café historia

baby boomer history – the new guard move in

Baby boomers, (like the cafe author it has to be admitted) hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the '70s, are being replaced by younger staff.

The New York Times has just completed a survey of nearly 50 US academics. Those interviewed believe the new intake are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate. "There's definitely something happening," said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. "I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years."

Already there are signs that the intense passions and polemics that rocked US campuses during the past couple of decades have begun to fade. At Stanford a divided anthropology department reunited last year after a bitter split in 1998 broke it into two entities, one focusing on culture, the other on biology. At Amherst, where military recruiters were kicked out in 1987, students crammed into a lecture hall this year to listen as alumni who served in Iraq urged them to join the military.

In general, information on professors' political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce. But a new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University (described in detail in the lengthy New York Times article) found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. "Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s," they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third. When it comes to those who consider themselves "liberal activists," 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger. "These findings with regard to age provide further support for the idea that, in recent years, the trend has been toward increasing moderatism," the study says.

But as scholars across fields argue, the historical era in which a generation develops — the Depression, wartime or peaceful affluence — is a defining moment for its members. "My generational paradigm is the end of the cold war," said Matthew Woessner, a 35-year-old conservative and political scientist at Penn State Harrisburg. The notion that campuses are naturally radical or the birthplace of social movements, Ms. Kelly-Woessner said, was specific to the 1960s and '70s. "I think the younger generation does look at it differently."

And so it should - different generations, different viewpoints and interpretations: especially about a recent past. As for me some of my history students today visit the university I attended - then, in the early 70's it was left wing and pretty radical in politics and its subject offer. Now? it is fairly traditional, matter of fact and its most radical department is no longer Social Sciences, but probably Meteorology & Global Warming - but that is an issue worth going to the barricades for, 21st century style.

image origin                 post source: New York Times 

linked casahistoria site: Teaching History 

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I had a steam loco, obama has the flag

This morning in a fit of marking-induced madness I started to sing "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam" a tune stuck somewhere in the depths of memory that I used to sing as a youngster at a holiday Band of Hope session I the north of Scotland. I also remembered that I was awarded a badge for reciting biblical verses in between the singing (it had the dove flying back to the ark on it!!) that I wore on my lapel when I went back to school. I used to like badges one of my favourites was my Ian Allen loco spotters badge – a rarity at the time as it was made not from the usual tin but of…..plastic!!

Now it seems Obama has started wearing a lapel badge too but not a dove, or a blue plastic loco and tender, rather he has become the latest to sport the national flag on his chest. The origin of the flag lapel pin is murky. According to Mark Leepson's Flag: An American Biography, the "near religious reverence many Americans have" for our national symbol dates only to the Civil War era (not back to the Revolutionary War, as many assume) . Prior to that, few private citizens possessed or flew their own flags — it was limited to military and federal facilities. When the Confederates started winning battles early on in the War Between the States, Northerners began to fly the flag as a sign of pride.

Since then, flag imagery has been intricately tied to moments of crisis or conflict. Over the past four decades, Kit Hinrichs, one of the nation's top graphic designers, has collected more than 5,000 pieces of stars and stripes–related memorabilia. He says the flag lapel pins in his collection don't really date back before mid-century. "I don't think it was a common thing for men and women to wear before the Second World War," he says. "I certainly have jewelry from before then with flags on it — cufflinks and stick pins and tuxedo buttons and brooches — but not [many flag pins] before the '50s."

It was during the culture wars of the late '60s and early '70s that the flag lapel pin truly took off and became the simultaneously uniting and divisive symbol that it is today. Republican candidates in the 1970 congressional race wore them as a symbol of patriotic solidarity against anti-Vietnam protesters like Abbie Hoffman — who donned a shirt made of the flag — or others who stitched the flag onto the seat of their pants. But it was Richard Nixon who brought the pin to national attention. According to Stephen E. Ambrose's biography Nixon, the President got the idea for sporting a lapel pin from his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, who had noticed a similar gesture in the Robert Redford film The Candidate. Nixon commanded all of his aides to go and do likewise. The flag pins were noticed by the public, and many in Nixon's supposed "silent majority" began to similarly sport flags on their lapels. Over the next few decades, the pin sporadically surged in popularity. During the Gulf War, they sold briskly alongside flag patches and yellow ribbons.

Then came 9/11. Taking a page from the Nixon Administration, George W. Bush and his aides all donned pins. So did many anchors on Fox News, though not Bill O'Reilly, who said at the time "I'm just a regular guy. Watch me and you'll know what I think without wearing a pin." ABC News, on the other hand, prohibited its on-air reporters from pinning on the red, white, and blue, citing a desire to maintain journalistic credibility.

