomas Jefferson, who considered going to New Orleans during Mardi Gras one of his unalienable rights.
Not to be outdone, the American colonists threw England out in 1776 after Patrick Henry cried, “Give me the Statue of Liberty or give me death” but Lord Cornwallis didn’t surrender until 1781 at Yorktown, not to be confused with York (Pennsylvania), New York (New York), or Yorkshire (home of Leeds, York, Sheffield, Bradford, and Hull, which, despite what you may think, is not the name of a Wall Street law firm).
Shortly after that, everything became George W. Bush’s fault.
[Editor's note. “American History, rhymeswithplague-style” was originally published on August 23, 2010, which was not Columbus Day either. --RWP]
Monday, August 23, 2010
American History, rhymeswithplague style
In the European version of things, the New World (that is, actual land in the Western Hemisphere as opposed to more ocean) was discovered by the Vikings or Leif Ericson or somebody more than a thousand years ago. This event was commemorated in the British comedy film, Carry On, Norse.
(Note.The native population of the New World, who pointed out that the European version of things is not always accurate, were considered irrelevant and a bit of a nuisance.)
Later, during the year that Michelangelo sculpted this and this for Lorenzo de’ Medici, Queen Isabella I of Castile sent out one Christoffa Corombo of Genoa, Italy, and his merry men in three ships called the Nina, the Piñata, and the Santa Gertrudis. Christoffa Corombo, whose name morphed into Christoforo Columbo in modern Italian and Christopher Columbus in English, was known as Cristóbal Colón in Spain. This is fortunate, because Cristóbal and Colón are the names of two places on the isthmus of Panama, where Spanish is the predominant language, and Panamanians might otherwise have thought Cristóbal was part of a gypsy fortune-teller’s act and Colón referred to the part of the body between the stomach and the anal sphincter.
It’s not every day a person gets to use the word isthmus, and I am honored to have been able to use it today.
Lorenzo de’ Medici died in Florence, but we aren’t going to go there.
Christoffa Christoforo Cristóbal Christopher Isabella’s new friend set out from Spain on August 3, 1492, and returned a few months later saying he had claimed the entire New World for Spain on October 12, 1492, just because he had landed on a small island in the Bahamas. He returned to Lisbon, Portugal, in March 1493, and made four voyages in all to the New World, causing thousands of schoolchildren over the ensuing centuries to have to recite this little poem from memory:
“In fourteen hundred ninety-three,
Columbus sailed the deep blue sea.
He did the very same thing too
In fourteen hundred ninety-two.
He liked to sail so he sailed some more
In fourteen hundred ninety-four.
Though hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers fourteen ninety-five,
He made more trips ’til Spain said ‘Nix’;
He died in the year fifteen naught-six.”
Or something like that.
Portugal was definitely not a happy camper and wanted Pope Alexander VI to divide the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal. He did so, although by whose authority is a little murky, along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, leading King Ferdinand II of Aragon, Isabella’s husband and also her second cousin, to wonder aloud, “How much is a league, exactly?”
A century later the English navy defeated the Spanish armada, Portugal had faded into obscurity, and it became a moot point how much a league is exactly, because the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Swedish (and, for all I know, the Maltese, the Luxembourgers, the Lithuanians, and the inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides) began to explore the northern part of North America and claim it for themselves. Spain had everything else in the new hemisphere from Mexico south except Brazil, which belonged to Portugal, and that is why to this day Brazilians write San Paulo as São Paulo.
Eventually the French had Quebec, downtown Pittsburgh, the federal prison in Joliet, Illinois, and Louisiana, which at that time included Montana. The English threw the French out in 1763, however, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, which had begun, conveniently, in 1756. The French got to keep Louisiana for another forty yłears, which is why one of the first sentences everyone learns in French is “Quelle temp est-il?” and another one is “Laissez les bons temps roulez!” Then they sold it to Thomas Jefferson, who considered going to New Orleans during Mardi Gras one of his unalienable rights.
Not to be outdone, the American colonists threw England out in 1776 after Patrick Henry cried, “Give me the Statue of Liberty or give me death” but Lord Cornwallis didn’t surrender until 1781 at Yorktown, not to be confused with York (Pennsylvania), New York (New York), or Yorkshire (home of Leeds, York, Sheffield, Bradford, and Hull, which, despite what you may think, is not the name of a Wall Street law firm).
Shortly after that, everything became George W. Bush’s fault.
(Note.The native population of the New World, who pointed out that the European version of things is not always accurate, were considered irrelevant and a bit of a nuisance.)
Later, during the year that Michelangelo sculpted this and this for Lorenzo de’ Medici, Queen Isabella I of Castile sent out one Christoffa Corombo of Genoa, Italy, and his merry men in three ships called the Nina, the Piñata, and the Santa Gertrudis. Christoffa Corombo, whose name morphed into Christoforo Columbo in modern Italian and Christopher Columbus in English, was known as Cristóbal Colón in Spain. This is fortunate, because Cristóbal and Colón are the names of two places on the isthmus of Panama, where Spanish is the predominant language, and Panamanians might otherwise have thought Cristóbal was part of a gypsy fortune-teller’s act and Colón referred to the part of the body between the stomach and the anal sphincter.
It’s not every day a person gets to use the word isthmus, and I am honored to have been able to use it today.
Lorenzo de’ Medici died in Florence, but we aren’t going to go there.
“In fourteen hundred ninety-three,
Columbus sailed the deep blue sea.
He did the very same thing too
In fourteen hundred ninety-two.
He liked to sail so he sailed some more
In fourteen hundred ninety-four.
Though hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers fourteen ninety-five,
He made more trips ’til Spain said ‘Nix’;
He died in the year fifteen naught-six.”
Or something like that.
Portugal was definitely not a happy camper and wanted Pope Alexander VI to divide the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal. He did so, although by whose authority is a little murky, along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, leading King Ferdinand II of Aragon, Isabella’s husband and also her second cousin, to wonder aloud, “How much is a league, exactly?”
A century later the English navy defeated the Spanish armada, Portugal had faded into obscurity, and it became a moot point how much a league is exactly, because the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Swedish (and, for all I know, the Maltese, the Luxembourgers, the Lithuanians, and the inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides) began to explore the northern part of North America and claim it for themselves. Spain had everything else in the new hemisphere from Mexico south except Brazil, which belonged to Portugal, and that is why to this day Brazilians write San Paulo as São Paulo.
Eventually the French had Quebec, downtown Pittsburgh, the federal prison in Joliet, Illinois, and Louisiana, which at that time included Montana. The English threw the French out in 1763, however, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, which had begun, conveniently, in 1756. The French got to keep Louisiana for another forty yłears, which is why one of the first sentences everyone learns in French is “Quelle temp est-il?” and another one is “Laissez les bons temps roulez!” Then they sold it to Thomas Jefferson, who considered going to New Orleans during Mardi Gras one of his unalienable rights.
Not to be outdone, the American colonists threw England out in 1776 after Patrick Henry cried, “Give me the Statue of Liberty or give me death” but Lord Cornwallis didn’t surrender until 1781 at Yorktown, not to be confused with York (Pennsylvania), New York (New York), or Yorkshire (home of Leeds, York, Sheffield, Bradford, and Hull, which, despite what you may think, is not the name of a Wall Street law firm).
Shortly after that, everything became George W. Bush’s fault.
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