Did You Know? The 1776 Report—a Half-Done Project
A short-lived report quickly torched by the new Biden administration provides a pathway for those who seek to return to a classical structure of higher education. The report, titled the…
Posts tagged with
“history”
Essential Knowledge: Students Should Study the Classical World
Countless students begin and graduate from college with an impoverished humanities education, a reality that should disturb any proponent of the liberal arts. According to a recent report by the…
Did You Know? Students Are Clueless About History
Colleges and universities across the country don’t require students to study history. Although students at many colleges are “technically” required to take a history course to fulfill their general education…
How to Renew Traditional Historical Study in Graduate Schools
I’m sometimes asked why it is so difficult for PhD students of a conservative bent to survive and flourish in history graduate programs these days. It’s not enough to say…
Higher Ed Is Stoking the Flames of the War on History
On July 4 at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump praised Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Louis Armstrong; it was a significant political and cultural speech, comparable to Trump’s speech extolling Western…
Why Students Have Turned Away from History
I taught history from 1976 through 2013 at Harvard, Carnegie-Mellon, the Naval War College, and Williams College. The 37 years of my career coincided with a drastic change in the…
Social Justice Revisionism Comes for Washington and Lee
In the fall of 2018, the trustees of Washington and Lee University voted to paper over parts of the university’s history. On the recommendations of Washington and Lee’s “Commission on…
Why Students Should Still Pick a History Major
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the history field has seen a precipitous decline in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in American colleges. As Benjamin Schmidt, a historian at Northeastern…
What We’re Reading: Western Culture, Groupthink, and Queer Criminology
Jenna A. Robinson, President Jacques Barzun’s magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, has been a revelation—of my own inadequate history education. As the title says,…
No Harm, No Foul in UNC Sports Scandal Course Dispute
The Raleigh News & Observer recently published a contentious exchange between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s history professor Jay Smith and vice chancellor of communications Joel Curran…