As befits a tradition that reached its height during the Nixon years, flag lapel pins have — fairly or not — become to many a shibboleth of America's War on Terror, and a symbol of the "either you're with us or against us" ethos that has often prevailed since September 11, 2001. And while the USA hasn't yet reached anything close to a consensus on what a flag pin says about its wearer, Barack Obama seems to have discovered that symbols matter.

Bet he wishes he had a blue plastic Ian Allen loco spotters badge though….

 

image origin  (top) (lower)             post source: Time

 

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olympic china – the view from the past

As China winds up towards the Olympics and its spin doctors get into top gear, how much of its recent history will actually get a balanced presentation. or put another way, what type of China will be put on view?

Indeed, as China has become a global economic powerhouse, and as millions of Chinese pursue the goal of getting rich fast, there doesn't seem to be much of a demand to re-examine past events here, to study them fully and, in that way, to arrive at a clearer self-understanding.

No doubt, sitting quietly in their living rooms, there are not a few people in China pondering the lessons of events like the anti-rightist campaign of 1957, in which tens of thousands were sent off to labor camps, the disastrous Great Leap Forward that followed, and the Cultural Revolution itself, an episode of political fanaticism that would seem worthy of careful scrutiny.

Still, history is a delicate, carefully supervised matter in China, as is the news. China, on the one hand, has harshly criticized other countries over the years, especially Japan, for having a short memory regarding the atrocities it committed in China during its years of occupation. On the other hand, no country has a shorter memory than China when it comes to anything that might tarnish the reputation or the prestige of the governing party. No unrestricted historical inquiry is allowed in China, certainly no unrestricted debate among scholars on any of the sensitive topics, from the famine of the early 1960s to the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989 to the historical status of Tibet. When it comes to pictures, the authorities exercise tight control over government photographic archives, basically shutting down access to entire stretches of this country's recent past.

One rectifier may be a new publication from Taschen: a Chinese history in photographs that is published this month. It is "China: Portrait of a Country," edited by Liu Heung Shing, a former Time magazine and Associated Press photographer who has been living off and on in the country for the last 30 years. About 30 percent of the photographs in the book, Liu says, have never been published before, mainly because they depict events that the Chinese censors would prefer that the public forget - or, if not forget exactly, file away in a box in the musty attic of the collective consciousness that it's best not to reopen. And that's why Liu's book, which is being simultaneously published in Europe, America and Japan - but not in China - emerges as a veritable reconstruction of an otherwise disappearing pictorial history of China's last 60 years. It contains dozens of images, no longer available in China itself, showing how turbulent and brutal that history was - and how recently China was still a country not of shopping centers and Olympic Games, but of raw revolutionary violence.

To get around the closed archives, Liu spent years traveling China to collect pictures from dozens of Chinese photojournalists who had private archives of images of the major events of the last 60 years, and it is these pictures that make up the heart of his new book. And so, among the pictures you won't see in any official Chinese publications is one by Wang Shilong, who worked for a newspaper in China's northeast, showing the burning of old books by a mob in Henan Province in 1972. There's Jiang Shaowu's photograph from the late 1960s showing intellectuals and disgraced officials being "re-educated" in an "ox-shed" - so known because the offenders were called "ox-demons and snake spirits" during the campaign to rectify their bourgeois thinking. There's a picture from 1966 by Meng Zhaorui, a photographer for the army, showing Mao, Lin Biao and Premier Zhou Enlai together working on a speech that Lin was about to give in support of Mao to a Red Guard rally in Tiananmen Square, in Beijing.

And there are dozens of other images that will strike many readers as unforgettable, even if China seems well on course toward doing what the government wants, which is precisely to forget them.

image origin                 post source: Herald Tribune

linked casahistoria site: Mao's China 

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emigration – new uk podcast

The latest podcast in the series of lectures and other events presented by The National Archives of the United Kingdom is on the subject of Emigration records and will be of value to all casahistorians researching family emigration history.

This podcast by Roger Kershaw explains the reasons behind the emigration of some 16 million people since the 17th century. It discusses the most popular destinations for emigrants and sources such as outgoing passenger lists, passport records, and a host of emigration schemes supported and fostered by the government. It also features the various child migration schemes that have been responsible in migrating some 150,000 children from the UK between 1618 and 1967. Particular reference will be made to the growing number of online sources relevant to this subject.

