I’m not sure about Nazi scientists but I grew up calling a woman Aunt who was really my Mom’s BFF growing up (don’t we all have an Aunt like that?). She married a man who came to the US as a teenager, just after WWII, from Germany. The US wanted his Dad, who was some kind of aircraft engineer for our defense program. The boy had been coerced into being in the Hitler youth, and then was drafted into the Army near the end of the war when he was 14 (when the Germans had only old men and young boys left). He deserted and lived in the woods for a month eating bugs and all. Was caught and spent the last year of the war in a prison camp in France. Was very glad to come to the US and never wanted to go back to Europe at all.
P.S. He got a PhD here and was a college professor for decades.
Yep, we grabbed the best scientists and technology to keep the Soviets from getting them. Same reason we hired the rocket scientists and rocket “companies” in the former Soviet Union after it broke up (to keep them from freelancing for North Korea, Iran, Iraq, etc). That’s why our astronauts fly to the ISS on Russian rockets today, why our Atlas V rocket uses Russian RD-180 engines, etc.
History is definitely not a collection of facts; it is the interpretation of facts. It is false/fake history if the facts are changed or purposely hidden from view, which then leads to misinterpretations and should be disregarded at that point.
FWIW article released just today about why the history I just discussed isn’t dead or irrelevant.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-eugenics-california-idUSKBN13V276
Actually, it is not that difficult to arrive at what is factual in a given situation. There is no final arbiter, as in a person or an entity. However, there are philosophical arbiters called consistency and supporting evidence.
One thing about written language and now moreso with live, candid video is facts are events, actions and statements which have been recorded (written or otherwise) and are consistent across more than one source and supported by other pieces of information. Pretty much similar to how detectives stitch a case together.
Someone should only publish facts when there is a credible source that is also backed up, i.e., consistent, with another independent source (or supporting evidence) that does not know or was not in contact with each other at the time of recording the information. This is why textbooks should be exhaustively sourced, and those sources should be able to be checked for accuracy and consistency.
For example, many facts about US History is garners from the letters that the colonists wrote back to their families in England. Facts could easily be ascertained because different families in different colonies who did not know each other reported the same things.
Other examples are The Federalist Papers and the personal letters of the Founders also provide excellent facts. There are multitudes of cases where members of the Constitutional Convention would write about an issue about which they disagreed, but the starting point of the disagreement were the same, consistent facts - written independently by different people who were actually arguing.
Overall though, I do find your questions rather interesting in that if you do not think there something such as a set of agreed to historical facts or facts that pertain to a current situation, then you must read newspapers and watch TV news and literally believe nothing given that you question if there is a way ascertain what is fact.
However, you inadvertently stumble upon why newspapers and journalists are just so unreliable at what they do. Often, too many often only have one source that they depend on; then, they often refuse to name the source; and finally, they ask you to trust them when there is no way to check/confirm the accuracy of their source or the facts garnered from that source. This is why they (newspapers, in general, and journalists) are so often wrong for as long as several days and sometimes weeks following a major event.
Romani, as a Californian, I had no idea, and I should have. TFS. Good example of why we need to know about and understand the corners of our history which aren’t as bright and shiny and “good” as our whitewashed history would have us believe.
Just as with anything else, there are bad historians, and there a good historians. There is no such thing as “what historians say.” Anyone who believes a statement, such as “what historians say,” is ripe to be led like sheep.
Case in point - all the official historians in Russia changed the history books after the early 20th century revolution to wipe out its known past and instill in children and the people what it wanted them to believe. So, exactly how accurate is what those historians say? How about not very accurate or factual.
The above is but one stark example that it is a bit naive to use the statement “what historians say.” The relevant questions are: "Which historians? and “Are they credible historians?”
^But the answer to “Are they credible historians?” should not be “Yes, they are, because their choice and presentation of facts is consistent with my political prejudices”. It is a difficult thing in life, but useful, to learn that you are wrong, a lot.
Do you believe native american schools teach their students a completely unbiased version of history? Or do you think there is some inherent saltiness and half-truths in it regarding white Americans?
When I was in grade school, I certainly didn’t feel I was being taught a pro-white version of history. I was taught white people were horrible in almost every way imaginable – they invaded Indian occupied land in NA, kept slaves, were involved in colonialism, Viking barbarism, etc, etc, etc. In fact, I honestly can’t remember one instance where white people were actually portrayed positively.
To be fair, I grew up in the 80s/90s, so perhaps the curriculum had evolved somewhat from when (I presume) most people here attended school.
I thought this was understood when I stated in Post #128 that sources should be checked against true original sources, such as letters, signed documents, books/articles by original authors, recordings, videos etc.
