Word: americanizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Historians in our society have the awesome and tedious burden of recounting events with accuracy. Handlin, University Professor of History and dean of American historians, has found fault with the work of some of his predecessors and colleagues. Oscar Handlin is a disappointed...
Handlin has sharp words for those who have fallen prey to the theory-without-evidence mode of historical accounting. He believes in sticking to the facts--even though at times the "provable facts" were actually incorrect. Works such as U.B. Phillips' American Negro Slavery, written in 1929, distorted the facts of history when they included as a "proven fact" that blacks were racially inferior. Although we are never told quite why, Handlin finds these illusions forgivable...
...history where things may have occurred differently. Only where there is evidence is there history, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian tells us. Thus it follows that if there is no evidence, there is no history. How many African tribes kept records at City Hall? Or better yet, how many American Indians kept council meeting notes? Does this mean that black and native Americans have no history? Is that why schoolchildren are repeatedly told Columbus discovered America when native Americans were here first...
...resolution constituted a conscious attempt to equate Zionism with obvious examples of racism. Tiamiou Adjibade, the U.N. delegate from Dahomey, admitted that "in essence Zionism was not related to apartheid", yet in the same breath he linked the two. American publications made the same spurious connection. One letter drew an explicit analogy between South Africa and Israel, terming Jewish fear of anti-semitism a 'red herring...
First, the charms. The flamboyance and imagination which raise Sagan to something of a '70s cult figure rescue a lot a Broca's Brain. Sagan recounts, for example, a colorful and enthusiastic history of his profession, emphasizing the incredibly rapid blossoming of American astronomy. In an equally lively essay, he describes the ludicrous procedure scientists use to name newly-discovered craters...