Unlearn16: Class is in Session - The One Where I Teach The History of History

00:00:00.000 class is in session hey everybody and welcome to unlearn 16 class is in session now today

00:00:09.520 i've kind of been pushed in a direction for this podcast because i was gifted all of this

00:00:17.200 and if you can't see it okay there is magazine life magazine time magazines newspaper clippings

00:00:27.060 dating all the way back to the 1940s in the United States. And as I'm going through all of this and

00:00:34.520 I'm sitting looking at it with my students, we really started to talk about how having something

00:00:40.700 tangible like this, like actually touching this Life magazine, showing Jacqueline and Caroline

00:00:49.080 and JFK Jr. right at the funeral or showing actual newspaper clippings of Nixon resigning

00:00:57.580 or Truman taking over after FDR passed, like all of this stuff, it just, it emboldened my class

00:01:07.300 to have deep conversations. And the cool part is these conversations are multifaceted.

00:01:13.160 So we start talking about JFK. Well, of course they start talking about

00:01:16.940 the assassination and the conspiracy theories and the angles. And all of a sudden we're talking

00:01:21.620 about physics, but my kids also started talking about what did he actually do? Because this

00:01:26.760 magazine here, this life goes through what did he accomplish or what do we perceive him to have

00:01:32.480 accomplished throughout his presidency? Yet he really didn't actually get to that because the

00:01:38.980 thousand days he was president wasn't enough time. And those particular things we give to him,

00:01:44.320 we credit to him, like civil rights legislation, were actually LBJ. So then we start to talk about

00:01:51.240 in my class, the difference between what happened in perception of the past. And we were talking

00:01:57.100 about what is more important. And this is fascinating. This is amazing. My students

00:02:03.320 start to say, and this is so true because they start to compare it to the presidential race of

00:02:07.740 today. My students start to say, perception matters more. And as I listen to them talk about

00:02:16.840 how much perception matters, you can't disagree. Perception does matter more because if you think

00:02:24.600 it's true, it really doesn't matter what is true. So my students start to talk about, well,

00:02:32.760 how do you shift perception if people really don't care about what is true anymore? And it's

00:02:40.860 so easy to lead. Because as we're talking about all these headlines, like Nixon resign,

00:02:47.560 Truman calls in the seals, you know, new president, Roosevelt passes, suspect in assassination of Dr.

00:02:59.740 King is apprehended in London, like all of these amazing titles, they start to say, but Joanna,

00:03:05.760 we've already talked about what didn't they include and what's not in the newspapers or

00:03:10.820 what's not on TV. So my students start asking me what's not in these headlines. Now that's a cool

00:03:17.420 question. The cool question is to talk about the headlines and to use these actual pieces of

00:03:24.100 history as moments. But the even cooler part is, how do we start to fill in the missing pieces of

00:03:33.100 the puzzle? How do we get a more holistic picture? Because we all know that we're not getting the

00:03:38.580 full picture, especially coming from US magazines, talking about, you know, US accomplishment,

00:03:46.600 there they are landing on the moon, all of these amazing things. And then we pull this one up.

00:03:51.640 Um, it's official and I'm not going to read the headline, but you know, this racialized

00:03:57.540 headline is incredibly problematic.

00:04:00.200 So then we read this headline and then you start to understand, oh my God, world war

00:04:06.680 two and a lot of world wars are fueled by levels of racism and misperceptions and stereotype.

00:04:15.000 Why?

00:04:15.680 Because perception matters more than what is.

00:04:19.260 guys my kids sometimes my students blow my mind perception matters more than what is because if

00:04:27.580 you believe it and you act on it it doesn't matter what really was so then the question

00:04:34.340 my students start to talk about when it comes to history and the way that we teach history

00:04:38.740 and discuss history is we should be studying perception in that time context as much as

00:04:49.000 we're studying what actually happened. Because the perception of what happened and the perception

00:04:55.020 of the people in that time and in that space actually perpetuated and caused action.

00:05:02.580 So let's go all the way back. So I'm looking at all of these things. And the thing that was the

00:05:06.800 oldest was the fact that FDR was a four-term president. Now, a lot of people don't know that,

00:05:14.920 But FDR got elected to his fourth term. There was no cap on how many times a president could run. And in his fourth term in office, he passed. Truman takes over. And then the whole sequence of events, when Truman takes over and decides to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and plunges us into the Cold War, you have to wonder, would that have happened if FDR still was president?

00:05:42.240 So we have that conversation. Not only do we have that conversation, but we also talk about what motivated people to put a limit on the presidency at that time, because you might say, OK, fine, following FDR and his four terms and they decided that it was too much.