Regardless of your political leanings and whether you agree with the person ideologically or not, it is imperative to check the sources against each other and to check the validity of the cited sources,
Additionally, sources should not just be trusted based on their degrees and position on a prestigious faculty either.
My DS had a very interesting run-in with a top econ professor at his school. Note - this is a guy who advised the outgoing president a couple years back. In my DS’s class, there was a chapter in his textbook book explaining something that Adam Smith said stated from the Wealth of Nations, written in 1776.
The professor was explaining the concept, and my DS said this is not what he understood Adam Smith to mean and Smith did not say or imply as much. DS questioned this and the professor responded that this what he also interpreted it and so did the author, another top econ professor at another top school. He then asked my DS who would he rather learn from himself or his professors.
That evening, DS got his copy of Wealth of Nations and found the relevant passage and section being discussed in class. Turns out it was a rather succinct paragraph with a clear example of what was being discussed.
My DS in the following class again raised the question. Book in hand, he then read the paragraph EXACTLY as Adam Smith wrote it and asked the professor how he arrived at the interpretation he got, given that so much MORE was added in the interpretation, essentially changing what Adam Smith actually said.
This did not go over well that day, because even the students figured out the econ professor was “filling in” information that was clearly not part Adam Smith’s calculus and that the interpretation used in class would not have been approved by Adam Smith himself.
Hence, even extremely knowledgeable professors need to be double-checked historically
against original sources.
(Emphases mine)
Even the ones who opposed slavery or opposed abusing Native Americans, etc.?
On the other hand, an honest reading of history will make a lot of people look worse than they are idealized (or excused) as. Of course, if you take a racial view of people representing their race (even though people usually only represent themselves, even when they claim to do something relating to their race), all racial groups will look bad based on looking at their worst actors. White people just happen to be most numerous among influential people in US history.
Awc: you write a post about your son’s interaction with a prof, demonstrated to be incorrect in his interpretation. If you would give us the quote from Smith, together with pertinent quotes from this professor and the other top econ prof, we could judge the interpretation for ourselves. Of. course we will need both prof’s views from their writings. Otherwise it is third hand reporting.
In the meantime, I have been reading a whole lot of articles with different views on teaching Huck Finn in hs. and I am wondering if Waiting2exhale would be willing to give her opinion.
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“Being around people who all think and believe the same is the reason the leading scientists of the world in the 14th century still believed the Earth was flat. They had created their own collective safe space for their beliefs and ignored the other scientists who were saying differently, instead of debating them.” That actually isn’t true history, by the 14th century ancient works from the Greeks had come back into western Europe via the Byzantine Empire, and many learned people understood the earth was a sphere (Erostothenes measured the circumfrence of the Earth around 400+BCE),it was mostly the ‘common people’ who claimed the earth was flat. It is the same thing with the earth centered solar system, by the time of Galileo many learned people, including people in the church, knew Copernicus and Galileo was right, I suspect the church leaders who prosecuted Galileo realized he was right but prosecuted him for openly challenging what they claimed was true (heck, the church didn’t drop the earth centered solar system as official pronouncement until the 1920’s).
History is not an exact science, and any historian quite frankly who claims they don’t have inherent biases or that what they write doesn’t reflect their world view are either blind or lying. Some historical facts are of course verifiable, we know Gettysburg was fought over the July 4th time period, we know when the Draft riots happened, we know when the southern states started seceding…on the other hand, Historians argue over what ‘really’ happened at Ft. Sumter, was it a southern attack, or did the north ‘goad’ the south into attacking? We argue over what the constitution is, some historians will tell you those who wrote it saw it as this piece of law cast in stone, based on the letters those who were involved wrote, others will argue with the letters of others, and by the very nature of the constitution, that it was never seen as a perfect document, one that they fully knew would be a living document shrug.
