I’m back from the seminar, which was both excellent and exhausting. And I’ve got all these open tabs to close, so.
- We went on a trip to Mount Vernon, and I took a lot of pictures. Our trip to Mount Vernon was focused less on Washington-as-statesman and more on the experience of slave life on the plantation, so there are a lot of pictures of the slave quarters and the agricultural areas (and none of the interior of the manor house).
- One thing that came up at the seminar was that there are a lot of amazing resources online for teaching about the history of slavery in the Americas. One example: the Virginia Runaways database. It’s a collection of runaway slave ads from Virginia newspapers in the 1700s. (We looked at this one in class, which is interesting for the clothing details if nothing else.)
- On a different note entirely! I’ve been very impressed with the writing James Fallows has done about China (and very nearly assigned Postcards from Tomorrow Square to my AP World History students, except that we spend so little time on modern China). At the Aspen Ideas Conference, he did a session on China with Niall Ferguson, a prominent historian who has written a lot about the historical nature of empires. The full session has been posted online; I haven’t watched it yet, but based on Fallows’s own description of it, I’m really looking forward to watching. (I linked to Fallows’s blog post about the video, rather than the video itself, because the post also has links to his commentary on the session.)
- And, by the way, everyone should be reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog at the Atlantic Monthly, because he’s engaging and smart and awesome. Two posts in particular that caught my attention recently: “The Importance of Being Ivy League” and “The Girls Step Up to This“.
- This clip is… look, I get that the nature of twenty-four-hour cable news is such that you get a lot of people who are paid to just keep talking, which means they’re inevitably going to say something really dumb. But this seems to go above-and-beyond in terms of “dumb”.
I think that’s it for now.
Posted Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 9:45 am. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is my favorite blogger in the world. He’s the smartest and he has the sensitivity of a poet. His memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, I read in one sitting.
The End.
I go back and forth on Coates, but that “Ivy League” piece is killer. Especially the bit where he says, Yeah, now my neighbor can be president instead of yours.