00:06:01.060 We needed to limit the presidency. Well, why? I mean, I don't know why I've set my kids off to try to learn why, because there's the reality and then there's the perception.

00:06:10.600 the perception is they wanted to limit um power they didn't want any kings and the more that

00:06:18.600 you're in power the more power you are cure and the more power you solidify thus to stay

00:06:24.640 in office okay well if that's true it makes sense but it wouldn't make sense for the democrats to

00:06:29.620 push that would it or did they get into did they in that time and in that space was the united

00:06:40.520 states and that the power structure that existed sort of hoist and forced into a little bit more

00:06:47.580 of a control power structure because the people in the united states were demanding that i don't

00:06:55.140 know. Because let's be honest, right after World War II and after the United States won World War

00:07:01.700 II, I don't know how many people really find the need to limit presidential power after the

00:07:10.540 president just served and did all of these amazing things. You want to know who would want to limit

00:07:16.400 it corporations in my opinion that might have been a big push by corporate interests

00:07:24.560 specifically even some military industrial complex aspects that we're now going to roll

00:07:34.100 into world war ii because they don't want to have to go up against somebody that has more power than

00:07:40.860 they do. So we're looking at all this and then it launches us into a debate about Hiroshima and

00:07:50.000 Nagasaki. Was it a war crime? Should they have dropped that bomb? Is that too many civilian

00:07:55.540 deaths? Was there enough concern? Did the United States really think it was going to lose or did

00:08:02.760 they want to flex their muscle in order to prove something, not to Japan, but to the

00:08:10.320 Soviet Union? Was the last act of winning that war against Japan really the first act

00:08:19.220 of the Cold War? So my students debate this. And again, there's no finite definition, right?

00:08:27.540 That's the brilliance and the confusion and sometimes the frustration when talking about

00:08:32.740 human history. There's no one answer. There's only a multitude of options. And probably the

00:08:38.020 truth is a whole bunch of them mixed together to formulate one. So we talk about all of this.

00:08:45.920 All right. And as we talk about the end of World War II, we then roll into JFK. And as we roll

00:08:54.740 into JFK, my kids obviously talk about the assassination. Now, my students have talked

00:09:01.980 about the assassination before. We've watched the movie JFK by Oliver Stone. We've dissected

00:09:09.600 what was true and what was fiction. We've talked about, does the fiction matter more? We've built

00:09:17.500 scale images of the assassination so that we can get the idea, the vantage point from the grassy

00:09:24.440 You know, my students have shown the magic bullet theory, both artistically and sort of physically as they've sat students down mimicking what it would have been like in the car.

00:09:36.000 You got to know the JFK assassination is all they're all in.

00:09:39.820 I talk about that assassination. They are all in. Now, what they've started becoming more aware of is the aftermath.

00:09:47.000 initially it was just about the shot and eventually my students started asking questions about the

00:09:54.720 okay so when jfk was shot and then oswald was arrested that oswald was shot shot and jack

00:10:03.240 ruby shot him and he was put in prison and then jack ruby died and then we go through the 25

00:10:07.640 people witnesses that actually surround this case who have all mysterious heart attacks

00:10:16.580 stroke, car accidents. They've gone missing, right? And at that point, they start to really

00:10:24.220 get an understanding of a level of a coverup. It doesn't matter who, if you want to say who did it,

00:10:30.600 like we all have to sit down and go, there was a serious coverup. And that cover, what does that

00:10:36.180 coverup mean? A lot of people spend a lot of time, and my students used to spend a lot of time trying

00:10:42.200 to figure out the who and trying to figure out the how. But the key of history has always

00:10:50.780 been, and it's always been the hardest part, to figure out the why. The men and women that

00:10:57.120 were involved in that assassination are long but gone. We're not there to punish and to

00:11:03.700 determine the individual. We're there to understand what was going to be caused,

00:11:11.220 what world was going to be created by that assassination happening. And you talk about

00:11:19.120 the military industrial complex. And then my kids really start to dive into the intricacies of who

00:11:26.040 owns the machine of war, who makes money from it, what companies make money from it. And we always,

00:11:32.100 always tie it to today. And then you go deeper in that. If these companies were making money from

00:11:38.300 it and they were making money from contracts, then of course, war is their business. And if

00:11:42.800 war is their business, they have a vested interest in accelerating war. And that's what Eisenhower

00:11:48.100 always warned everybody about. Eisenhower, a one-term president, obviously a commander,

00:11:58.560 I don't know what his grade, a captain, somebody's going to yell at me on here when I don't know his station, an admiral, whatever his station was in war, he understood the military industrial complex.

00:12:11.980 He warned people against it.

