Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 109

DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT® ELECTING THE U.S. PRESIDENT? A Classroom Skype Invitation

BEAM ME IN TO DISCUSS THE AMERICAN ELECTION PROCESS

The Presidential Election of 2012 is about a year away. Americans will go to the polls on Tuesday November 6, 2012.

While the campaigning is already well underway among the Republican ranks, the real business of choosing a candidate in 2012 to face President Obama, the presumptive Democratic candidate, will soon be in full swing. The marathon of caucuses, primaries, conventions and delegate counts will begin in earnest in early 2012 and preoccupy the nation for most of the year.

That makes this a good time to get a handle on America's crazy quilt of election history and rules.

In a session lasting approximately 30 minutes, I would like to use Skype to "Beam in" to your classrooms this Fall to engage your students on the basics of the Presidency and the American election process. I will speak briefly, then take questions from students in a wide-ranging conversation about a system that doesn't always seem to make sense. Here are some of the topics I have in mind–

-Why a President? When they were inventing the American system of government back in 1787, how did those men decide what the office of the President should be?

-Who elected George Washington and what's different today?  How has the process of electing the President changed since George Washington won the office first back in 1789?

-Is the Electoral College a Party School? The Constitution doesn't specifically mention the "Electoral College." What is it? Do I need good SAT scores to get in? Most important, why do we still have it?

-Do we need a President? Are the problems of the country too big for one Chief Executive to handle? Maybe we should split the job up. Benjamin Franklin thought we should have three men to do the job. Was he right?

If you would like to organize a free Skype session, please go to the website Contact page and send me an email request. Please be sure to include the name and location of your school, how many students are in your class, and the grade level. The schedule and dates of the sessions will be set at a mutually convenient time. (Please note: A limited number of Skype visits will be scheduled based on my availability.)

I would also encourage you to consider turning this into a "FAMILY EVENT" by inviting parents and other family members into the classroom to make this an exciting discussion about the role of voting and citizenship in our democracy.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Very best,

Kenneth C. Davis

Don't Know Much About@ History: Anniversary Edition

 

Labor Pains: A Don't Know Much About Minute

The end of summer, a three-day weekend, burgers on the grill, and a back-to-school shopping spree, right? And the most important question, "Can I still wear white?"

But very few people associate Labor Day with a turbulent time in American History. That's what Labor Day is really about. The holiday was born during the violent union-busting days of the late 19th century, when sweat shop conditions killed children, when there was no minimum wage and when going on vacation meant you were out of work.

If you like holidays, benefits and a five-day, 40-hour work week, you need to know about Labor Day.

When Labor Day was signed into law by Grover Cleveland in 1894, it was a bone tossed to the labor movement. And it was deliberately placed in September to ensure that it would not recall the memory of the deadly rioting at Chicago's Haymarket Square in May 1886. Europe's workers, and later the Communist Party, adopted May Day as a worker's holiday to commemorate the deadly Haymarket Sqaure Riot which came about during a strike against thee McCormack Reaper Company.

Although Labor Day did become federal law in 1894, most of labor's successes –the minimum wage, overtime, the end of child labor – did not come about until the Depression-era reforms of the New Deal.

Labor Day was created to celebrate the "strength and spirit of the American worker." But this holiday should remind us that — like so many things we take for granted — those victories for working people came at great cost, in blood, sweat and tears.

For more on the history of Haymarket Square, here is a link to the Chicago Historical Society's web project.

"American Experience," the PBS documentary series, produced a Homestead Strike piece as part of its film about Andrew Carnegie.

You can read more about the history of the trade union movement in Don't Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition.

Don't Know Much About@ History: Anniversary Edition

 

Labor Pains: A Don't Know Much About® Minute

The end of summer, a three-day weekend, burgers on the grill, and a back-to-school shopping spree, right? And the most important question, "Can I still wear white?"

