The Big Questions:
To what degree is the United States living up to the ideals set forth in the Declaration?
How does ideology impact the telling of history?
Business:
- Honors meeting at lunch changed! We will do it during work time instead!
- Please join the Google classroom! Code: ioc4yo
Starter 9.1: A Significant Omission…..
Read the omitted passage from the Declaration of Independence and answer the following questions:
- To what is Jefferson referring?
- Why do you think Congress removed this from the adopted draft?
He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither … And he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of whichhe had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
Discuss Declaration Packet. (TURN IT IN!)
What are the ideologies upon which our country is founded?
What bias did you see in each of the historian excerpts?
Four corners: America is living up to the ideals set forth is the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.
Re-examining the Revolution....
How is the Revolution usually taught in schools? How might ideology impact the telling of this part of our history? How does bias matter in the telling of history?
The American Revolution: Crash Course US History
WORK TIME
Read and annotate: “Re-examining the Revolution” by Ray Raphael
HONORS MEETING DURING WORK TIME!
JOURNAL 9.1 Raphael Response
Respond in your digital comp books to these prompts:
1. Ray Raphael says, "We continue to see ourselves as David to prove we are not Goliath..." What does he mean by this? How does he see this as a result of mythologizing the study of history? Why should we care?
2. Do we agree with Raphael's claim that "the historical self-portrait of America as the little guy, together with a myopic denial of international politics, fuels the quest for unbounded global power"?
3. What is his ideological perspective?
HONORS
Due Monday: Read Chapter 1 of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: "Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress"
Answer the following questions in your digital comp books.
1. How does Zinn challenge your previous notions about the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus? How does this version complicate the dominant ideological tradition of Columbus as our forefather?
2. What is Zinn’s perspective about the writing of history?
3. Zinn argues that most history texts pretend that there is such a thing as “The United States”—a community of people with common interests. What are the “communities” that Zinn identifies? What “interests” do they share? What “interests” of one group might be in opposition to an “interest” of another group?
4. If communities share common interests, did Columbus and Las Casas belong to the same community? If so, what are their common interests? (What was Columbus in the Caribbean for? Las Casas?) If not, what interests separate them into different communities? Did Las Casas have more in common ideologically with the Arawaks than he did with Columbus?
5. From what you have read so far, how would you characterize Howard Zinn’s ideological bias?