00:12:14.440 He said, be careful when you allow people to make money off war.

00:12:18.960 They will create wars to make money.

00:12:23.240 And look at what the Cold War was.

00:12:25.100 look at what the cold war was 60 years of spending and making money under the auspice of what fear 0.52

00:12:37.080 fear of the nuclear bomb fear that soviets are going to attack fear of the domino effect

00:12:43.060 fear was the driving force and then my students start to sit there and this is all today by the

00:12:48.300 way. Then my students start to sit there and go, well, most big things that politicians do

00:12:54.680 is on the heels of, or on the boot of fear. If we can make people afraid and we can give them

00:13:03.140 a solution that only I can provide and solidify, they're going to give me everything.

00:13:10.000 So then my students went home today and I told them to go read A Little Leviathan by Thomas

00:13:14.620 Hobbes because Thomas Hobbes would say one of his most important sort of statements was the fact

00:13:21.480 that people will give up all of their civil liberties as long as you are willing to keep

00:13:29.540 them safe and keep their families taken care of. That fear is a huge motivator that if you keep

00:13:37.640 them safe. They don't care to be free. What? That's huge. That's huge. And I think that that

00:13:46.540 applies to many, many different people. And again, it's not about real. That fear isn't real.

00:13:55.820 It never is real. That fear is always perception. So the creation of perception in your time and

00:14:04.960 in your space gives you power. And if it gives you power, it's what also writes history that we

00:14:11.540 then study and replicate without even questioning the underpinnings of was it real? Because after

00:14:19.380 we talk about JFK and we talk, we roll into the moon race, right? The space race. And we joke

00:14:27.400 about all the people who deny that we actually, the United States landed on the moon and then we

00:14:31.180 blow past that. But what we talk about is this, what was the motivating factor for landing on the

00:14:37.200 moon? Was it just exploration? And my kid said, no, it was the height of the cold war.

00:14:46.120 It was a competition and the Soviets did everything first. And the United States saw

00:14:52.720 this as a perception of power. Now there's some real power laced in there because if you can go

00:14:59.060 to the moon, you can weaponize space. If you can weaponize space, you have first strike capacity

00:15:03.000 and mutually assured destruction goes away. But besides that, it's a race for space because

00:15:10.040 the country who can achieve it has a perceived level of power that is going to be more significant

00:15:19.100 and more accessible and more enforceable than actual proof of said power.

00:15:26.020 so like oh my god so getting to the moon actually just proved that they were strong it didn't

00:15:33.980 it it only did it in pretense and i said yeah and i said and and that was kennedy's legacy

00:15:42.140 right he started it but he wasn't around to see it finished

00:15:46.940 he had he had been assassinated years prior following kennedy's assassination it wasn't in

00:15:54.160 here. We talked about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. of Malcolm X. We talked

00:15:58.960 about the who and the why. What world was going to be created in the aftermath, Bobby

00:16:06.240 Kennedy. We talked about all of that. And then in the newspapers, it brought me to Nixon.

00:16:13.720 the kids don't know a lot about Nixon

00:16:17.840 and the funny part about Nixon

00:16:22.960 is you start to talk about

00:16:25.520 they know he was impeached

00:16:26.600 they kind of know why

00:16:28.040 so we talk about Watergate

00:16:30.780 we talk about why I'm coughing right now

00:16:34.300 and I can't stop

00:16:34.960 we talked about

00:16:38.160 breaking into the Watergate building

00:16:40.600 what that meant, what he got

00:16:42.220 And then we talked about the more important stuff. Fine. Watergate, you have the post, finding out about it, breaking the story, all of the, you know, the height of the reporting frenzy, all of that kind of things crashing down.

00:17:07.260 but that's not the interesting part. The interesting part is as this hit the press

00:17:16.240 and as Nixon was taken in question, they demanded because people knew that Nixon actually taped

00:17:25.360 everything that went on in the Oval Office. You weren't supposed to do that. He was doing it for

00:17:29.580 two reasons. And I think more of the latter than the former. Number one, for posterity,

00:17:34.320 He wanted to write a really great memoir and he wanted everything on tape.

00:17:39.560 Number two, and I think this is more likely, he was horrifically paranoid.

00:17:44.760 He thought everybody was out to get him.

00:17:46.580 Nixon had the biggest bureaucracy in the White House and he thought everybody was leaking.

00:17:53.480 He thought everybody was a turncoat.

00:17:56.140 Everybody was trying to undercut him.

00:17:59.420 A lot of people think he had significant mental illness near the end of his term, if not earlier.