But very few people associate Labor Day with a turbulent time in American History. That's what Labor Day is really about. The holiday was born during the violent union-busting days of the late 19th century, when sweat shop conditions killed children, when there was no minimum wage and when going on vacation meant you were out of work.

If you like holidays, benefits and a five-day, 40-hour work week, you need to know about Labor Day.

When Labor Day was signed into law by Grover Cleveland in 1894, it was a bone tossed to the labor movement. And it was deliberately placed in September to ensure that it would not recall the memory of the deadly rioting at Chicago's Haymarket Square in May 1886. Europe's workers, and later the Communist Party, adopted May Day as a worker's holiday to commemorate the deadly Haymarket Sqaure Riot which came about during a strike against thee McCormack Reaper Company.

Although Labor Day did become federal law in 1894, most of labor's successes –the minimum wage, overtime, the end of child labor – did not come about until the Depression-era reforms of the New Deal.

Labor Day was created to celebrate the "strength and spirit of the American worker." But this holiday should remind us that — like so many things we take for granted — those victories for working people came at great cost, in blood, sweat and tears.

For more on the history of Haymarket Square, here is a link to the Chicago Historical Society's web project.

"American Experience," the PBS documentary series, produced a Homestead Strike piece as part of its film about Andrew Carnegie.

You can read more about the history of the trade union movement in Don't Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition.

Don't Know Much About@ History: Anniversary Edition

 

Don't Know Much About Salman Rushdie

On today's date, August 15, in 1947, at midnight, India and Pakistan were born. The partition of mostly Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan created decades of war and mistrust.

But that moment also opens Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie's fabulous 1981 novel and one of the great books of our times –a tale of a boy born at the moment of partition, mixing a Dickensian life with magical realism, set against the story of modern India.

When I was starting out as a freelancer 30 years ago, I  was a book reviewer for the trade journal Publishers Weekly. Most of the reviews ran about seven sentences long and bits of them sometimes turned up as blurbs in book ads. But then I reviewed Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. My unsigned review was printed in full on the back jacket of the first American edition. I always felt a secret glory in that anonymous connection to one of the great books of the 20th century.

In naming the novel one of the "Best 100 Books,' Time describes Rushdie's masterpiece:

Two [children} are switched at birth, the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman and the offspring of wealthy Muslims. Rushdie follows them through 30 years of partition, violence and Indira Gandhi's iron-fisted rule

Of course, Salman Rushdie went on to make international headlines for another of his books.

Lots of books are considered controversial, but few lead to death threats. When Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses hit bookstores in 1989, the author was forced to go into hiding—for nine years. Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, deemed the book an insult to Islam and declared a fatwa, or religious edict, calling Muslims to execute Rushdie (b. 1947). Only in 1998 did the Iranian Foreign Minister finally drop the official death threat against Rushdie.

What else do you know about this modern master of magical realism? Here are a couple of questions drawn from Don't Know Much About Literature

1. What happens on midnight of August 15 1947 in Midnight's Children?

2. While he was in hiding, what children's book did Rushdie write for his son Zafar?

3. What honor did Rushdie achieve in 2008?

Here is the Time magazine list of Best 100 Novels

Note: This is a revised version of a post originally written published on August 15, 2009.

 

Answers

1. 1,001 children are born with supernatural powers.

2. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).

3. In 2008, Midnight's Children was selected as winner of the "Best of the Booker" awards. Readers around the world voted the 1981 novel as the best of the prestigious prize winners.

 

Don't Know Much About® Salman Rushdie

On today's date, August 15, in 1947, at midnight, India and Pakistan were born. The partition of mostly Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan created decades of war and mistrust.

But that moment also opens Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie's fabulous 1981 novel and one of the great books of our times –a tale of a boy born at the moment of partition, mixing a Dickensian life with magical realism, set against the story of modern India.

When I was starting out as a freelancer 30 years ago, I  was a book reviewer for the trade journal Publishers Weekly. Most of the reviews ran about seven sentences long and bits of them sometimes turned up as blurbs in book ads. But then I reviewed Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. My unsigned review was printed in full on the back jacket of the first American edition. I always felt a secret glory in that anonymous connection to one of the great books of the 20th century.

