HL - More on the decision to drop the bombs

I am spending some time researching the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am surprised that most of the articles I am able to find support Truman's decision. When I took American history in high school, it seemed that the consensus was coming around that Truman should not have dropped the bombs - at least not on enormous civilian targets. Now it seems people are starting to see Truman's decision as a wise one. One element that is influencing the change is the declassified documents that are referred to in the article I handed out last week.

I have found some articles that criticise Truman's decision. This one is actually an excerpt from a book. The author does a good job of summarizing the arguments:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/raico/raico22.html

This is one that attracted a lot of attention, although it is mostly just a blog entry. In this one, he shows how Truman violated a set of Roman Catholic ethical principles known as "Just War Theory." If you want to learn more about Just War Theory, Google it.

http://www.jimmyakin.org/2009/05/harry-truman-was-a-war-criminal.html

Read these articles and let me know what you think it would be useful for me to have the whole class read. Thanks.

HL - The Decision to Drop the Bomb

Here is a nice list of primary documents regarding the dropping of the bomb. I haven't really had a chance to look through all of these, but if you look through them and find some particularly interesting or informative, let me know.

One interesting thing was the scanned copy of the leaflet that was dropped on Japan warning them that the US possesses "the most destructive explosive." It is printed in English, not Japanese. Most of the leaflets dropped by the Japanese were in English and Japanese.

http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/index.php

Yonaguni Monument

This is something I just found out about.  I first came across it when I was reading some fringy stuff about Lemuria, so this is a discovery that has been adopted by certain proponents of, ummm, "unconventional" theories.  It is interesting in its own right, regardless of your perspective.  They have found a large stone structure under the water near Japan.  It definitely has the appearance of being man-made, although it is officially designated as a natural feature.  This link will give you an interview with a Japanese professor who believes it is man-made.  If it is man-made, it would indicate that human civilization goes back to the last ice age.  This would put the earliest known civilization in the Pacific, and not in the Indus Valley or Mesopotamia.  Be sure to watch the video.  Also, read up on this topic online and let me know what you think.

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/arqueologia/esp_ruinas_yonaguni_2.htm

Pop culture connection

This is a really interesting video. What interested me in this song is that almost everything the guy says could apply to The Great Gatsby. The "seventeen miles" is not quite right, and "only trace amounts left in your blood" doesn't quite fit, although Daisy had been drinking earlier in the day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aopK2A8MCd4

Note to the anti-Bateman conspiracy

It looks like everybody is getting in on the conspiracy business. I think it will be very hard to organize a conspiracy whose potential membership is comprised of most of the student body and the entire faculty and administration. Just saying.

Did FDR know about Pearl Harbor in advance?

Here is a link to the complete interview with Robert Stinnett. I gave you the full text of the other article. I will post more links, with commentary, as I find things.

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=408

BTW

Nick - you are forbidden from reading that previous post. Sorry, but I am sure you understand.

Note to the anti-Nick Conspiracy

Hello, seventh graders in the anti-Nick conspiracy. Since most of you are not experienced conspirators, let me give you some advice:

1. If you are part of a conspiracy against someone, don't go up to that person and say, "Hey! I just joined the anti-Nick conspiracy!" If the person knows who is conspiring against him, then you no longer make up a conspiracy, but revert to being the same ordinary seventh graders you were to begin with.

2. Start conspiring. You seem to be all talk and no action.

3. Don't let Nick join. This one seemed pretty obvious, but apparently not.

AH - More about Hannibal's elephants

This is an article that claims that Hannibal's elephants were clearly a forest subspecies of African elephants. It claims that this subspecies did not go extinct until the 1st or 2nd century AD. It does not have a bibliography, so I don't know where the research is from. An internet search gives me this same article over and over again. There are still elephants that are called "forest elephants," but it looks like Hannibal's elephants were a separate subspecies. Maybe Hannibal contributed to their extinction.

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/African_Forest_Elephant

AH - Hannibal's elephants

Here are a couple of articles on Hannibal's elephants. The first one addresses an interesting problem - elephants hate going up hill because of the exceptional amount of energy that it takes for them to go up inclines. This article concerns only African elephants. I haven't found a study that says that Asian elephants are more likely to enjoy climbing, but it is almost certainly true. I worked at a casino that featured Asian elephants as performers, and they had those guys climbing ramps all the time. This seems to lend credence to the argument that Hannibal used Asian elephants.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9607

This next article deals directly with the question of whether Hannibal used African elephants, Asian elephants or forest elephants. I can't find the New Scientist article that this article references. If you do, please post the link. This article is from 1984, so I will also look to see if there are any more recent articles that address these concerns. If it turns out that Hannibal used forest elephants, that would explain why they resembled African elephants, but were able to climb uphill and survive in the alps.

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/18/science/the-mystery-of-hannibal-s-elephants.html?sec=health

HL - A Dangerous Question

It is a little risky to ask you to voice your opinion about whether or not a play is a great work of literature. The reason I am doing it with Our Town is because it is one of the few readings we do this year that we have the luxury of evaluating this way. The only way to determine for certain if a writing is literature is to see if it survives the test of time. I would never ask you whether The Iliad should be considered literature, because generations of scholars have decided that it was. If you tell me that you read it and you do not consider it a great work, then I would say that you are not putting enough effort into understanding the greatness of it.

