International Baccalaureate History Topics

Hello everybody!  It would be nice if you post a quick “hello” here just so I know you found the blog.  On Wednesday afternoon I will post some thoughts on our first reading and that will be your first opportunity for extra credit on our daily quiz.

On your calendar you might make note of Wednesday Sept. 15.  On that day noted historian Robert Dallek will be visiting our class.  This is an “A” day so “B” day students will have to opt over from their 3rd period teacher.  His recent book (2007), “Partners in Power: Nixon and Kissinger” is central to the work we will be doing in class though it will not be a required text (yet). 

I am very excited to have two sections again of my favorite class.  It amazes me that so many young people are willing to throw themselves into a real academic challenge when easier options exist.  I think this goes against the grain of much of what we hear about the younger generation. 

That said this course will be very demanding but I know all of you have the potential to do well, its just a matter of commitment.  Let me know if there is anything I can ever do to help, and welcome!

That was the way he always signed his name.  My Dad died last night.  I’ll be leaving Monday afternoon to be with my Mom and siblings and their families.  I’ll give you instructions tomorrow on what I want you to do with your remaining review sessions.  I will be back Friday so our review at my house Saturday is ON.  I’ll pass a map out in the morning.  But now I’d like to share a few things about my Dad.

He was a bit aloof with me, with all of us, growing up.  He was the middle child, born in 1923, his Dad, Edwin, and family struggled through the depression, and my Dad, reluctantly, along with his brother Robin, served in WWII.  He was a freshman at Yale when Pearl Harbor happened and though he went on to finish his spring semester there he enlisted in the summer and after volunteering for every imaginable avenue of special training was finally sent in to the war in 1944 where he was engaged with a mortar battalion and helped liberate the Czechoslovakian city of Cheb.  After his war experience he returned, on the GI bill, to the University of Wisconsin, to be near his family where he finished his degree and went on to get his MD.  He met my mother Gene there.

I will always remember the night on or about my 21st birthday when, enjoying a drink before dinner (bourbon?) he started out of the blue telling me war stories.  It was the first time I really regarded him as a man.  By that I mean a man who struggled and fought, not for the country but rather for himself and his ideals.  I know I’ve told you all he first got to vote in 1944 while overseas and the seargent, seeing he voted for Wilke, ripped up his ballot and said, “we’re all for FDR here”.  Welcome to democracy.

In my growing up years Dad did not ever appear to struggle.  He was aloof.  He always seemed in control.  I never saw him flabbergasted except maybe on the tennis court, or at the ping-pong table, or once when I was going through my own pre-teen rebellion efforts.

In my years after living at home, which actually started at 13, he frequently sent me letters.  I wish I had saved them.  He sent me letters while I attended boarding school and while I lived at my older sister Cally’s and at college and after my move thousands of miles away to California.  His letters were invariable typed, dictated, somewhat chatty but always thoughtful and signed with his sweeping CN Steussy MD.

When he heard I wanted to get a teaching credential his reply was something like, “well he won’t want to do that the rest of his life!”.  Regardless he was here for our wedding, saw his grandchildren, including his namesake, my 8 year old son Calvin, and after we bought our atrociously expensive house (by Indiana standards) and I was ensconsed in the IB program he seemed to accept that this teaching thing might be more than a short post-college foray. 

My Dad lived a good long life.  He, I think, was an amazing husband.  I am more worried about my Mom now than anyone.  Growing up though he may have been aloof to me, one thing I will always remember was his not just open affection, but out right respect of my mother.  I have always had positive relations with women, as friends colleagues and superiors.  I am quite certain that this was in part encouraged by witnessing my parents interaction with one another.

 It can not be much of a suprise for an 86 year old man to die but it is still hard.  All of those TOK lessons about being and identity, self and meaning suddenly bubble up with an intense realism.  I know it is trite to say his body has died but his spirit lives on, but maybe the reason little sayings like that persist is because there is a real foundation of truth to them.  He will live on through me in part maybe through the deepest devotion love and respect I have for my wife Norma.  He will live on through me in my often irascible nature like voting against a sitting war president, and he will live on through my children at least in their own forays into the world of athleticism which compelled him for all of his years.

I hope he left with no regrets.  I think he lived a good long life.  I’m sure if anything he would be worried about Mom.  I think we all are.  That is the main reason I am going home.  I fthere are any lessons here for a wider audience I guess you can gleam them for yourselves.  Thanks though for allowing a bit of   experience for me.  I will see you in the morning, and will establish a footing for a few solid days of review so you all can g o on into your own irascible lives.

Love to you all.

Mr Steussy.

So what is this “New World Order”?  I am not inclined to give much credit to the boundless conspiracy theories but they do make for some humorous anecdotes (see “Stonecutter’s Song” above).

