We can expect that Texas high schools won't be taking the Postmamboist approach to history anytime soon.
Among the many counter-historical factual implementations of The Texas Board of Education as to what can and cannot be in their state's textbooks, they also forbade inclusion of Spanish-speaking people and the histories of them -- and presumably how they came to be a part of the U.S. population in the first place -- from history textbooks. One of the minority opposing members of the board had to leave the process over this, she was so disturbed because, to paraphrase her, "They want the history of the U.S. to be all white people, all English speakin, only."
The Texas Board of Education also hates Jefferson because he was anti-capitalist. It's cognitive dissonance to the max, sharing a Jefferson hate with people I despise. My reasons for the hatred are very different -- for the reasons they probably approve of Jefferson -- it's because he did approve of inter and intra state slave trade, among other reasons.
This reminds all over again why Texas was never an option as a place to base myself when younger.
In the meantime, at UCLA, Himself the Vaquero's there because of the English - Comp Lit Graduate Dept., which is sponsoring this symposium, Ports of Call -- Cultures of Exchange.
He's giving a keynote address at noon today, California time, on the history of Cadiz and the New World ports of Havana and New Orleans -- the Spanish connection, and all that means, including the African.
The Dept. Chair is of Tunisian background, and the whole grad dept. slants strongly to Middle eastern literature. But if you're kid growing up in Texas you won't even know this nation has loads of voters whose relatives came from these other countries. They may well not know these other countries even exist -- the Middle East is Israel, Palestine and 'Arabs.' Soon even Iraq and Afghanistan will fall off the primary media radar too, as the situations there drag ever on.
It sux evermore to be U.S., doesn't it?
At least tomorrow an amiga and I will go to Church uptown and hear some great music.
In the meantime it storms wind and rain.
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Worse for Jefferson, he was anti-religion!
I have to consider TJ in context. He was stalwart in defending freedom of religion and public education. He was a great believer in libraries, and the one he designed for the Univ of VA is considered an architectural masterpiece today.
It's also the case that northern popular opposition to slavery didn't really take hold until around 1840, and that even then it was controversial. Lincoln didn't dare politically to issue the Emancipation Proclamation until 1862, and even that was limited to states in rebellion. During reconstruction, northern support for equal rights for blacks was tepid at best, and in fact there was no serious non-southern support for civil rights until the Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement.
In this light, there's something to be said for a Virginia planter whose understanding of the principles of the Enlightenment at least left him conflicted about his inheritance.
In my mind the genuinely inexcusable act of Jefferson's career was not recognizing Haiti and not objecting when a French dictator extorted tribute from there. It was naked violation of his principles and no contingency of realpolitik justifies it, even considering that times were different. They were also changing, too.
V.'s conclusion to his keynote today:
In her biggest hit, “Hips Don’t Lie,” from her album, Oral Fixation Volume 2, which opens with a Baroque-style synthetic trumpet fanfare and is styled as a belly-dance, she sings, “En Barranquilla se baila así.” The song was one of the biggest radio hits ever, but it was video-driven. One day in Times Square, I looked up and saw Shakira belly-dancing on a giant screen, many stories high. I watched in amazement as ad terram tremulo descendant clune puella.
If you think I’m overstating Shakira’s historicity, consider that after her Oral Fixation tour ended, Shakira took a summer history class at UCLA in disguise, with a backpack, under her name of Isabel Mubarak, attending professor Robert Cleve’s course titled Introduction to Western Civilization: Ancient Civilizations from Prehistory to circa A.D. 843. As I look out today, I wonder which one of you might be Shakira in disguise.
What those TBoEd aholes have decreed, then, is that the Mexican American War cannot be taught. That very war in which almost all the generals in the U.S. Civil War, a/k/a The War of Southern Agression, as General, and later, President, Ulysses S. Grant and so many others of the Union army called it, got their training and experience.
Oh dear. That's the same war that President Grant stated flat out with digust in his Memoirs. was declared for no other reason than to expand territory for the slaveholding elite of the south. Which is how, um, Texas got to be a state ....
Love, C.
You really don't want to give up TJ, do you?
I can't forgive him for living on the buying and selling of slaves, some of whom were his family. But, hey -- that allowed him to keep ordering French wine and music! But then they all had to be sold when he died to pay his debts, he who lived by the labor of them all his life. feh.
Love, C.
I've been reading a Reconstruction history called Those Terrible Carpetbaggers. It's scholarly and heavily researched. I regret to say that Grant does not come off well -- detached, all too willing to heed the last person who talked to him, and unable to grasp the extent of the violence in the South.
Funny, Sean Wilenz says just the opposite today in the NY Times!
I sent the link to you earlier.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14wilentz.html?ref=opinion
Love, C.
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