In naming the novel one of the "Best 100 Books,' Time describes Rushdie's masterpiece:

Two [children} are switched at birth, the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman and the offspring of wealthy Muslims. Rushdie follows them through 30 years of partition, violence and Indira Gandhi's iron-fisted rule

Of course, Salman Rushdie went on to make international headlines for another of his books.

Lots of books are considered controversial, but few lead to death threats. When Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses hit bookstores in 1989, the author was forced to go into hiding—for nine years. Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, deemed the book an insult to Islam and declared a fatwa, or religious edict, calling Muslims to execute Rushdie (b. 1947). Only in 1998 did the Iranian Foreign Minister finally drop the official death threat against Rushdie.

What else do you know about this modern master of magical realism? Here are a couple of questions drawn from Don't Know Much About Literature

1. What happens on midnight of August 15 1947 in Midnight's Children?

2. While he was in hiding, what children's book did Rushdie write for his son Zafar?

3. What honor did Rushdie achieve in 2008?

Here is the Time magazine list of Best 100 Novels

Note: This is a revised version of a post originally written published on August 15, 2009.

 

Answers

1. 1,001 children are born with supernatural powers.

2. Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).

3. In 2008, Midnight's Children was selected as winner of the "Best of the Booker" awards. Readers around the world voted the 1981 novel as the best of the prestigious prize winners.

 

Don't Know Much About the "Negro Riots" in Watts

The recent urban riots in London that spread to other parts of England beg an obvious question: Can it happen in America?

Of course, it has already happened in America, more than once. Most famously, perhaps, it happened nearly half a century ago on a hot summer night in the Los Angeles neighborhood known as Watts.

While the times and many circumstances are very different between England now and America then, the American experience with urban rioting –now seemingly forgotten– is worth remembering because many of the root causes seem to be the same.

It started with a "DWB"– "driving while black." On August 11, 1965, an all-too-frequent stop of a young black man exploded into one of the worst urban riots in American history.

Where: Watts was a rundown district of shabby houses built near the highway approaching Los Angeles International Airport. Ninety-eight percent black, Watts was stewing in a California heat wave. In the stewpot were all the ingredients of black anger. Poverty. Overcrowding. High unemployment. Crime everywhere. Drugs widely available. The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupation army.

When: On August 11, a policeman pulled over a young black man to check him for drunken driving. When the young man was arrested, a crowd gathered. Within a few hours the crowd had grown to a mob, and the frustration was no longer simmering in the August heat. It exploded.

What By nightfall of the next day, small, roving bands of young people throwing rocks and bottles had grown to a mob of thousands. Rocks and bottles were replaced by Molotov cocktails as the riot erupted into a full-blown street rebellion with widespread looting. Among the most popular looted items were weapons, and when police and firefighters responded to the violence and fires, they were met with a hail of bullets and gasoline bombs. When Dick Gregory, the well-known African American comedian and civil rights activist, tried to calm the crowds, he was shot in the leg.

The battle raged on for days as thousands of national guardsmen poured in to restore order. There was open fighting in the streets as guardsmen set up machine-gun emplacements. By the sixth day of rioting, Watts was rubble and ashes. The toll from six days of mayhem was thirty-four killed, including rioters and guardsmen; more than 1,000 injured; 4,000 arrested; and total property damage of more than $35 million.

Why: The aftermath of Watts was more than just a body count and insurance estimates. Watts signaled a sea change in the civil-rights movement. When Martin Luther King toured the neighborhood, he was heckled. Saddened by the death and destruction, he admonished a local man, who responded,

"We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us."

Here is the original New York Times report on the "Negro Riots"

The Watts summer of 1965 was the first in a string of long, hot summers that left the cities of the North and Midwest smoldering. The worst came in 1967, particularly when Newark and Detroit were engulfed in rioting. In the wake of these rebellions, presidential commissions were appointed, studies made, and findings released. They all agreed that the problem was economic at its roots. As Martin Luther King had put it, "I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I've got to do something to help them get the money to buy them."