00:18:04.320 And he recorded the, and then, and then he kept them even when this story broke, even when the Watergate story broke, and as it broke, he had all of these tapes that Nixon could have burnt, right? Could have destroyed. He didn't. He said, I'm not giving the tapes because that's presidential immunity.

00:18:31.680 Where have we heard that before?

00:18:34.320 It's presidential immunity. I have immunity. I don't have to give you this. It's all like

00:18:38.480 sorts of national security issues in those tapes. And the Senate said, and the Supreme

00:18:45.560 Court said, you give them over. Now, here's the funny part. He still could have burned

00:18:50.940 them. He still could have got rid of that evidence. He could have got rid of a tape

00:18:55.960 or two. And instead, he hands them all over. And I think one of the famous quotes, he said,

00:19:01.240 I was under medication when I decided not to burn those tapes. I find that hilarious.

00:19:07.800 He's actually blaming medication for not breaking the law. That's how crooked he was. He actually

00:19:15.800 said out loud that I would have broken the law had I not been medicated. It makes no sense to me.

00:19:23.120 Again, none of this being equal. I also say to my students, but what else was Nixon doing?

00:19:29.620 Nixon at that time

00:19:32.320 throughout his presidency

00:19:34.400 or near the tail end

00:19:35.800 was carpet bombing

00:19:37.540 Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam

00:19:39.580 carpet bombing

00:19:41.400 and all with a secret slush fund

00:19:44.400 of money

00:19:45.640 without congressional approval

00:19:48.640 you want to talk about somebody

00:19:54.520 that you should have been

00:19:56.920 like that's a crime

00:19:58.600 Not breaking into the Democratic National Office. Who cares? Are you joking? Killing hundreds of thousands of people without congressional approval, with secret money.

00:20:19.400 that should be an impeachable offense but as we know the united states presidents do not get

00:20:27.120 impeached for crimes they commit outside the united states well therein lies also a big big

00:20:32.220 big problem and there's a big why and my students start to ask that question well the longer you

00:20:39.200 commit crimes outside of your country and you are not held accountable for said crimes because you

00:20:45.100 are on the winning team or because you have more money or military power. How long until the world

00:20:51.080 is tired of that level of hypocritical abuse of power? And some of my students say, well, 0.64

00:21:01.020 that time is coming. In fact, you can see cracks within the United States itself,

00:21:06.740 and I think still based on that premise. So we go through all of the Nixon stuff,

00:21:13.680 the moon landing stuff. And actually, there's a very final piece, and I remember this well,

00:21:21.420 but for them, they weren't even born yet. There's a full New York Times paper about 9-11.

00:21:31.100 Now, the kids know the conspiracy theories about this. The kids, they're definitely more aware

00:21:37.860 of aspects of that day. But we also talk about the who and the why. And now we are able to step

00:21:48.080 back and get a little bit more context about during the Soviet, speaking, going back to the

00:21:53.060 Soviet, the Cold War, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States gave weapons,

00:21:58.940 money and training to the Taliban in order to fight off the Soviets. And when there was a 0.61

00:22:03.620 policy shift in the United States, they backed off, stopped giving money, training, weapons,

00:22:09.160 and any kind of help, went back to the United States and the Taliban got slaughtered. Fast

00:22:13.340 forward to 2001, that is the revenge. Does it make it right? Of course not. Does it make it

00:22:20.320 any less of a terrorist act? No. Does it give it context? Yes. And context is perhaps the single

00:22:31.140 biggest important element when studying history because context also isn't finite. I can raise

00:22:39.480 some questions. My students can raise questions. Another teacher can raise questions. Nothing is

00:22:44.780 perfect, right? So if nothing is perfect, you're never seeing the whole picture. You're only

00:22:50.200 studying aspects of it. That's okay. Still has value to study. Just never forget you don't have

00:22:56.880 the whole picture. You probably never will. So what does that mean? That means you always have

00:23:01.680 to be open to new debates, new points of information, new pieces of information, new

00:23:06.560 perspective, and new questions. Because if you're not open to that, you might as well stop talking

00:23:12.000 about history because you're no longer searching for the truth. You're searching for what fills

00:23:17.640 your perception. And on that note, I'm going to qualify. I'm going to organize all of these

00:23:24.900 beautiful, impressive pieces of history.

00:23:28.320 I'm going to create a bit of a museum within our school

00:23:31.640 so we can talk at open-ended conversations,

00:23:36.200 no matter what class, about the why.

00:23:40.540 Have a great day, guys, and I will see you next Tuesday.

00:23:43.980 Same bat time, same bat channel.

00:23:47.440 Dismissed. 1.00

Unlearn16: Class is in Session - September 17, 2024

The One Where I Teach The History of History

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