I read this long treatise by a conservative historian who made this whole big argument that the economy of the 1930’s was fixing itself, he cited numbers and figures from the time that claimed that the work of the New Deal was in effect illusory (and also, not surprisingly, argued Keynes economic theories failed)…other historians pointed out the numbers he used were out of context, that he looked at aspects of the micro economy and argued the macro was similarly “working itself out”, and then cited numbers to show it wasn’t. They also pointed out said professor left out that when FDR, on the advice of bankers, tried to balance the federal budget in 1936-1937, the economy went into a recession …and of course, they point out the historian in question said “WWII ended the depression”, and pointed out that WWII was the largest single government expenditure in US history, it was in many ways the ultimate in Keynesian spending…
I read something recently that said the Electoral college was primarily designed to give small states more power in voting for president, and that view can be challenged, in that electors were put in place to counter a demagogue getting elected, it is only in more recent history that states required electors to vote for who they were pledged to, and likewise those who argue the constitution was about ‘will of the people’ ignore the many anti democratic things in it, but a case can be made, it is all about how you ‘shape’ the facts, and also, as @awcntdb points out, whether primary sources are available.Classic example? For a long time, historical teaching was that the pyramids were built by slave labor (some tried to tie it to the Jews supposed enslavement in Egypt), and people didn’t challenge it much…a while ago, they came across egyptian records of the building of a pyramid, and it pretty much showed it was not slave labor, the kind of supplies they were buying (the kind of food, for example,designed to entice the laborers to stay on the job) and actual pay records show that was a fallacy (and the biblical claim of mass enslavement of the Jews in Egypt is likewise historically questionable, no such records have ever been found from the time involved, and the Egyptians kept great records)…without primary sources, a lot of it comes down to guesswork, from second hand observations, from oral tales, from even physical evidence, they try and figure out ‘the truth’.
Sometimes it is pretty obvious, a book on holocaust denial can’t pass historical muster, in large part because the Germans kept detailed records of what they did, including films, and besides survivors we also have the accounts of those who liberated the camps. Holocaust denier books rely on claiming there was this massive conspiracy to blame the Nazis when in fact those who died , died of ‘disease’ or "american bombing’, which is ludicrous, on top of everything else,if such disease really happened that killed millions a lot of common people outside the camps would have died, and would have born witness to it.
I was taught that the electoral college was created because people would vote for people they knew personally who would then have the education to make an appropriate choice for them.
One of my son’s was asked to read foreign websites about the history of Pearl Harbor before reading their textbook. The textbook completely glossed over the fact that we had been blockading Japan’s ports. There were reasons that the Japanese felt they had to strike at us.
@mathmom wait you mean it wasn’t just because they were homicidal and suicidal maniacs who attacked us for no reason? 
Never heard that one before. And if there were an actual blockade, the Pearl Harbor strike force would not have gotten out of Japan without being detected.
However, it is well documented that the US had embargoed sales of oil to Japan (back then, the US was an oil exporter). Oil was something Japan did not have, so it either needed to buy it from someone or conquer places with oil. Japan wanted to do the latter by conquering Dutch and British colonies (now Indonesia and Malaysia), but did not like the idea of the Philippines (then a US territory) being controlled by an unfriendly power between Japan and the oil fields. So they decided that they “had to” get the first strike against the US since they believed that war with the US was inevitable.
@mathmom:
The US didn’t blockade Japanese ports, they cut off oil supplies to Japan when Japan refused to stop the invasion of China and the brutal actions they were known for their, the Japanese deny they ever happened, but their troops were as brutal if not more so then the SS…and I get a little tired of this idea of the bad old US doing that to Japan and glossing over that the Japanese empire was one of the most brutal regimes the world has ever seen…the US cut off their oil in the hope they could get Japan to retreat from China, keep in mind Japan invaded China many years before Pearl Harbor, they were the guilty party.
The reason that Japan attacked pearl Harbor (they hit the Phillippines several weeks later) was they hoped to strike a crippling blow to the US fleet and also in the hope that it would give the US pause about their actions, what they really hoped was when they gave the US the ultimatum, that was a de facto declaration of war (that ended up being delivered hours after Pearl Harbor was hit, it was supposed to be delivered a half hour before),that the US would back down, and if not, they would destroy the fleet and cripple the ability of the US to fight in the Pacific until they rebuilt . The idea that Hirohito was this nice guy who wrote poetry and was a captive of the military is also a crock, in the ensuing 70+ years much has come out that shows that that view of him was pretty much propoganda, to justify keeping him as Emperor, rather than as a case could have been made, to try him as a war criminal like the other leaders were (or should have been, few were).
Turned out Yammamoto was right, the Japanese government saw the US as this weak country that would never fight (given the strength of the America First movement and Herr Lindberg, not surprising), he said he feared all they had done was awaken a sleeping giant, and he was right. Within 6 months of Pearl Harbor the ships that could be salvaged had been repaired, new ships were starting to come online, and Midway pretty much destroyed the Japanese carrier fleet.
Several hours later, not several weeks later.
Some of the ships that were salvaged were not fully repaired until 1944.
Here is an article about ship and aircraft production by the US and Japan during the war: http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm . It also notes that, even if Japan had won a complete victory at Midway, Japan would still have been eventually outnumbered by US ship and aircraft construction.