>this social movement or this obscure religious belief are more important than this huge war/conflict in history
Why is this the narrative in so many history classes?
>>412893
>>412893
I've never heard this in any history class. You wouldn't be making some kind of hyperbolic fantasy on an anonymous Tsagadai Hacky Sack Appreciation Chat would you?
>>412931
Seems like he might be...
Usually less than 10% of a mations men fight in a war, let alone die in it.
>>412909
Explain?
>>412931
I get what OP is saying. Generally, revisionist history has tainted history classes in leftist universities. We can't talk about the WWI experience in Canada any longer in just a war context. We have to extend it to every social aspect ever; women's suffrage, religious fears, social Darwin movement, class divisions, etc.
Yes, every event in history has come from something that preceded it. But now it seems like the importance of everything is undermined for whatever reason. -Every- history essay these days seems to have one of the following lines:
>This narrative is limiting and doesn't include [x]
>This viewpoint is highly problematic because
>I would like to offer that [x] needs to be reconsidered for this bullshit obscure reason
Please tell me I'm not the only one who sees this.
>>412931
I took a "Modern history" class in college and the professor literally said "The discovery of King tuts tomb is the most important EVENT in the past 300 years"
I was also told (in another class called "Europe in the 20th century") that Czech Cubism was the most important idea to go over europe in the 20th century. Not fucking Nazism or Communism but Czech Cubism.
>>412948
That one is lamenting that /pol/ has robbed him of his ability to contribute anything of value to historical discussions
>>412946
>implying 10% isn't completely catastrophic and nation-defining
Look at Eastern Europe. The whole mindset and identity is defined by wars and bloody struggles.
>>412950
>muh leftists
>>412955
He's expressing a genuine concern, you can't just dismiss it because of your absolutely genius "muh x" argument
>>412909
>>412950
>I get what OP is saying. Generally, revisionist history has tainted history classes in leftist universities.
>>412966
>muh muh
>>412950
spot on
>>412948
I assumed your question was a reference to how the Holocaust is generally given greater emphasis in 20th century history classes than the actual military and geopolitical aspects of WWII are.
>>412950
>We can't talk about the WWI experience in Canada any longer in just a war context. We have to extend it to every social aspect ever; women's suffrage, religious fears, social Darwin movement, class divisions, etc.
But that's a good thing.
Viewing history through a lense of pure state-state conflict and military matters is a gross oversimplification of the processes that led to where we are now.
Wars are major and important events, no doubt, but they are also deeply disturbing across all of society and it is certainly worth exploring the other consequences of the time.
>>412974
>yuh muh
>>412950
There's literally nothing wrong with any of that. Why shouldn't any of those things be considered in an analysis of WWI? It's like you're afraid of a more complete understanding of time periods because, as you say it'll "undermine the importance of everything". That's a very ideological approach, anon.
>>412981
>long series of shitposts in which we both slowly deviate from the spelling of 'muh' to hide my lack of argument
>>412987
>all started by the muh leftist comment
>>412979
>women wearing corsets in the Victorian era not only has greater reaching consequences than WW1, but also were important in leading up to WW1. Now WW1 isnt important enough to cover so lets talk about the hardships women faced during ww1 in trying to get suffrage, not to mention the poor minority people still held back by Jim Crow laws.
This is the type bullshit taught in UNIVERSITIES now, not just high school.
>>412988
:^]
Other people here are actually arguing the points, im just a contrarian
>>412955
>>412967
Let me reiterate, because I get what sort of shit flinging this could cause.
It seems like some universities don't allow for any other "discourse" other than the one it professes, and anything else is made highly problematic. Rather than one author's narrative, or even one prof's narrative being contributing to some large body of knowledge about an event, it's become more of an academic pissing match. People are more concerned about pointing out limitations of a narrative, and saying what an author didn't include in their whopping 20 page essay on -one- area of focus. It doesn't really do good to only criticize.
