The Power of the Press

With my apologias out of the way, allow me to actually blog. That is, if you are not completely shunning us by this point, and act for which I would definitely not blame you.

Over the weekend, I had two interesting run in's with good journalism. The first was via a clipping from the Chicago Tribune which my mother sent me last week. The article was deploring the sad state of historical education in both the United States and England. Apparently, 23% of British teenagers do not believe in Winston Churchill. I'm not even sure how that is possible. How do you not believe in Winston Churchill? That would be like an American teenager not believing in FDR. That goes beyond the kind of ignorance that leads many U.S. teens to be unable to identify the three branches of American government. At least they are not claiming that our government does not exist. They simply feel that knowing the names of the Three Stooges is more important. Having that sort of arcane knowledge myself, how can I possibly blame them? But Winston Churchill is not Santa Claus. I have an image in my head of some proper British mother sitting down her 10 year old daughter and saying, "I'm sorry Sally, but Winston Churchill is not real." My hope is that the poor child would cry. She should cry. Because it is a lie.

Now, 47% percent of these same British teens believe that Richard the Lionheart is a fictional character. This one, I can understand. Richard lived an extremely long time ago. He spent very little time in England and could not even speak English. As my roommate said, "Someone in the Robin Hood stories has to be fictitious, and it isn't going to be Robin Hood." And it is through the Robin Hood stories that most of these teens probably know who Richard is. So I don't blame them so much for this one, though the part of my heart that belongs to medieval England is crying a little.

For anyone who is interested, you can find the article here.

My other run in with wonderful journalism was because of assigned reading for school. Let me first say that this has been a banner semester for academic reading. Not only am I reading The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, I have also been reading fantastic novels for both my Modern German history class and for Latin American Literature as History. However, I am beginning to appreciate breaks from the novel reading,and one came when we began to read a new book for Modern Germany, called What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933. It is a collection of newspaper columns about Berlin by an Austrian journalist named Joseph Roth, and it has been translated from the original German.

Aside from the historical interest I have in the articles, I cannot get over the fact that they represent damn good writing. In his descriptions of everything from really large department stores (as opposed to simply large department stores) to the local homeless shelter, he uses turns of phrase that ring of poetry. He also brings a new prospective to everything, such as how God must have invented sand just for the enjoyment and education of children and how it must have been a whim of fate that made such a disorganized city as Berlin capital of the whole German Reich.

Whether or not any of you care about German history, if you simply enjoy reading (as I know many of you do), you will be doing yourself a major favor if you read this book. I cannot do justice to it in my description.

Well, that is my blog for the day. We are presenting papers at the Phi Alpha Theta conference this Saturday, and I imagine that one of us will want to blog about that. So keep checking back and, with luck, we will be back with you soon.

Brenna

I Guess I Lied

Hello all. It looks as though I was overly optimistic when I announced that our blogging hiatus was over. It apparently was not. That might have something to do with the fact that we have been having one busy semester. We're taking a class called Historical Method in which we are begining to write our senior theses and I know that I have been doing a lot of reading and writing for my classes, as has Gillian.

I hope that we will finally start blogging again. We'll see how it goes this time...