Thread: Life This Day in History
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Old 01-26-2009, 04:09 PM   #121
Amnorix Amnorix is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rain Man View Post
Back in my freshman year of college, I had a commie-pacifist history professor who refused to teach about anything involving the military or wars. Overall, it was kind of a stupid teaching strategy (try going from the Great Depression to the Fifties without mentioning a war), but it nonetheless made me realize how often wars are the focus of history at the expense of other factors.

So here's a challenge. How about highlighting the biggest military and non-military events of the day?
Teaching history without wars is idiotic. Wars is typically the pivotal turning points of history. Nothing changes history as fast and as dramatically as a war. That said, many (inept) teachers just teach the war without teaching enough about the causes of the war, and their results. Studying specific battles and their results is generally fun, but not really critical. It is enough to know who won the Civil War, and a few key battles that led to the result. To go through each step of the war, battle by battle, is not very useful for the casual student.

Actually, thsi thread is somewhat counter to my own personal prediliction that teachers of history are too focused on the memorization of dates. In reality, in my view, specific dates constitute worthless knowledge. Dates are only important to the degree that they let you put matters in context -- THIS thing happened before or after that thing over there. Simply knowing the exact (or almost exact) date on which something occurred is usually a waste of mental space.

This thread merely lets me delve into various historical events within a specific context.

I'll see what I can do about covering a military and a non-military topic. On some dates, I have lots of choices. On other dates, I have very few. The main limitation here is the time that I have to write about whatever my topic du jour is.
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