College: Re-Telling American History

So i recently started going to a university for the first time (im 26) What concerns me is the “american history” course im taking. In a nutshell they are re-telling american history through the eyes of socialist/marxist historians. I smell the bullshit my fear is that the 18 year olds on my right and left do not. Is this common in all colleges? and what should i do/say about this if anything and to whom.

Read history outside of class, and challenge the professor if he says things that are spun in one direction or another.

College isn’t supposed to be learning how to re-say a bunch of shit someone wants to to say on command, it is supposed to be you digging the hole, that will be where you pour your foundation when you get out of school. (That and party, sex, party, sex, etc).

See this as a call you inform yourself, a challenge to better yourself. Learn. Like actual real, honest learning. Because parroting a bunch of shit from a text book or prof’s notes isn’t learning. Know what I mean?

Also, get used to this.

Business classes were the only ones not infected with leftist dreams of utopia. And for the love of Chirst, stay away from anything close to “woman’s studies”. Good lord. I thought I was going to meet hot bi women and they would think I was sensitive, etc. That shit only happens in movies.

The real world is a bunch of angry chicks that hate you for having a penis, and know why you are in that class.

[quote]SHREDTODEATH wrote:
Is this common in all colleges? [/quote]

Yep. U.N. controls the educational curriculum.

[quote]countingbeans wrote:
Read history outside of class, and challenge the professor if he says things that are spun in one direction or another.

College isn’t supposed to be learning how to re-say a bunch of shit someone wants to to say on command, it is supposed to be you digging the hole, that will be where you pour your foundation when you get out of school. (That and party, sex, party, sex, etc).

See this as a call you inform yourself, a challenge to better yourself. Learn. Like actual real, honest learning. Because parroting a bunch of shit from a text book or prof’s notes isn’t learning. Know what I mean?[/quote]
Its a little worse than being “spun”. Like rascism was created to rob white workers. Slavery was a means for wealthy to establish mental control over poor whites, the revolution happened because evil whites wanted all the “peoples” money (that was just day one). Im going to call him on his marxist bullshit next class.

Oh and here is the ONLY historians he has presented

  1. Theodore W. Allen

  2. Noel Ignatiev

  3. Howard Zinn

[quote]SHREDTODEATH wrote:
Like rascism was created [/quote]

Anyone that says this shouldn’t be teaching a college course.

Slavery was a means for “wealthy” to produce goods to bring to market. Nothing more, nothing less. Some saw it is a dying economic tools until things like the cotton gin came along and made the costs out weight the benefit. (Don’t know if I totally agree with that, read it in passing.)

Well, this is sort of true, but not in the context you put it. USofA was founded by educated smuggliers and tax evaders that were willing to risk life and limb to keep the fruits of their labor and be left alone/have more say by/in government.

^ should read: benefits outweight the costs

[quote]SHREDTODEATH wrote:
So i recently started going to a university for the first time (im 26) What concerns me is the “american history” course im taking. In a nutshell they are re-telling american history through the eyes of socialist/marxist historians. I smell the bullshit my fear is that the 18 year olds on my right and left do not. Is this common in all colleges? and what should i do/say about this if anything and to whom.[/quote]

I took an American History course on the founders as an undergrad. We read four books: one about women during the Revolution, two about blacks during the Revolution, and one about Native Americans during the Revolution. A friend of mine raised his hand and said to the professor (who was a black woman, if it matters): “This is a course on the founders, we’re two months in you haven’t mentioned John Adams yet.” The look on her face was fantastic.

That said, you can;t boil it down to a generalization about higher education in general. Some professors favor this, others that. Some are great, some are horrible. The better the school, the more likely you’re going to get somebody who’s a straight shooter (outside of gender studies, of course).

[quote]smh23 wrote:

That said, you can;t boil it down to a generalization about higher education in general. Some professors favor this, others that. Some are great, some are horrible. The better the school, the more likely you’re going to get somebody who’s a straight shooter (outside of gender studies, of course).[/quote]

This is true too. I went to school in MA. They are brutally left up here, I’m sure other parts of the country are a bit more “center”.

