Whatever merits there might or might not be to the case gun rights advocates make in favor of more guns and less government restriction, a recent email equating gun control with totalitarianism is over the top. The offending message and FactCheck.org’s corrections are worth reading.

The multilingual World Digital Library is now online. It is designed for students, though I imagine specialists with narrower regional focuses could learn a thing or two. For more information, see the Washington Post’s related article yesterday. This piece also references a related, but more mature digital history project, American Memory, which is hosted by the Library of Congress.

I’ve started a simple blog called History Courses for my students beginning this summer. The point is to have a simple one-way communication stream, a bulletin board of sorts, although students are free to comment on the blog, if they want.

By the way, my iBook was out of commission all winter. That’s one reason for the paucity of new posts here. The other is that I have been teaching ESL instead of history, because budget cuts at George Mason University left me without any courses this winter. ESL entails a lot of hours in the classroom.

I’ve made a little more progress in my Great War course thanks to the early deadlines for book orders. We can’t cover as many books as I might have liked because of the compressed time period: three three-hour meetings per week for one month. I can’t fill all that time with lectures either, for then the main question would be who succumbs to fatigue first, me from speaking or the students from listening. More depth and less breadth is my goal, though the reading schedule will remain rigorous.

We’re going to do four major units with six books. First, there will be the origins question with July 1914: Soldiers, Statesmen, and the Coming of the Great War by Samuel R. Williamson, Jr. and Russel Van Wyk (Bedford/St. Martin’s 2003). We’ll supplement this documentary history with the first chapter of The First World War by Hew Strachan (Penguin 2005) Second, we will use several classes to cover the course of the global conflict using Strachan’s survey together with the personal narratives in Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis (HarperCollins 2005). Third, we will use Modris Eksteins’ Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Anchor 1990) to consider the cultural impact of the war. Finally, we will look more closely at the war in two countries with Imperial Germany and the Great War by Roger Chickering (Cambridge 1998) and France and the Great War by Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker (Cambridge 2003).

I might add some articles or online sources when I write the syllabus, and students will get a broader feel for the literature through brief oral book presentations at the end of the semester.

Because students will need a little time to begin reading in the first place, I will begin the class by looking at a selection of classic films. There could also be a lecture at the beginning on broader trends in war and society, although I’m tempted to forego that in favor of students raising related questions during discussions.

Incentives for students to read will be not only the subject matter and two short papers, but also a midterm and final exam. While I am no big fan of exams in history courses, many undergraduate students seem to need this carrot and stick. They might even appreciate it, though I would expect none to admit as much.

What happens during classroom time will depend largely on class size. The theoretical upper limit is 45, but I’m told 25 is more usual in the summer. Even that would be too large for meaningful discussions, so I’m thinking about what kind of discussions among small groups of students could occur within the larger classroom, with the groups then reporting results to the class as a whole. I have little experience with this setup in history; however, I regularly use the technique when teaching English to non-native speakers. I believe that this student-centered approach could be applied to history, in which learning historical thinking and a new topic is also about doing. Students need to read, think about, and discuss history in order to make it their own. Discussions in small groups could significantly increase the amount of practice that each student gets in a larger class.

Integrating these student-centered discussions into classroom time should also help with the pacing of each three-hour evening session. There will be more variety for everyone, and time usually passes more quickly for students when they are actively engaged in the class.

George Mason’s Hist 100 courses are supposed to cover Western Civilization in one semester. To manage this Sisyphean task, I switched from a chronological to a thematic approach. While this makes sense from an analytic point of view, covering themes seems to alienate some students, because the themes appear in the foreground, not the events and personalities. Moreover, the themes tend to bridge larger periods of time. With “Religion and Society,” for instance, I cover the Investiture Conflict, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Wars of Religion, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. And “War and Society” goes from the French Revolution through the Second World War into the Cold War.

The material in my thematic courses has been organized in a more meaningful way than was possible under a broad chronological approach, but it has not held students’ attention. That is why I am thinking about covering a selection of specific episodes the next time around. I could put these up front and use the people, ideas, and issues involved as a vehicle to understand the broader themes that I want them to learn. A possible subtitle for such a course might be “Select Events and Ideas,” which might also make the history feel more manageable to the students.

I still need to work out the details, but here’s my catalog description for one course I am teaching this summer:

Hist 388-C02 – The Great War

Some 9 to 10 million people lost their lives in the Great War between 1914 and 1918. Most of the dead were soldiers; however, the war affected the lives of nearly everyone, not only because of the mass mourning it inspired, but also because of its economic, social, cultural and political consequences. Why did Europe’s great powers go to war? Why did they keep fighting? How did soldiers and civilians experience the war? What were its consequences? This course seeks to explore the First World War, a total war, from as many angles as possible, including politics, diplomacy, strategy, tactics, economics, class, gender, generation, and nationality. The course will center on discussions of assigned readings, which will feel heavy during this short term. We will also consider some films. Grades will be based on class participation, two short papers, a short book presentation, and a midterm and final exam.

The particular challenge with this course is the intensive summer format George Mason University uses. The course meets for about three hours, three times per week for one month.

I am disappointed by the news Tom Ricks shares in “Fiasco at the Army War College.” In it he asks, “Did faculty members at the Army War College curtail their criticism of the Iraq war for fear of institutional retaliation?” In fact, they did more, even blackballing Ricks. I’m almost surprised, because I think highly of that institution, but I also recall how little respect the Bush administration has shown for professionalism in so many areas of government.

Thirteen more days.