Presentation is worthy, but a little lecture –ish…..

image origin                 podcast: National Archives

linked casahistoria site: European Emigration 

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world war 2 – the (red) starry view from the kremlin

Writing the history books in a country which started the Second World War as a dictatorship in alliance with Nazi Germany and then went on to invade and dismember five of its neighbours was always going to be tricky – especially when that same country ended the war on the "other side", proclaiming it was invading eastern Europe (and Manchuria in the Far East) in the name of democracy, liberation and the ending of fascism. Then went on to keep a hold on these territories just as thoroughly as the previous Nazi regime had done…….

So it is hardly a surprise that modern Russia is having problems over the interpretation of the period by those self same neighbours today.

Russia's new President, Dmitry Medvedev has condemned what he described as attempts to rewrite wartime history -- an attack the Kremlin said was aimed at Ukraine and the three Baltic states. In a joint declaration marking the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Medvedev and Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko denounced a "politicised approach to history". Their countries "strongly condemn any attempt at rewriting history and revision of the results of World War Two," they said.

Ukraine and the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have challenged Moscow's view of history, saying their nationals suffered from Soviet as well as Nazi oppression, and a Kremlin spokesman said later the criticism was aimed at them. Meeting in the Belarussian town of Brest, where Nazi forces first crossed the Soviet border on June 22, 1941, the two leaders said that "a selective, politicised approach to history should be set against honest, scientific debate. Only on this basis can Europe draw the lessons of history and avoid a tragic repetition of the errors of the past."

Russia has chided Ukraine for taking steps since the mid-1990s to grant some form of recognition as combatants to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), guerrillas who fought both Nazi and Soviet troops to secure an independent state. The issue is contentious in Ukraine, where commemorations expose the country's split into the nationalist west and centre and the Russian-speaking east, more sympathetic to Moscow. Historians say the UPA had 40,000 men in its ranks at its peak. Some Ukrainians donned Nazi uniforms in a unit known as SS Halychyna.

Russia has also complained about Baltic nationalists who resisted Soviet occupation. It became embroiled in a diplomatic row with Estonia last year over the removal of a statue of a Red Army soldier from Tallinn's city centre to a military cemetery. Moscow also says Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia and Latvia have been denied basic rights against a background of strong anti-Russian sentiment.

Perhaps the Russians, and Belarussians have just got to accept that one of the features of the democracy, liberty et al that they announced in 1945 is the ability to consider different interpretations of history…

image origin                 post source: Herald Tribune

 

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negs from india's recent past

Last in December, Aditya Arya, and Indian ad photographer opened some yellow crates he inherited from a photojournalist friend, Kulwant Roy and had left for nearly 25 years. What he discovered was a photographic record of modern Indian history, including thousands of images from the last days of the Raj through the 1960s, many of which have never been published. The archive has now excited historians who believe it may shed new light on key moments in India's independence movement. It has also attracted attention for the commercial value of its images of historical figures ranging from Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to Jacqueline Kennedy.

Some of the negatives have become stuck together or begun to disintegrate. Arya has managed to digitally scan and catalogue some 4,000 to 5,000 prints and negatives from Roy's collection, but he estimates this is just a third of the total. Still, several potentially significant photographs have already emerged, including a 1939 picture of Gandhi in a heated argument with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the head of India's Muslim League who went on to found Pakistan. The two men were seldom photographed together and their disagreements primarily took place out of the public eye.

Roy shot many of Gandhi's travels as well as the 1946 British Cabinet Mission which finalized plans for Indian Independence. And he was there when Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, handed power to Nehru, India's first prime minister. His images may not be as well known as those of photographers like Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who went to India during this period, but they were popular at the time.

Roy covered Jackie Kennedy's visit in 1962 to India and India's war with Pakistan in 1965. But increasingly, he was eclipsed by a new breed of aggressive young photojournalists. The decorous press conferences and the chummy familiarity with politicians early Indian photojournalists like Roy had enjoyed were giving way to the scrum and the photo-op. Roy hung up his camera.

The photo of Gandhi arguing with Jinnah can be found among the archives of Getty Images, one of the world's largest photo agencies, where it is simply attributed to a "stringer" for Topical Press, a long defunct London news service. "As was common for this period the print was uncredited," Sarah McDonald, a Getty curator, wrote in an e-mail response to questions about the photo. McDonald also wrote that "if we can verify the image is by Roy we will be happy to credit the image to him."

