James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

It would be interesting to be able to sit down with Benedict Arnold when he was making the decision to betray his country to the British and pick his brain, maybe be able to get him to reconsider - he was a serious loss when he became a traitor.

Night and Fog, a short documentary (30 minutes) about the Holocaust made in 1955 by a French director, Alain Resnais. Stark. When it came out Francois Truffaut said he thought it was the best film ever made.

I think more people would begin to take an interest in history if TV and the film industry did a couple of things - first, they could do more of the programs where they put ordinary people from current society in situations where they are living the way people did in past eras, such as the one where a family lived in a Victorian home with no anachronistic conveniences for a long enough time (I think it was a year) to really have to adapt. Second, when they do shows or films based on historical events, they could do more to develop the characters, rather than making them shallow cutouts with one-dimensional personalities, cardboard heroes or villains. A lot of movies are just Saturday morning cartoons with live actors.

Forgot to mention Denzel Washington (Glory, Autobiography of Malcolm X).

He's one of those excellent actors who kind of disappear into their roles, as compared with some like Tom Cruise who keep playing the same character with a different name each time. Among actors who've done a number of historical roles, Anthony Hopkins and Ben Kingsley are good that way too - they seem to channel totally different personalities from one role to the next.

I think the problem is, as some others here have said, the way it's too often taught. Up through junior high school, in my case, it was just names and dates, nothing about why people did what they did, nothing about how they lived. I think it's because that's easy to do, but it's lazy.

Once I got to high school it changed; at my school they integrated history, English, and social studies into modules focused on periods of history. So for the civil war, we studied the issues, read Andersonville and The Red Badge of Courage, and watched a reenactment of a Civil War battle (they invited a Civil War reenactment group to our school.) Beyond the laziness of it, if they make history boring, people won't grow up capable of seeing the parallels and dangers that might present themselves in current events.

Then when I got to college I got a professor who taught history in a similar way; the school used a text that covered each era in a section of three chapters - one on politics and war, one on art and literature, and one on social issues and lifestyles. The theme was that people have always had to deal with the same challenges, and history is about the different ways they've done that.

I watched the way my kids were taught and tried to counteract the whitewash and laziness. I shared some of "Lies My Teacher Taught Me" with my daughter; when she went to school and talked to her teacher about some of the events that were left out of their version (i.e. the swearing-in of President Warren G. Harding into the KKK in a public ceremony in the White House) the teacher flat-out called her a liar.

I'm a psychotherapist because to me there's nothing more interesting than people, and history is about that just as much as psychology is. If I were to go back to college to study more fields, I'd probably go into sociology and/or anthropology for the same reasons.

The spew-data-and-test-memorization approach is part of the subversion of the educational system to train useful workers rather than rounded and competent citizens.

Teddy had his speech folded up in his pocket and that stopped most of the force of the bullet (it was a very long speech!) An innovative form of body armor? I don't know what he said for the parts of the speech that were either destroyed by the bullet or illegible due to the blood. He was a pretty good impromptu speaker anyway; maybe he told jokes.

Correct - Teddy Roosevelt was shot while running for president on the Bull Moose ticket after he was unable to win the Republican nomination. He was angry at his hand-picked successor, William Taft, and wanted to take his place. He ended up splitting the party and the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, won instead of either Taft or Teddy.

Das Boot is great.

Another excellent film portraying Germans from their point of view (though made by an American) is Cross of Iron by Sam Peckinpah. It stars James Coburn in one of his best performances, and follows a bitter and cynical German NCO on the Russian front, trying to keep his squad alive in the face of both Soviet troops and a narcissistic German officer who is ready to sacrifice them to win himself a medal. It has a very similar feel to Das Boot in some ways.

Military History magazine published a special edition titled 100 Greatest War Movies, with reviews of the 100 movies chosen by a panel of historians, from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin made in 1925 to Letters From Iwo Jima of 2006. It's worth picking up.

Re watching European and other non-US/Canada region DVDs, even if your DVD player won't play them, your PC probably will. I have some Australian DVDs I can watch on my PC although my DVD player won't play them.

I really liked Inevitable Revolutions too. I read it back in the 1980s, I think. I'm a retired Marine and was on active duty then, and it cast a different light on some of the Marine Corps history I'd learned.
For another look at the same issues, though very brief and not exclusively focused on Latin America, take a look at War Is a Racket by retired Marine General Smedley Butler - it's short enough that you can download the entire text free from the Web. He was the only Marine officer to ever win the Medal of Honor twice, and after he retired he rethought his career and became a pacifist; he said that everything he'd done in Latin America had been for the benefit of corporations, not the interests of the American people or the people who lived there.

1. Mark Twain, one of the funniest and most thoughtful people that has ever lived.

2. Abraham Lincoln, another of my heroes, and also a great thinker and conversationalist.

3. Barbara Tuchman, maybe my favorite historian, who wrote books about events from the 14th century through the Vietnam war.

4. J.R.R. Tolkien, for his depth of knowledge of humanity and ancient cultures (wouldn't let him sing more than two verses of any of his songs, though.)

5. Hypatia of Alexandria, one of the great thinkers and scientists of the ancient world, murdered by a mob of religious illiterates because she had the nerve to point out that reality sometimes didn't match dogma and because the bishop there couldn't stand educated women.

6. Carl Sagan, another of my heroes, because he was a fascinating and inspirational man who made science accessible and important to a lot of people who might otherwise have missed out.

I'd like to see the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk;
hear Lincoln give the Gettysburg Address, and see him walking around Washington DC all those nights when he couldn't sleep;
listen to Einstein play his violin;
see (from a safe place, like maybe the moon) the impact of the Chicxulub meteorite 65 million years ago; and
see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon for the first time.
Lots more, but those are the ones that come to mind first.

As some others have mentioned, Ken Burns does such good work - I loved the Civil War series when it came out, and my wife recently got me The War and we just finished watching that. At times very painful; some of the vets they interviewed were among the most reflective, sensitive, introspective people I've ever heard talk about warfare.

I liked Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and Letters From Iwo Jima, because they minimized the glossing-over and showed the price people pay better than most films do.

I loved Burns' video biography of Mark Twain, too.

Can't bring myself to watch the recent miniseries on John Adams, because he turned into such a little tin wanna-be dictator when he became president - the man who gave us the Alien and Sedition Acts and started the tradition of administrations trying to silence or lock up their critics.

I really liked that mini-series on the Great Depression several years ago - don't remember who made it, but Mario Cuomo was the narrator, and it was excellent.