>>412979
Of course, and I do not deny that at all. Opening up new bodies of history, and examining events on a larger scale is great. It's needed. The homefront experience, economic, social, gender history...it's all important and interesting. But when the narrative shifts to a viewpoint where it's more about author criticism than the concepts being wrong, or anything beyond "problematic" that I find some writers irk the fuck out of me.
>>412893
Women
>>412987
>sudden stop at which someone mentions reddit and the stupidity of the shitposting corrupts the rest of the thread
>>412989
How about someone actually present some quantifiable evidence that this and exactly this is happening?
>>412992
well that makes two of us m8
>>412995
LIFE IS MEANINGLESS AND WE ARE ALL LIVING GARBAGE
GARBAGE
G A R B A G E
>>412989
>Strawman
>>412955
He's right. I've been taught to object to narratives in exactly that way and it does feel limiting. I have to learn a lot about European history myself because Europe is almost a nonentity (aside from being a villain and the home of the evil Catholics and Nazis) in my American curriculum. Admittedly I've almost explicitly focused on Asian history in my class choices but it still annoys me that I've never seen a class offered about the 30 Years War, or antiquity in general (outside of the Classics department, which by no means is the same thing). Personally, I blame the American Left's adoption of French ideas that it wasn't intellectually prepared to digest. We've got more people who are able to be Maoists over here, and we have a lot of idiots who don't even realize they're Maoists because they're educated to care about vague forms of liberation and expression rather than how to analyze societal trends, geographic facts and their connection with observable historical trends, etc. I mean, the only economics any of my professors has taught in the classroom has been a variant of Marxism. I don't think it's a problem that can be swept under the rug that easily when the flaw is linked so closely to the way people learn to write historical narratives. Think of it this way: it basically presupposes constant revisionism and the necessity to reject all former narratives for the sake of present day political issues and the opinions of liberals, who dominate the discussion every time and make people who slightly dissent from the Democratic progressive narrative in any way feel uncomfortable.
>>412997
Sit in a history class? I dont know what else to tell you Anon. I graduated 3 years ago with a history degree and I can assure you it was in full effect during 2008-2012 in colleges.
>>413004
>literally confirmation bias
>>413003
Holy shit
Tipping intensifies, mang
>>413018
What do you want me to show? I don't have any syllabuses, or old essays saved.
>>413024
Any actual information that isn't anecdotes
>>412950
>revisionist history has tainted history classes in leftist universities
I like the "generally" qualifier, essentially a free pass when asked for 'proofs'.
>>413003
I have never, once, in my entire life, heard any quantifiable criticism of any kind of liberalism in my entire life. I have never, once, in my entire life, heard anything about Marxism, nevermind Maoism, except that it's either pure evil or extremely misguided and dangerous. I literally have an economics teacher that said Alan Greenspan saved the world and that unemployment is good, however. I don't know where or when you clowns grew up but this shit wasn't going on in lower class midwestern America in the 90s that's for damn sure.
t. Ameriburger
>>413034
Were you a humanities major? I double majored in History and Electrical Engineering and I can assure you there are ALOT more libs in the humanities field than real degree fields.
>>413034
New England, 2015
>>413038
>real degree fields
Logical positivism intensifies
my WW2 class was basically "why the versailles treaty is harsh, unjust and responsible for Hitler rise to power", teaching very little about the great wars themselves. Marxists today are the ones spreading Nazi propaganda, incredible.
>>413044
>humanities major detected
>>413052
Literally a physics major, but just not an autistic one
>>413034
Justify the theft of surplus value from the workers by the capitalist class
>>413038
I was referring to my high school days. I am currently an English major but nothing has changed. I have had a poetry teacher that made sure to let us all know how terrible Marxism is every time the topic comes up (often-ish considering how many commie/fellow traveler poets there are).
>>413063
when did you stop beating your mother?
>>413063
You're barking up the wrong tree. As Twain said, "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education".
>>412893
I wonder what caused these huge wars/conflicts in history desu
>>413083
Bolivia has widespread child labor right now. Praise the revolution.