Arya is hoping to mount an exhibition of Roy's photos in Delhi later this year. A book and other projects are also under discussion. Arya believes that some of the images - for instance a picture of a loin-clothed Gandhi descending from a third-class rail car - could become as iconic as the vintage India photos taken by Bourke-White and Cartier-Bresson.

image origin                 post source: Herald Tribune 

linked casahistoria site: Decolonisation 

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celebrating japans brasileiros

Interesting café fact ^#223: 
Numbering an estimated 1.5 million, there are more people of Japanese descent in Brazil than anywhere in the world outside of Japan itself!!

It was exactly one hundred years ago that the first Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil, and this weekend the country as a whole has been reflecting on the anniversary. The celebrations (with Japan's Crown Prince Naruhito in attendance) are a chance to pay tribute to the pioneering immigrants that first arrived at the port of Santos near to Sao Paulo - and, the organisers say, to thank Brazilian society for making them welcome. The 165 families who arrived here on 18 June 1908 came to escape poverty and lack of job opportunities in Japan, and to meet the demand for workers in Brazil's coffee plantations.

But there is plenty of evidence at the Museum of Japanese Immigration in Sao Paulo that this was not always a comfortable story. The newly-arrived Japanese faced a huge culture shock: a radically different language, food and climate. The aim was to make their fortune quickly and return home - but, for many, it was not to turn out that way. "When they arrived here planting coffee wasn't so productive," says Lidia Yamashita of the Museum of Japanese Immigration in Sao Paulo. "Then, because of World War ll, they could not consider returning to Japan. The expectation changed. They had to stay here in Brazil and think of it as the land where they were going to live."

Few places better illustrate the impact of Brazilians of Japanese descent than in the Liberdade district of Sao Paulo. After years working in the countryside many Japanese immigrants moved to the city to seek a better future. The shops, restaurants, markets and street festivals make Liberdade appear more like part of Tokyo than a Latin American city - and it is now one of Sao Paulo's main attractions. At the weekend this area is packed with people enjoying a wide range of foods, and it is in the eating habits of Brazilians that you can find the most visible evidence of the impact of Japanese immigrants and their descendants. As well as helping to change what had been a very basic diet, they introduced new farming techniques that have helped to make Brazil the agricultural superpower that it is today.

Community leaders say Brazilians of Japanese descent are completely integrated into society here, and that a century after the first immigrants arrived some 40% of their descendants are now mixed race. However, historian Arlinda Rocha Nogueira says this evolution is not complete. "I would not say 100% integrated, no," she says. "They are moving towards a state of integration in the third or fourth generations - but not in the first or second. There are many Japanese societies that are closed."

Interesting café fact ^#224:
The more that is unearthed about latin american immigration history the less latin it seems to become......

image origin                 post source: BBC 

nearest(!) casahistoria site: Argentine immigration

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orwell under surveillance by big bro in barcelona

As the closed circuit tv (cctv) cameras breed and multiply on every street, motorway, bridge, airport, and sprout inside buses and trains, shops, hospitals and schools (some of my local secondary schools have cameras inside the toilets - to stop bullying...) the latest irony is that a surveillance cctv camera has now been installed in the Barcelona square, Plaça de George Orwell, that commemorates the civil war volunteer and author of "1984".

Quite what George Orwell himself would have made of it we will never know. But the writer of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the satire featuring the all-seeing eye of Big Brother, might perhaps have been amused to discover a security camera keeping watch over a plaza in Barcelona that bears his name.

The camera monitors any miscreants in this rundown square in the inner-city Ciutat Vella area. Any Orwell pilgrims paying the plaza a visit might be a little disappointed. The square was named after Orwell not because of his literary endeavours, but because he fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. In 1936, he arrived in Spain to fight as part of the International Brigade in the doomed effort to defeat Franco's nationalists. He survived a bullet in the neck before going on to detail the vicious infighting among leftwing factions in Homage to Catalonia. Sixty years later, in 1996, residents of Ciutat Vella marked the anniversary by naming the square after him.

Ciutat Vella contains some of the most popular areas for tourists in the city, so is a magnet for bag thieves. In an effort to crack down on these street robberies, cameras were installed a few years ago. The irony of placing a camera in a square named after Orwell appears to be lost on the local council. "This is a public place independent of the name of the plaza. The camera is there to ensure the security of the individual, not as a measure of repression," says Jaume Cusco, a Barcelona city council spokesman.

image origin                 post source: Guardian 

linked casahistoria site: Spanish Civil War 

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learning to learn learning, swedish style

For the last 15 years two key issues of the modern education debate have been how to promote independent learning, (ie encourage learners to learn and discover by themselves) and how to provide effective monitoring of the learning process for student, teacher and parent to help facilitate the best possible progress. A third has been the pragmatic one of how best to achieve this in a cost effective way

One possible way of meeting all three is provided by the experience of Sweden where a private education group, Kunskapsskolan (“Knowledge Schools”) opened its first six schools in 2000. Four more opened last autumn, bringing the total to 30. It now has 700 employees and teaches nearly 10,000 pupils, with an operating profit of SKr62m last year on a turnover of SKr655m.
 