One of these studies, conducted by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was known as the Kerner Commission. In 1968, it warned that America was

"moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."

Here is a link to excerpts from the Kerner Commission Report:

How much has really changed?

On the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report in 2008, Bill Moyers of PBS produced a show on the Commission and what has –or hasn't — changed in four decades.

You can read more about Watts and the civil rights era in Don't Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition.

Don't Know Much About@ the "Negro Riots" in Watts

The recent urban riots in London that spread to other parts of England beg an obvious question: Can it happen in America?

Of course, it has already happened in America, more than once. Most famously, perhaps, it happened nearly half a century ago on a hot summer night in the Los Angeles neighborhood known as Watts.

While the times and many circumstances are very different between England now and America then, the American experience with urban rioting –now seemingly forgotten– is worth remembering because many of the root causes seem to be the same.

It started with a "DWB"– "driving while black." On August 11, 1965, an all-too-frequent stop of a young black man exploded into one of the worst urban riots in American history.

Where: Watts was a rundown district of shabby houses built near the highway approaching Los Angeles International Airport. Ninety-eight percent black, Watts was stewing in a California heat wave. In the stewpot were all the ingredients of black anger. Poverty. Overcrowding. High unemployment. Crime everywhere. Drugs widely available. The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupation army.

When: On August 11, a policeman pulled over a young black man to check him for drunken driving. When the young man was arrested, a crowd gathered. Within a few hours the crowd had grown to a mob, and the frustration was no longer simmering in the August heat. It exploded.

What By nightfall of the next day, small, roving bands of young people throwing rocks and bottles had grown to a mob of thousands. Rocks and bottles were replaced by Molotov cocktails as the riot erupted into a full-blown street rebellion with widespread looting. Among the most popular looted items were weapons, and when police and firefighters responded to the violence and fires, they were met with a hail of bullets and gasoline bombs. When Dick Gregory, the well-known African American comedian and civil rights activist, tried to calm the crowds, he was shot in the leg.

The battle raged on for days as thousands of national guardsmen poured in to restore order. There was open fighting in the streets as guardsmen set up machine-gun emplacements. By the sixth day of rioting, Watts was rubble and ashes. The toll from six days of mayhem was thirty-four killed, including rioters and guardsmen; more than 1,000 injured; 4,000 arrested; and total property damage of more than $35 million.

Why: The aftermath of Watts was more than just a body count and insurance estimates. Watts signaled a sea change in the civil-rights movement. When Martin Luther King toured the neighborhood, he was heckled. Saddened by the death and destruction, he admonished a local man, who responded,

"We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us."

Here is the original New York Times report on the "Negro Riots"

The Watts summer of 1965 was the first in a string of long, hot summers that left the cities of the North and Midwest smoldering. The worst came in 1967, particularly when Newark and Detroit were engulfed in rioting. In the wake of these rebellions, presidential commissions were appointed, studies made, and findings released. They all agreed that the problem was economic at its roots. As Martin Luther King had put it, "I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I've got to do something to help them get the money to buy them."

One of these studies, conducted by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was known as the Kerner Commission. In 1968, it warned that America was

"moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."

Here is a link to excerpts from the Kerner Commission Report:

How much has really changed?

On the 40th anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report in 2008, Bill Moyers of PBS produced a show on the Commission and what has –or hasn't — changed in four decades.

You can read more about Watts and the civil rights era in Don't Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition.

Don't Know Much About Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

On August 9, 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.

Born in Concord, Mass. on July 12, 1817, he was the son of a pencil-maker. Thoreau attended Harvard and later was befriended by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who eventually gave him a job as a gardener and tutor, while encouraging Thoreau's writing.  Thoreau published several books and essays, including his classic "Civil Disobedience" in opposition to the War against Mexico.