>>413084
The faggot that caught that home run ball in game 5 of the '15 Eries?
>>413093
Baseball as a concept is objectively the least relevent thing in existence.
There is a big mac wrapper floating around the streets of new york like a post modern tumbleweed that will have a bigger impact on history than that meme sport.
>>412951
with out the popularity of czech cubism there would be no nazia or sweet communist propaganda. so there is that Literally the reason we don't talk about Hitler the watercolor landscape artist is because his art was not modern enough for the universities he applied to. so i can see your professorrs pont . also kingtuts omb being discovered kicked off the modern oriental movement which led to the primitivism art movement which led to czech cubism which led to hitler. history is an inter connected chain of causality it is up to the historian to make sense of it and to prove points. to understand why the wars happen is more important then to understand the wars themselves .
Is "Influence on History" the new "Scientific Progress?"
>both are unquantifiable
>both get thrown around by shitposters
>>413113
>Baseball as a concept is objectively the least relevent thing in existence.
Then why did Ken Burns make a 10 part documentary series about it?
>>413147
Because Ken Burns is the next least influential historical thing
>>413147
You can accurately determine the irrelevence of a subject by how many documentaries Ken Burns has done on it.
>Baseball
>10 Parts
>Jazz
>9 Parts
>National Parks in America
>6 Parts
>Thomas Jefferson
>1 Part
>World War 2
>1 Part
>The French Revolution
>No Documentary
>Mongolian Explosion
>No Documentary
>Decline of the Roman Empire
>No Documentary
>Pelopenssian War
>No Documentary
Relevence is inversly proportional to Ken Burnsian screentime.
>>413190
World War II is multiple episodes
>>412893
http://oyc.yale.edu/courses
For your consideration, a sampling of history classes at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
>American Revolution
12/24 lectures explicitly about the war, even though the professor considers the revolution to include sociopolitical developments before and after the war
>Civil War
13 or 14/25 lectures explicitly about the war, and the course in general has the war as its theme
>European Civ
11/24 are specifically about wars, violent revolutions, imperialism, or conquering emperors
>France Since 1871
11/25 lectures about wars, terrorism, and revolution in a course on what is arguably the greatest artistic and cultural flourishing in human history
>Epidemics
no lectures about war but war as a vector of disease is discussed in all cases but malaria
>Ancient Greece
15/24 about wars, though that is arguably Kagan's specialty
>Early Middle Ages
13/22 lectures are about wars
>Early Modern England
3/25 lectures are about war. The course's entire bent is toward social history.
If anything it seems to me like war and other forms of mass political violence are the single most prominent subject in Yale's undergraduate history curriculum.
>>413207
That isn't an indicator of the state of American education.
>>413210
Neither is your anecdote about your shitty liberal arts school.
>>412997
It's not. Almost anybody with these sort of opinion is almost guaranteed to have never taken a history class, or wasn't paying attention during them at least, and went in looking for ideological confirmation that the professors had no intention of supplying.
>>413217
It isn't, but at least I'm not holding up Yale as an indicator of what most Americans are taught in the classroom.
>>413224
>Most Americans
Will not be taking history classes beyond high school at all. Guess the crisis is averted.
>>413224
At least the other anon is giving a quantifiable example compared to anecdotal whining.
>>413210
Yale is like the definitive liberal arts school. I just gave you a lecture by lecture break down of the content of their publicly available history courses. If you can do the same for any other university (it doesn't even habe to be an Ivy League) and demonstrate that mass political violence is under-represented in the history curriculum, go right ahead.
>>413236
And who do you think will be teaching high schoolers? Not Yale graduates, for the most part. The ones that do might be good teachers, but there are a lot of people eating up these narratives right now who will be feeding them to the rest of the body politic for as long as someone has to propagate an ideology throughout out society. You're not thinking about the education of the next generation, you're thinking about which school has the best curriculum. There's a huge difference.