Like IKEA, the giant Swedish furniture-maker, Kunskapsskolan gets its customers to do much of the work themselves. The vital tool, though, is not an Allen key but the Kunskapsporten (“Knowledge Portal”), a website containing the entire syllabus. Youngsters spend 15 minutes each week with a tutor, reviewing the past week's progress and agreeing on goals and a timetable for the next one. This will include classes and lectures, but also a great deal of independent or small-group study. The Kunskapsporten allows each student to work at his own level, and spend less or more time on each subject, depending on his strengths and weakness. Each subject is divided into 35 steps. Students who reach step 25 graduate with a pass; those who make it to step 30 or 35 gain, respectively, a merit or distinction.
 
Again like IKEA, no money is spent on fancy surroundings. Kunskapsskolan Enskede, a school for 11- to 16-year-olds in a suburb of Stockholm, is a former office block into which basic classrooms, open-study spaces and two small lecture-theatres have been squeezed. It rents fields nearby for football and basketball, and, like other schools in the chain, sends pupils away to one of two specially built facilities for a week each term for home economics, woodwork and art, rather than providing costly, little-used facilities in the school.
Teachers update and add new material to the website during school holidays and get just seven weeks off each year, roughly the same as the average Swedish office worker. “We don't want teachers preparing lessons during term-time,” says Per Ledin, the company's boss. “Instead we steal that preparation time, and use it so they can spend more time with students.”
 
One selling point that any parent of a teenager will appreciate is the amount of information they will receive. Each child's progress is reported each week in a logbook, and parents can follow what is being studied on the website. There is an expectation that children take responsibility for their own progress. “Our aim is that by the time students finish school, they can set their own learning goals,” says Christian Wetell, head teacher at Kunskapsskolan Enskede. “Three or four students in each year may not manage this, but most will.”
Performance monitoring is also important within the company: it tracks the performance of individual teachers to see which ones do best as personal tutors or as subject teachers. It offers bonuses to particularly successful teachers and is considering paying extra to good ones from successful schools who are willing to move to underperforming ones.
 
Kunskapsskolan's do-it-yourself style of education may soon be available outside its home country. In March it was named preferred bidder to run two “academies” (state-funded schools run largely free from state control) in London. If they go ahead, they will be run by a not-for-profit arm, since for-profit ventures are banned from Britain's academies programme.

An interesting concept as outlined by the Economist article but Kunskapsskolan is a commercial firm which also hopes to open low-cost independent schools in Britain, where it can offer the full Kunskapsskolan experience, but free of state involvement. Does this mean they want to be free of state inspection, ie monitoring? That process they are keen to perform on students and staff, but not themselves? We shall need to see.....

image origin                 post source: Economist 

linked casahistoria site: Teaching History 

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to rosario, a statue of ernesto

The existence or otherwise of statues and monuments are often a good guide to national sensitivities and to changes in public feelings towards a collective past. Where I grew up in Hamburg for example there was/is only one municipal monument to the fallen German troops of the Great War (Kuöhl's 1936 memorial, erected to commemorate those who died in the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War is typical of the ones erected during the Third Reich and is one of the few remaining. The monument, with it's almost mocking inscription, Germany must live, even if we have to die continues to be swathed in controversy, with much public sentiment favouring removing it while others, particularly veterans groups demanding that it remain......) In Spain plaques to the Republican victims of the Civil War have taken 60 years to emerge. Then there are the statue parks of eastern Europe where the great & good of the communist era have been removed to and put out to graze.

In Argentina a historical sensitivity is that of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. While he remains the most famous export of the Argentine city of Rosario, his legacy here has long been a low-key one. Except for a handful of businesses named in his honour, few markers alert visitors that the revolutionary leader was born here exactly 80 years ago before becoming one of the most mythic figures of the 20th century.

That changed this weekend when civic leaders inaugurated the first official monument (click here for more images/background - in Spanish) honouring the revolutionary leader in Argentina, ending decades of government silence about the controversial figure. A 13-foot-high bronze statue unveiled before hundreds of cheering admirers