Seriously though what would Kissinger say now, over 15 years after the publication of this book, about the New World Order.  There is an inescabably Eurocentric focus to his analysis of the periods of various World Orders, from the Peace of Westphalia to the Congress of Vienna.  What did these conceptions mean to the populations of Southeast Asia, Africa or the Americas?  Not much, thank you.  If that is the case then, if Kissinger is really talking about European hegemony, and I think we could safely argue that the United States is a product of that, then is our current embroilment in the “war on terror” really much of a suprise?

As we conquered the west in the euphamism of “manifest destiny” the native American’s pushed back but could not prevail.  As “we”, meaning the European history and culture of representative democracy, seperation of church and state and free market systems, push into all corners of the globe,  is it really suprising that some are pushing back?  Is it suprising that some have acquired the means to really hurt us?   Will 9/11 be regarded as a sort of modern battle of little bighorn?  Was, maybe more accurately,  the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan like the Spanish retreat from the great Pueblo Revollt of 1680? 

In 2110, and yet at least one other “New World Order” will have emerged by then according to Kissinger’s rubric, what will the students of this classroom refer to our time as?  Will it be seen, as the quote on the wall has suggested, as the end of history?  As per Wikipedia…

The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama, expanding on his 1989 essay “The End of History?”, published in the international affairs journal The National Interest. In the book, Fukuyama argues that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the end point of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government.

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”^[1]

Some see his thesis conflicting with Karl Marx‘s version of the “end of prehistory“.^[2]. Some scholars identify the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as the source of Fukuyama’s language, by way of Alexandre Kojève. Kojeve argued that the progress of history must lead towards secular free-market democracy, (conceived in terms of a multi-party system of political representation). It is conjectured that Fukuyama learned of Kojève through his teacher Allan Bloom.

Have you all seen these before?  They’re called “Word clouds”.  You can cut and paste ant text and the words will be randomized but also manipulated in size by their frequency.  In other words in Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech, above, he used “World” quite a bit and “communism” rather less so.  I think they are interesting.

Here in Ambrose and Brinkley’s 15th chapter we have a marathon of words.  40+ pages!  Note the 5th edition was published in 1988, the sixth in 1991.  In one of those editions, the 5th I suspect, this chapter was new and a classic case of not having enough historical distance to weed out the significant from the non.

If I were hunting for terms I might choose Ambrose’s take in the Iran-Contra affair, Lebanon, Grenada and maybe the Falkland Islands.

So what do A&B think of old Ronnie?  Good or bad or somewhere in-between?  See you tomorrow.

CRS

A more exciting time can hardly be imagined and yet I don’t remember it at all.  Bard college in the hudson valley of NY was an extraordinary place for me.  I met my lifelong friends there.  I really dug into and estrablished my academic and philisophical roots that ground me to this day, and I had a lot of fun.  However it would be hard to imagine a place that was such an island.  No one had a TV.  Of course the Internet didn’t exist for any intents or puropses from 84-89 and we were in the middle of nowhere really,  five miles from the nearest “hick” town and 90 miles from NYC.  I didn’t read the paper (I read enough for class thank you, didn’t read for fun) so the events of those years happened beyond my perspective, except for the quick influx of activism puntcuating the two presidential elections, and the Iran-Contra Affair, which I do remember driving across the river to the Kingston Mall to be able to watch on a TV in a bar. 

By time November and December of that year happened I had moved with my then girlfriend to San Diego and was living in a hastilly built illegal room inside a garage of a house rented by students in Solana beach.  The Internet still didn’t exist and I hadn’t re-acquired my following of current events that I had enjoyed in High School.  It is very hard for me to believe that I was so completely out of touch.

Regardless I did, as I have told you, Visit CZ, Poland and Hungary in 1992 when my brother Ed was living in Prague.  My parents came for a short visit as well and we ventured into west CZ to find the farm my Dad had bivouacked in in WWII.  It was a great trip.  I’ll try to bring in pictures.

Given what you know now, from White and other sources (we’ll get to Ambrose and Kissinger later) should it be a suprise that events occured as they did in Poland, CZ, the GDR and the other countries of Eaastern Europe?  How were the events similar to and different from one another?  How were they similar to and different from the events of 56, 68 and 1981?  Enquiring minds want to know.  CRS

A curious phrase, “national communism”.  It would seem a bit contradictory.  Communism is supposed to “world-wide” of course.  No room here for that pesty “nationalist” stuff.  But recognizing the road to communism was long and hard I suppose one has to make room for the continuance of nations – at least for a while.  The East Germans, Poles, Hungarians and Yugoslavians certainly thought so.

What is most suprising to me here here is that the era of Soviet domination of the communist movement is so short.  1945, from the end of the war and Yalta and the recognition of spheres of influence to 1953 and the death of Stalin.  The Poles, to a certain extent, and the Yugoslavs and the Chinese more so, really bgin to chart their own course.  One can’t help but wonder had the events of Hungary been handled a little bit differently, and this was alluded to in Kissinger I think, then maybe the Soviet tanks would not have rolled through Budaphest.  Of course they did, and they will again in Czecoslovakia in 1968, but allow it to be asserted that by the mid 50s there were challenges to Soviet domination throuout Eastern Europe.  