>>413251
The horror that highschoolers may be taught that history is complicated and should be approached from various perspectives weighs heavily on my mind to be sure.
>>413251
You've given us no reason to worry other than he-said-she-said bullshit.
>>413241
I don't want to give out what university I go to on here, I could post names of professors but it might make it easy to figure out who I am.
>>413244
That isn't even what I'm claiming, I don't so much care about political violence being underrepresented. I'm complaining about certain ideological narratives being propagated throughout the American education system, particularly in state schools.
>>413273
Are you honestly afraid that the 8 people who browse /his/ will dox you? Oh no, someone on the internet might see my real name eegads.
>>413272
I'm not moving the goalposts, that was the only reason I came into this thread. Look at what my first post responded to and look at what I wrote. War is actually incredibly uninteresting compared to other elements of history.
>>412893
Historian here. I disagree with many of my colleagues that their narrow research specialisation ought to be taught to undergraduates.
However, I disagree utterly with your really quite shitty hidden agenda OP. What are states and armies except social movements or obscure martial beliefs?
I would be deeply reluctant to authorise a double credit course of WWII unless it was really circumscribed and fit the curriculum neatly. Personally I'd authorise comparative-Ostfront and cram in:
1 anti-democracy,
2 the failure of the Hitler economy,
3 the "success" of the five year plan,
4 world statesman ship,
5 poland / baltics / finland as operations,
6 occupation of poland, commissar order, pogram, einsatzgruppen A-D
7 Uranus
8 Comparative transnational war economies including homefront devestation
9 The concentration camp system and GuLag
10 The extermination camp system
11 Collapse of AGC
12 Death Marches and Mass Rape
13 Comparative occupation policies: Germany 1941-1944, Soviet Union 1944-1949
14 Whether historiographically comparative narratives can be constructed, & take home essay historiographically critiquing the blood lands.
Running double lectures and double tutorials. Or over 12 months.
>>413280
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1351893
I have in my notes from her class about American culture that the nuclear scare wasn't a threat, and that the USSR didn't pose anything resembling a serious threat to the United States. Despite this, the Cold War was used to perpetuate the model of the American traditional family. This happened at the expense of the LGBT community and the colored community.
While I don't contest professor Fronc's narrative entirely (who could argue that America's government in the 1950s and ealr 1960s didn't try to perpetuate the image of the Family?), I find the claim that the USSR and Communism in general did not pose a serious threat to the United States to be misleading, having looked into the matter on my own at great length, being curious about Marxist ideology and the history of the Cold War. The KGB funded many student movements in the US, with the express intent of formenting dissent within the country. This is common knowledge, and a cursory reading of any Communist literature reveals an emphasis on propagating the ideology, by its very nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures
That's the kind of ideology the largest university in New England propagates in the current year.
>>413356
http://www.umass.edu/history/people/faculty/fronc.html
Here's a proper link to her university profile.
>>413356
You really have a habit of grossly overstating the role of the KGB in the US new left, and understating the role of soc-dem and CPUSA red diapers, orthotrots, and the "IWW heritage".
You also have a boner for ideology as the driving force in history which is Frankfurt in its level of idiocy.
>>412950
>Generally, revisionist history has tainted history classes in leftist universities.
I know, that whole reevaluation of seapower in the war of 1812 has forced Harvard to come out publicly for the overthrow of capital by the working class itself and give $40M annually to the IWW to fund Worker's Defence Committees…
fucking idiots.
>>412950
>Please tell me I'm not the only one who sees this.
They're trying to prepare undergraduates for "big boy" school. Imagine, for a moment, that you're Chris Browning, and your dream in life has been to do a unit level history of German soldiers in WWII.
>>413387
My main point is about the denial of the Soviet threat to the United States. You haven't had my personal experience of dealing with liberals in classrooms here.
>>412893
You are a fucking idiot, worse than any /pol/tard in being 100% toxic and useless to /his/ and history in general if this is actually what you think. Hopefully you are just b8ing.