With Our Town, the case is a little different. It was written in the middle of the last century, so it has not stood the test of time. Contemporary literary critics are divided as to whether it is a great work or not. It is not like The Old Man and the Sea, which seems definitely to be on its way to being an accepted book in the Western Canon.

If you decide that Our Town is a great work of literature, you have to realize that it is great a new way. Aristotle would never see a book about common people leading ordinary lives as a great work. There are those who see Our Town as introducing a new, American standard of greatness. The question really is, do you accept this assessment or not?

AH - Democracy vs. Republic

I did not respond to this question very thoroughly in class, so let me clarify. The difference between a democracy and a republic is related to the way the will of the people is carried out. In a democracy, the people make as many choices as possible. In a republic, some individuals are chosen to carry out the will of the people. A pure democracy - with every decision discussed and decided upon by the citizenry - has never existed on a large scale. It is possible to run a village or a church this way, but we have never had a nation run this way. Greece always had the ideal of a pure democracy, but usually they ended up running a system closer to a republic. A republic is much more workable. Elected officials can meet in one place and make decisions that affect the people.

From this description, it is clear that the United States is a republic. We have elected officials who make laws, set policy, establish taxes, etc.

The thing people in a republic need to watch out for is abuse of power. There must be a method in place to make sure that the officials stay accountable to the will of the people. If they don't, they run the risk of revolution. Even without a typical revolution, sometimes the republican system will be replaced or overpowered by an individual who is seen as representing the will of the people better than the corrupt government. This happened in Greece with tyrants such as Peisistratus. It also happens in the Roman Republic with the rise of the Caesars.

I have made an observation that may be interesting to you. Largely, I have found that Republican tend to like the Romans, while Democrats prefer the Greeks. You can see how, in some ways, the ideals of these powers reflect the ideals of these parties. The Greeks believed that equality was the goal of the state. Much of the wealth of the Athenians belonged to Athens, and they put a lot of effort into making sure it was distributed fairly. The Romans saw the state's role as expanding and providing opportunity. They were less concerned with equality, and more concerned with making sure people were rewarded for service.

I don't want you to read too much into this. Greece and Rome were very different from any government we have today. Also, I don't think this came about intentionally. If you look at the history of the parties, the Democrats were for the independence of the states, while the modern Republican Party was founded largely to oppose slavery in the middle of the 19th century (there were earlier parties that used the name "Republican," but the modern party started in opposition to slavery). The positions of the two parties developed slowly, and not in an effort to copy the concerns of Greece and Rome.

HL - Reassessing Hoover

It looks like we will not have time to explore Hoover's presidency to the extent that I had intended. My closing thoughts on Hoover, then, are that he did not cause the Depression and he did try a lot of things to stop it that he does not get credit for. The biggest problem Hoover had was that he let himself seem insensitive to people who were suffering. In a sense, his "everything is OK" attitude is understandable, too. The last thing the economy needed was a president creating a panic because he said things about how bad the economy was. Hoover was clearly aware of how confidence in the country and the economy could lead to a healthier system. Hoover did not "sleep through" the Depression. Calvin Coolidge probably would have slept through most of it, but he didn't get the chance. Hoover was very knowledgeable about the economy and tried to draw lessons from history.

Some have said that Hoover had the misfortune of being an uncharismatic president at a time when America needed a leader more than anything. I understand what the point is, but I don't think Hoover was completely without charisma. If he were, how could he of won the popular vote by such a large margin?

HL - FDR and the Depression

Here is a Paul Krugman piece for the New York Times. I referenced some of these ideas in class, but didn't remember where I saw this article. Krugman makes the argument that the New Deal would have worked better if FDR had taken bolder action. He essentially takes the opposite view from the conservatives who say that FDR's policies failed because he made too many sweeping changes in the economy. The reservation I have about including this link is that Krugman is really more concerned with contemporary economic policy than with understanding FDR.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/opinion/10krugman.html?_r=1

HL - Did FDR Prolong the Depression?

Since I don't think we are going to have time to delve into this issue to the depth that I had hoped, here are links to two articles regarding the issue:

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx?RelNum=5409

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=B630965F5DA4E3281307EB1D4474B32D?diaryId=10644

The first is from UCLA summarizing the journal article published by two of their economists claiming that FDR's economic policies prolonged the Depression by 7 years. The second article is one of the many criticisms of the article that I found. It does not do a point-by-point criticism, but it analyzes GDP projections used by the UCLA economists.

You do not have to read past the URL to realize that the second article is from a leftist website. I hope if you read it, though, you do not disregard it on that basis alone.

There is another method some have used to criticize FDR's New Deal and its effect on the economy - the comparison of the US recovery vs. the recovery in other countries. We talked briefly about this in class. England did recover more quickly, but they did so through a dole (payments directly to people without any work requirements). A dole is definitely a way to get cash flowing in the economy, but it is unlikely Americans would have liked it. It was also against FDR's nature to give people something for nothing.

Analysis of FDR's reaction to the Depression informs the discussion about our current president's economic policies during our economic downturn. Since historians and politicians cannot agree on the efficacy of FDR's approach, it is clear why they cannot agree on the best approach now.