So all of this is still deep background to the era that your Documents exams will be focused on. You will be (are) examining the 70s and 80s, but “own knowledge” I think might rightly draw a bit from these larger circles of causality.  Please remember to bring in a copy of your documents tomorrow to the extent that you have them.  I would at least like to look at a few together in class, recognizing them potentially as drafts if you like and I would like them all in and done by Thursday.

I have alwys believed that Kissinger titled this chapter with full knowledge of its allusion to Sigmund Freud’s famous book of 1930, “Civilization and its Discontents”.  In Freud’s book he wrote that individuals and societies are in inherent conflict.  Individuals have certain desires which orderly society must thwart.  I wonder how Kissinger would explain this vis-a-vis “Detente”.

So what exactly is detente and why don’t people like it?  How does it work and what are some tangible examples that Kissinger offers up?  What goes on in the Middle East, with arms control, eastern europe and the USSR that serve as results of detente and to what end?  Where did this all take us?  One thing to muse over of course is the image in the “Time” magazine article above.  Who do you suppose the little man pulling on Nixon is?  I hope you know who Nixon is shaking hands with!

STWF

“Richard Milhous Nixon inherited near-civil war conditions”.  That quote has always stuck with me and this time reminded me of the book pictured above, published a few years ago, that I have wanted to read.  I am requesting it from the county library and will read it this week and possibly share some of it with you.  From what I remember of the review its a pretty dramatic, microcosmic look at a just a few stories that may help to underscore, or better understand the full extent of Kissinger’s quote.

“Vietnam and beyond” is the title I gave to this unit years ago and it sticks rather well.  Here we get in to Kissinger’s assessment of how Nixon was different, “complex”, and how he pulled the country away, or tried to, from its Wilsonian moorings.  Once again I find Kissinger’s assessment of Wilson complicated.  He seems to say here, that though Nixon did need, he believes, to start focusing on national interests, and allow the old “invisible-hand” to render stability, he appears to have a respect for what Wilson did in his time and how that ushered us through two world wide wars.  I do think though that he feels it was Wislonianism possibly that took us in to the quagmire of Vietnam, yet Nixon, “shared the great American yearning for a foreign policy devoid of self-interest”.

For all the pundits out there on the conservative right attacking Obama’s offer to “extend a hand if they (Iran, North Korea etc.) wil unclench their fist”, might want to remember that Nixon said much the same in 1969 about the need to talk with China and the Soviet Union, and how those talks helped lead to the final extrication from Vietnam.  Nixon, Kissinger asserted, saw the USSR not as a zero-sum game, but rather as something more complicated.  There is another game he brings into the discussion towards the end.  How does that work?

So before we get into Kissinger’s assessment of these years…  how does Ambrose characterize him?  In “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” the film inspired by the book by Christopher Hutchins, the claim is made that HK drops the ploy just prior to the ’68 election that South Vietnam will get better treatment by the Republicans causing South Vietnam to abruptly pull out.  Ambrose I don’t see making that connection, but he does name the same woman interviewed in the film who delivered the message.

Was 1968 the US’s chance to end things?  What were Nixon’s choices?  Why did he choose the one he did?  How successful does Ambrose say it was?  What was Kissinger’s role in all of this?

Remember the mining of Haiphong Harbor when we get to Kissinger.  Ambrose recognizes that the Soviet Union does nothing even when they lose a ship.  For years it was believed that a mining of the northern harbor would be translated as a serious escalation of the war and might invite more overt Chinese or Soviet intervention.  When the US finally does mine the harbor, seriously jeopardizing North Vietnam’s flow of supplies, the Soviet Union and China do nothing.  Why?  Why does Ambrose say?  What will HK say?

I can’t wait until Cuba opens up to historical scholarship.  Do you speak spanish?  Are you enjoying history?  Take some Latin American courses in college (UCSD & SDSU have some great people in this area) and then you can apply to go and maybe someday some archives will be open, and some people will be open, and we can start really discovering what has gone n in Cuba for the last 50 years.

For the state to declare itself “aetheistic” and to remove Christmas as a government sanctioned holiday is one thing.  For the population to submit to these decrees is another.  It reminds me of the story of the Pueblo before their infamous revolt of 1680.  The one succesful revolt of native Americans against the Spanish.  Prior to the revolt of course the Spanish had “outlawed” as best they could native religions and enforced Christianity on the Pueblos.  We know now though that many Pueblos continued to practice their religion underground (figuratively) or melded their own religious beliefs with those being imposed on them.

How do you think the Cubans reacted?  Did they just walk away from their Catholic beliefs or do you suppose they practiced them in secret?  What do you suppose happened to Christmas, and Easter in the day to day life and experience of Cubans?  It will be an interesting story to tell one day for sure.