Go fucking masterbate over pictures of napoleon in the "Military History" section and leave the rest of us to discuss history.
>>413404
>Imagine, for a moment, that you're Chris Browning, and your dream in life has been to do a unit level history of German soldiers in WWII.
>One of your students raises her hand, and smirks at you, quite Jewishly.
>"Professor, if your theories weren't completely discredited, why is Daniel Goldhagen teaching at a university like Harvard, and you're teaching a course at a backwater Lutheran school?"
>>413412
No I haven't, but I have had an experience dealing with Americans in a sub-discipline of history where the ultra-left are concentrated, and I have an extensive participation in online spaces where your whiney rich liberal shits congregate to shit all over each other.
The Soviet Union lacked the capacity to directly threaten the United States, to put its influence on the ground in the United States and to challenge central US interests internationally.
Compare the RAF or BR to Weathermen (unfunded by the way) or Symbionese Liberation Army (unfunded by the way).
The CPUSA had learnt by 1955 that they had better behave like the most castrated yellow dog sewer socialists, and the least challenge to the US was coming out of the Maoists.
None of whom could recruit in industry worth a damn.
The only actually successful elements of the new left in the 1960s-1970s were Fuck The Army, a multitendential soldiers movement more inspired by maoists and libcoms than Soviet lines, and the lib coms who went into the union movement.
>>413427
Browning turned to that student and asked, "If German culpability for anti-Jewish genocide was in the blood of the nation, then how come the largest victims of German state and social terrorisation were Slavic?"
The student was stunned, and fell back in her seat, weeping those nationalist whig tears we know all too well from eisegesisists. She clutched her copy of "Hitler's willing executioners" to her chest and ran out of the room shouting "Intentionalism Intentionalism."
The Einsatzgruppen A archives fly into the room and perch upon a copy of the Soviet and Yugoslav evidence to nuremburg, shedding a single aktion.
All the students in the room got up and shouted "Research from primary sources trumps Geist and fantasy every time" and were converted into functionalists who actually read sources.
WIE ES EIGENTLICH GEWESEN
p.s.: Half the Police Battalions were made up of Social Democratic workers.
>>413454
Holy shit, this is the best.
>>413416
/pol/ doesn't like napoleon. It's obvious to anyone with a bit of historical knowledge as to what makes napoleon a problematic figure for that board.
>>413224
What are you using as evidence? Yale is a sample size of one, but it is a well regarded school and should be representative of what other departments should aspire to.
>>413636
>Yale is a sample size of one, but it is a well regarded school and should be representative of what other departments should aspire to.
No, it isn't. Yale is the most highly concentrated bourgeois garbage.
>>413644
Well then other history departments must be even more focussed on conflicts and military history if "muh librul revisionists" is true.
>>413657
Social history, marxist historiography ala EP, and left leaning academics coincide. My experience is that marxist historians favour "curriculum" and providing a real service to undergraduates.
Cultural history, narrative turn, and liberal identity politics tend to coincide in my experience of colleagues. These colleagues, along with traditional liberals, tend to favour "teaching their speciality."
Due to the proletarianisation of the humanities, most young academics fall on a spectrum between these two groups.
In the U.S. it is called Common Core. Instead of being taught classical humanities, we teach our kids Critical Theory and apply it to every single fucking class possible.
It seems our high schools are slowly turning into a SJW-industrial complex
>>412893
half the time it's because the leaders in charge of the conflicts outright declare that.
so to declare that it isn't means you are disagreeing with those leaders and probably are going to declare some other obscure philosophy the cause of the conflict.
>>414029
Fucking hell I wish high school students came out learning anything half as rigorous as Critical Theory.
>>412951
why do you lie on the internet
How do you think we got to the conflict?
>>412893
Wars are more often than not products of social movements.
Metahistory > LE KINGS AND BATTLES GREAT MAN HIGH SCHOOL TIER history.
>>413343
phew, your undergraduates have no time to fuck around.