Juan Cole offers some interesting historical perspective on Israel’s wars in a piece called “Gaza 2008: Micro-Wars and Macro-Wars.” Here is one of his more provocative assessments:

Israel’s political tradition seeks expansion if possible; if not possible, it seeks a balance of power with its enemies. If that is not possible, it seeks to be held harmless from its avowed foes. If that is not possible, it is willing to wage total war to punish the enemy population until it accepts at least a cold peace. Where necessary, Israel is willing to give up territorial expansion to get the cold peace.

If only I knew what “total war” means here. In modern European history it was when the distinction between soldiers and civilians was increasingly erased during the First and Second World Wars. If Israel sometimes erases such distinctions in urban situations, I am not aware of a policy that accepts this erasure, especially not for its own civilians. Presumably Cole has something else in mind or is using hyperbole, either way demonstrating how slippery the term “total war” can be.

And “cold peace”? Well, the Cold War was a rhetorical war in the metropoles and a shooting war in other countries by proxy; however, it was otherwise a peace, albeit one punctuated by extreme levels of militarization that the push of a button could have transformed into the first real total war. Perhaps then “cold war” in a generic sense means a war with no shooting. Does “cold peace” mean a peace marked by periodic violence? If so, I have not noticed any particular willingness by Israel to accept this violence. Or is this about an icy peace punctuated by the permanent threat of violence? Wouldn’t that be a cold war then?

Putting aside the overly generous use of unexplained labels, Cole’s article is worth reading, whether or not you agree with his take on “Israel’s old expansionist tendencies.” The historical context is useful, and the term “micro-wars” is at least consistent with the metaphor upon which “asymmetric war” depends, though it encompasses more dimensions than merely partisan warfare. Cole points to four specific factors in the twenty-first century: (1) the integration of the religious political parties Hamas and Hizbullah with the population around them via the parties’ social services; (2) suicide bombs, tank-piercing capabilities, and small rocket fire; (3) the support of a regional power (a common feature of other guerilla wars); and (4) “Israel’s Achilles heel, its demographic vulnerability”—a violent environment encourages emigration. Cole uses these factors as the backdrop for his narrative of Israel’s conflicts in Southern Lebanon and Gaza.

In the end, though, he wonders if global opinion might prove a bigger problem for Israel, albeit only in the long term. Public opinion is the one thing I’ve been wondering about as well.

And “macro-war”? Does Cole mean the old conventional wars that Israel used to fight with its neighbors? Or is he talking about global public opinion, which is the focus of Israel’s and its enemies’ propaganda wars and public diplomacy?

In “America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree,” Marty Nemko argues, “College is a wise choice for far fewer people than are currently encouraged to consider it.” Looking at my plagiarism rate from last semester and considering the number of students at George Mason University who fail the mandatory History 100 survey simply because they do not show up or turn in their work, I have to admit that he has a point. He argues that high school students in the bottom half of their class should think twice before entering a four-year college. A two-year college or non-degree program might be more appropriate. He bases this advice on the following disheartening finding: “Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later.” And they were piling up debt.

Part of the problem, he says, relates to the quality of teaching. Class size, for example, is a problem. How much attention can I give each student in a fifty-person lecture course that sometimes meets for “small” group discussions of twenty-five students? My classroom experience, however, suggests that something else is also at work. There seems to be some kind of cultural or educational gap that has not prepared some of my students for the university classroom and university assignments. There are always a handful of students who expect every lecture to be both entertaining and amusing to every student in the classroom. Whatever happened to students just putting up with something that doesn’t interest them personally and learning about it anyway? What about basic curiosity and giving something a chance? This past semester two young men surreptitiously texted each other during a forty-five-minute excerpt from Chaplin’s hilarious “Modern Times.” Is there any hope that such students will ever be interested in anything in the classroom?

And what about those students who feel that reading assignments are an imposition, as if everything worth knowing were available on Wikipedia or a comparable website? True story: I had a student this semester who preferred to read email and texts on her smart phone instead of listening to the lecture. Usually when students do this, they try to be discrete about it, even if their facial expressions give them away. This student, however, held the phone up in front of her face so there could be no mistaking where her attention was. When I spoke to her about it another time, she said she was using the phone for the internet so she could bring something to the discussion. I told her I knew the little bit that was on the internet for our subject and that I was more interested in her own thoughts on the assigned book. She was flabbergasted.

These complaints of mine can lead to a slippery slope. I can’t forget all the hard-working, disciplined, and curious students I know. I don’t want to succumb to the cynicism that pervades Rate Your Students, a blog where some academics vent about their students and colleagues. It really is up to me to make the best I can out of a situation, even for the Sisyphean task of teaching the required one-semester survey in Western Civilization. Indeed, I think I’ve become a better teacher for these experiences. Still, Marty Nemko has a point, even if the fault does not just lie with institutions selling the dream of a four-year degree. There is clearly a gulf separating the expectations of a portion of the student body from the expectations that they encounter in the classroom. While many colleges and universities need to be more student-centered, prospective students need to consider whether a four-year college is the right choice for them. It is for many people, but not for everyone.

The British Film Institute has a YouTube channel that offers a lot of historic films. Here is “Santa Claus’ by G. A. Smith in 1898. Apparently the special effects were quite a feat 110 years ago.

For something longer and more in tune with this blog’s recurring theme of war and society, see “Christmas Under Fire” (1941), which looks at Britain at war on Christmas Eve. This film from the Ministry of Information has an American narrator for an American audience. It was made before Pearl Harbor, when the American public had no stomach for going to war in Europe.