“Look at Tunis and what it did. Yemen’s people are stronger.” — Yemeni protester in The Guardian
See also:
Category: Social World
Uprising in Egypt
(via The Daily Dish)
What protests look like:
See also:
- Summary of the last two days’ protests.
- The United States’ support for Egypt.
- What happens when you’re arrested by the state security service. (warning: contains one quote with vulgar language)
UPDATE: We just watched the video over lunch, and it actually resulted in a very good discussion. Our morning novel discussions have been useful here, in helping us see the multiple perspectives of the actors in the street protests: the protesters and the police. After all, the police have families too.
I gave a little spiel at the beginning, to set the stage and to point out the potentially historical nature of these protests. Democracy spreading through the middle east has huge implications for a country fighting two wars in the region; not to mention the blowback from these conflicts.
The truth of the anger of the protesters in the video seemed to resonate, making poignant what could have appeared farcical. The music and the Kennedy quote also helped my students identify with these events in such a far off place.
We also touched on the role of the U.S. in supporting the Mubarak government, and the potential of the uprising to lead to an anti-US, muslim fundamentalist government (via the Muslim Brotherhood). We still need to talk about what the US should and can do to support democracy in this situation, which is so full of conflicting imperatives.
The Chrysalids, Godwined
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
— Mike Godwin, 1989.
Our daily discussions of The Chrysalids have gone on long enough that Hitler came up. I can’t remember the details, but somehow, it occurred to one of my students that, since we don’t know exactly when the story is set, and given the outstanding question, “Did they ever find Hitler’s body?” what if Hitler turned up in the book.
Sigh.
Quite coincidentally, I ran into this article today, about Hitler’s last bodyguard. Apparently, he’s getting too old to answer all his fan mail. Tennessee gets a mention.
Sigh.
On a final note, the above quote about Godwin’s Law is a nice one to use in a cycle where we’re talking about probability.
Cheers.
Tunisian revolution
NPR had a great article today summarizing what’s been going on in Tunisia.
I played the article this morning. We had a little discussion about the conflicting groups in Tunisia and the possible causes of the revolution. It would be nice to be able to follow the emergence of a democracy in real-time.
U.S. Immigration Data
Raymond Cohn has a great table of immigration data on the Economic History Association website.
This data ties very nicely into the work we’re doing on graphing. The Excel file with the post 1820 data, and another with pre-1790 data, make it easier to work with (note the pre-1970 data comes from the Wikipedia page on the history of immigration; it was the easiest source to find a table of data).
Since each small group of students is responsible for a different wave of immigration, the groups will create bar graphs showing the countries of origin for each wave. They should look like these:
and,
Plotting the time series as a line graph would be another great way to slice the data:
Note that the data in the table is as a percentage of total immigration, so the numbers do not compare directly from one time period to the next; however, the proportions still work to show the same patterns.
Revolution
One of my students expressed an interest today in learning more about the French and Russian revolutions. Coincidentally, there’s a piece by Josef Joffe that makes the connection between the recent Tunisian revolution and Marx’s ideas about the recipe for a successful revolution.
A country needs to have a certain level of education and wealth to overthrow a tyrant:
If you are poor, you have neither the time nor the energy to engage in politics. If you are not educated, you lack the cultural skills to articulate your demands—to agitate and organize.
— Joffe (2010) in Why Tunisia Isn’t a Tipping Point for the Arab World
Samuel Huntington, took this idea forward in his book, The Third Wave. He looked at democratic revolutions between 1974 and 1989 from around the world and found that 75% of countries had a revolution when they developed to the point where the per-capita (per person) income was between $1,000 and $3,000. Tunisia’s per-capita income is $1,000 (when adjusted for inflation).
P.S.: The Boston Globe’s Big Picture has an excellent picture series from the last few weeks.
Minorities working together
One night in Georgia in the summer of 1962, Dresner and King were trapped with other activists in a house surrounded by hundreds of members of the local White Citizens Council.
While they were waiting for help, King told Dresner about the Passover seder he’d attended that spring at a Reform synagogue in Atlanta. He particularly recalled reading the Haggadah and hearing the phrase “We were slaves in Egypt.”
“Dr. King said to me, ‘I was enormously impressed that 3,000 years later, these people remember their ancestors were slaves, and they’re not ashamed,” Dresner said. “He told me, ‘We Negroes have to learn that, not to be ashamed of our slave heritage.’”
— Fishkoff (2010) in A half-century later, rabbis recall marching with Martin Luther King
Prejudice is one the major themes that’s come up in our discussions of the novel The Chrysalids. Students raised the idea that different minority groups might band together to fight for rights. I offered the examples of Jews in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. Just in time, Sue Fishkoff has an article on rabbi’s who worked with Martin Luther King Jr.
The rabbis who joined these efforts were arrested, jailed and sometimes beaten, protected by the color of their skin from the worst physical dangers, but nonetheless threatened on a daily basis.
— Fishkoff (2010) in A half-century later, rabbis recall marching with Martin Luther King
Haïkuleaks: Diplomatic cables as poetry
Therefore, he added,
we must prepare carefully,
out of the spotlight.— U.S. diplomatic cable Haiku via Haïkuleaks
We’ll be studying poetry soon, and Wikileaks is in the news. I therefore post the mind-expanding website, Haïkuleaks, which condenses diplomatic cables into seventeen syllables and three lines each.
The site uses Haiku Finder to scan through the cables for inadvertent Haikus.
‘People need to see
the results of decisions,’
the Sultan stated.