Then, in July 1845, he moved to the cabin at Walden Pond, where he lived for the next two years, two months and two days.

The Walden site of Thoreau's cabin.

Compressing those two years into a single year, he wrote Walden, his now-revered account.

It is not an "easy" book. It is not a simplistic "back to Nature" book. Even though Thoreau's work has often been reduced to bumper sticker aphorisms –"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."–the book is far more complex. Part memoir, part practical guide, it is really more about a sense of self-discovery –a spiritual search. Writing in a time of growing industrialism and mechanism, he did urge, "Simplify, simplify."

In an Introduction to a 2004 edition of Walden, the late novelist John Updike wrote:

A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible. Of the American classics densely arisen in the middle of the 19th century – Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), to which we might add Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1854) as a nation-stirring bestseller and Emerson's essays as an indispensable preparation of the ground – Walden has contributed most to America's present sense of itself.

An ardent abolitionist, Thoreau gave a speech, "A Plea for Captain Brown" (later published as an essay), in honor of John Brown, whose 1859  raid on a federal arsenal was intended to provoke a massive slave insurrection and deepened the nation's divisions. Thoreau was uncompromising in his defense of Brown, despite his own image as the spokesman for nonviolent civil disobedience.

He contracted tuberculosis and suffered from it sporadically. Thoreau died in May 1862 at age 44.

An excellent collection of resources on Walden, Thoreau and his other writings can be found at the Thoreau Society website.

Thoreau and his era of the mid-19th century leading up to the Civil War are discussed in Don't Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition.

Don't Know Much About® Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

On August 9, 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.

Born in Concord, Mass. on July 12, 1817, he was the son of a pencil-maker. Thoreau attended Harvard and later was befriended by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who eventually gave him a job as a gardener and tutor, while encouraging Thoreau's writing.  Thoreau published several books and essays, including his classic "Civil Disobedience" in opposition to the War against Mexico.

Then, in July 1845, he moved to the cabin at Walden Pond, where he lived for the next two years, two months and two days.

The Walden site of Thoreau's cabin.

Compressing those two years into a single year, he wrote Walden, his now-revered account.

It is not an "easy" book. It is not a simplistic "back to Nature" book. Even though Thoreau's work has often been reduced to bumper sticker aphorisms –"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."–the book is far more complex. Part memoir, part practical guide, it is really more about a sense of self-discovery –a spiritual search. Writing in a time of growing industrialism and mechanism, he did urge, "Simplify, simplify."

In an Introduction to a 2004 edition of Walden, the late novelist John Updike wrote:

A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible. Of the American classics densely arisen in the middle of the 19th century – Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (1850), Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), to which we might add Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1854) as a nation-stirring bestseller and Emerson's essays as an indispensable preparation of the ground – Walden has contributed most to America's present sense of itself.

An ardent abolitionist, Thoreau gave a speech, "A Plea for Captain Brown" (later published as an essay), in honor of John Brown, whose 1859  raid on a federal arsenal was intended to provoke a massive slave insurrection and deepened the nation's divisions. Thoreau was uncompromising in his defense of Brown, despite his own image as the spokesman for nonviolent civil disobedience.

He contracted tuberculosis and suffered from it sporadically. Thoreau died in May 1862 at age 44.

An excellent collection of resources on Walden, Thoreau and his other writings can be found at the Thoreau Society website.

Thoreau and his era of the mid-19th century leading up to the Civil War are discussed in Don't Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition.

"Is there hope for America in era of broken trust?"

"Is there hope for American in an era of Broken Trust?" New CNN.com post

 

But in these times of great recession, bailouts, high unemployment and nonstop partisan infighting, the fundamental sense of trust the nation once possessed seems irreparably damaged. The deep divisions in Washington, evident most recently in the wrangling over the debt ceiling, drove this home. Opinion polls in the wake of the debate confirmed the worst news for the Beltway Crowd: Confidence in Congress has plunged to an all-time low.

Read the complete post at CNN.com

Don't Know Much About@ History: Anniversary Edition