Weird too, because the little I’ve read about the War for Canada, oops I mean 1812, the more I think NE would be right leaning…

“If you think that is an exaggeration, get a copy of A People?s History of the United States by Howard Zinn and read it. As someone who used to read translations of official Communist newspapers in the days of the Soviet Union, I know that those papers? attempts to degrade the United States did not sink quite as low as Howard Zinn?s book.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/337103/role-educators-thomas-sowell

[quote]JayPierce wrote:
“If you think that is an exaggeration, get a copy of A People?s History of the United States by Howard Zinn and read it. As someone who used to read translations of official Communist newspapers in the days of the Soviet Union, I know that those papers? attempts to degrade the United States did not sink quite as low as Howard Zinn?s book.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/337103/role-educators-thomas-sowell[/quote]
Thats the exact text he is teaching from. I know its garbage but i see all the young minds around me eating it up as factual

In my experience business classes are by far the best. It is the saving grace for me and is the one thing that makes the obvious political slant even mildly tolerable.

Lots, but not all of business professors slant “right”. I use quotations marks because it’s really just the application of a bit of common sense, logic, cause and effect, unintended consequences, and basic economics; it really shouldn’t be considered political…

Business professor can also be a lot of fun when you have them shocking the class with what most of the students consider blasphemy. The “does not compute” look is priceless.

[quote]SHREDTODEATH wrote:
Oh and here is the ONLY historians he has presented

  1. Theodore W. Allen

  2. Noel Ignatiev

  3. Howard Zinn[/quote]

LOL. Radical leftists are scumbags. Don’t let on what you really think or you’ll likely be marked down.

[quote]
Is this common in all colleges?[/quote]

Pretty much. Although if you say academia is riddled with leftists you’re accused of being a conspiracy theorist or a whacko.

This is all kind of interesting. I took my bachelor’s in environmental science at a different school than my masters. My first school was much more pro-business and grad school seemed to have a bit more of a tree hugging hippy element to it but still down to earth for the most part.

How has the socialist teacher scewed the view of history?
What is it that he is teaching wrong?

[quote]countingbeans wrote:
Also, get used to this.

Business classes were the only ones not infected with leftist dreams of utopia. And for the love of Chirst, stay away from anything close to “woman’s studies”. Good lord. I thought I was going to meet hot bi women and they would think I was sensitive, etc. That shit only happens in movies.

The real world is a bunch of angry chicks that hate you for having a penis, and know why you are in that class. [/quote]
LOL

Heh the ones I took were a mix. It was a requirement in the creative writing department to take some and generally those were what you said but it was also a requirement of the education major as well and those women for the most part were just regular women. It made for some interesting as hell classes when arguments from these groups got going.

OP really any history until you get to high level classes working with original sources are going to be very opinion based in the direction of the culture you are learning it from. The original sources classes are much dryer but paint a clearer picture often and most of the analysis is done by you.

What’s a specific example of a leftist revision of history they’re teaching you currently that you feel is drastically inaccurate factually? Sort of curious myself as the entry level courses I’ve taken would be the other way if anything. Nothing ground breaking taught and generally by someone ready to go out to farm or some TA that doesn’t care.

Take something like this chapter…

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/zinn-chap16.html

Its really not that long. Obviously it has some interpretation but its not particularly radical imo. What points of it that aren’t clearly opinion do you think are factually incorrect? Hell a lot of the stuff that he writes could just as easily but used by conservatives that think the government was opportunistic and overstepped its bounds.

[quote]groo wrote:
It made for some interesting as hell classes when arguments from these groups got going.

[/quote]

This is true. I’m not saying I didn’t learn anything, I did, but I went in expecting something totally different.

[quote]groo wrote:
Take something like this chapter…

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/zinn-chap16.html

Its really not that long. Obviously it has some interpretation but its not particularly radical imo. What points of it that aren’t clearly opinion do you think are factually incorrect? Hell a lot of the stuff that he writes could just as easily but used by conservatives that think the government was opportunistic and overstepped its bounds.[/quote]

For example: “They also acted to control their own populations, each country with its own techniques–crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States–to make their rule secure.”

This is a rather blithe and flippant appraisal–set up as an equivalency–of what amounts on one hand to a bunch of official paranoia, some ruined careers, and the execution of maybe one innocent woman, and on the other to a seven-figure body count. HUAC v. the Gulag.

The two, in other words, are not so alike that they can be set up as equals, their differences dismissed by the impotent and laughably euphemistic use of the adjectives “crude” and “sophisticated.”