It’s got to be better than “History Detectives.”

It appears that they’re bringing my favorite British history TV program to the United States:

Hopefully the people on Time Team America will have more than three days to finish their digging.

James Dean’s PSA for safe driving.

Yes, it’s macabre, but it’s also historical (via the Consumerist):

You don’t have to be a military historian to do military history.

My alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, has finally filled its endowed chair in military history and I like the guy already. Read the whole article at Inside Higher Ed if your interested in his bio, but I’m primarily interested in this:

[John W.] Hall also said that there are limits to focusing on whether a professor is called a military historian. “The way I wrote my book defies easy categorization,” he said. He added that some of the “most insightful books about military history” in recent years have come from scholars who aren’t identified as military historians. He cited as examples John Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, Patrick Griffin’s American Leviathan: Empire, Nation and Revolutionary Frontier and Jill Lepore’s The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of Identity. Dower, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known as a Japanese historian. Griffin, of the University of Notre Dame, and Lepore, of Harvard, are both identified as historians of early America.

Compare this to K.C. Johnson, a guy I respect enormously, but who’s been on the wrong side of this argument for as long as I can remember:

K. C. Johnson, a historian at the City University of New York, characterizes the problem as pedagogical, not political. Entire fields of study, from traditional literary analysis to political and military history, are simply not widely taught anymore, Mr. Johnson contended: “Even students who want to learn don’t have the opportunity because there are no specialists on the faculty to take courses from.”

But what Hall tells you is that you don’t have to be a specialist to contribute to a particular sub-field. People who aren’t military historians can still write and teach military history. And people who aren’t labor historians can still write and teach labor history. And people who aren’t women’s historians…and so on and so on until you run out of sub-specialties.

Awww…

My son, Everett, and our new puppy, Sizzles:

Obviously, this guy never leaves the country.

I’m not sure how I ended up reading this rather confused CNN editorial by a Republican insider named John Feehery, but man am I annoyed. The subject is Senator-Elect (that feels REALLY good to type) Al Franken:

The metric system is the kind of thing that you can expect from the 60-vote filibuster-proof majority Democrats now have in the United States Senate.

After the Watergate scandal in 1974, Democrats trounced Republicans in the mid-term elections, getting 61 seats in the Senate and 291 in the House.

In the Senate, they adjusted the rules to make it harder for Republicans to filibuster (reducing the magic number from 67 to 60 to invoke cloture, which ends debate). In the House, they passed all kinds of reforms to take power away from senior members and give it to junior members. And Congress mandated that the American people embrace the metric system.

The most obvious problem with that opening is that it is designed to get us all scared about what the 60 Democratic votes (even though there aren’t 60 Democrats) in the Senate are going to do to us now. Nevertheless, that whole mandating “the American people to embrace the metric system” thing didn’t work out very well, did it? So why exactly should we be scared?

More importantly, I’m incredibly annoyed by this kind of head-in-the-sand attitude. Regular readers (all 3 of you) know that I just spent a month in Australia. During that time, my wife and I were practically helpless in the grocery store or the fish market because we had no idea how much a kilogram was. The same thing would have happened had we bothered to rent a car. I’ve been abroad enough so that I have a pretty good feel for a kilometer, but on every other weight and measure I am completely helpless.

I want to blame the Ford Administration for not getting behind a good idea, but according to Feehery:

In 1975, the newly dominant Democratic Congress sent President Gerald Ford a bill that declared that America was going to be metric, which he signed.

So what happened? Who blinked? Or is Feehery just making stuff up to smear Democrats with being behind something that feels “foreign?”

In any event, I’ll blame Feehery for being so insular that he doesn’t care how the rest of the world functions. We use English measures. They changed over. The Australians changed over. Can anybody give me a good explanation of why we didn’t that doesn’t boil down to, “We’re the greatest country on Earth so why should we?”

Why I hate “educrats,” part 3461.

From Inside Higher Ed:

Online learning has definite advantages over face-to-face instruction when it comes to teaching and learning, according to a new meta-analysis released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education.

The study found that students who took all or part of their instruction online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through face-to-face instruction. Further, those who took “blended” courses — those that combine elements of online learning and face-to-face instruction — appeared to do best of all. That finding could be significant as many colleges report that blended instruction is among the fastest-growing types of enrollment.

The Education Department examined all kinds of instruction, and found that the number of valid analyses of elementary and secondary education was too small to have much confidence in the results. But the positive results appeared consistent (and statistically significant) for all types of higher education, undergraduate and graduate, across a range of disciplines, the study said.

Horsehockey. How do I know? The study’s design:

A meta-analysis is one that takes all of the existing studies and looks at them for patterns and conclusions that can be drawn from the accumulation of evidence.

On the topic of online learning, there is a steady stream of studies, but many of them focus on limited issues or lack control groups. The Education Department report said that it had identified more than 1,000 empirical studies of online learning that were published from 1996 through July 2008. For its conclusions, however, the Education Department considered only a small number (51) of independent studies that met strict criteria. They had to contrast an online teaching experience to a face-to-face situation, measure student learning outcomes, use a “rigorous research design,” and provide adequate information to calculate the differences.

The key word here is “calculate.” The only way to make that possible is by measuring learning by filling in tiny bubbles on multiple choice tests. This almost has to be true given the age of some of those studies.

Multiple choice tests can’t measure the kind of learning outcomes that you can only get through direct engagement with the professor. You know, stuff like an actual conversation where you can respond in real time and make sure everybody is actually paying attention.

What’s worse are the implications of this study for labor. I can here it now, “Let’s outsource higher education to India! After all, they’re cheaper over there and the fact that everything has to be done online is actually to our advantage.

It’s times like this when I fear for our future as a country.

And here I thought you spelled “Ni!,” N-e-e.

Question for the weekend.

Am I the only one out there who thinks that if you don’t judge historical figures using the moral values of today you aren’t really learning anything?

Buffalo Bill.

I’ve been at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody Wyoming for the last few days, and just learned about the wonderful resources that their research library has online. The above illustration is from Google Books, but you can find plenty more fantastic stuff about Bill and his legendary show at the above link.

The real Richard Nixon emerges drip by disgusting drip.

The latest batch of Nixon tapes came out today and they aren’t going to do anything for the former President’s reputation. From the NYT:

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”

Lovely. Just lovely.

While that sounds bad, things will only get worse for the former President. My old friend Stan Kutler sued to get access to all the Nixon tapes before Nixon was even dead. The Nixon Estate has been doing what they call in politics the “modified limited hangout.” In other words, they’ve been giving over small sections of the tapes of all of Nixon’s conversations for years in order to put off releasing the really embarrassing stuff. This latest disgusting comment is an indicator of the real Nixon that they didn’t want people to ever see.

It’s bad, but can you imagine what the last Nixon tapes ever released will sound like?