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What if Adams and Jefferson Did Attack ads?

This spring, a small cadre of Williams College students is participating in an experimental history course on the American Presidents. Instead of producing papers, as is the norm in most history classes, the students will create video campaign ads for the presidential elections from Washington to Lincoln. 

There’s a catch, though. The students can only use images, quotes, documents, and music from the era. They cannot use anything that came afterwards. An image of the White House burning in 1812 would not work for the election of 1808. They cannot use images of Leutze’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware, a product more reflective of the 1840s than the 1770s. Their assignment is to capture the spirit of the age – not the spirit of our historical memory.  

For each video, the students must do as much research (if not more) than they would for a paper in which they were to describe the issues of each election. The video assignment is, on some level, the same as a traditional paper. They have to take a side in the election and argue their point of view from the evidence. Now, however, they must express their conclusions in a new form. These videos will provide windows into past political worlds. We hope to leverage technology to reach a wider audience, and, perhaps, to spark conversations about American history and electoral politics outside of our classroom.

(no subject)

Chuck Hagel is no firebrand. I don't agree with him about everything, but he's a careful, thoughtful observer.

I don’t think that we are necessarily locked into one of two options. And that’s the way it’s presented. We are great in this country and in our politics of responding to false choices; we love false choices.

This is so very true; Americans love forcing everything into binary choices: black or white, good or bad, yes or not, enemy or ally. The world, the real world outside our effed up consciousness, is not like that.

We Americans have this frame of reference … we see a problem, there has to be a solution... Well, the kind of complicated world we live in, I’m not sure there’s a solution to everything right now. What you have to do is manage it so it doesn’t get worse, manage it toward a higher ground of solution possibilities.

It takes a smart man to see that there isn't an (immediate) solution to every question.

I like what he says about Obama too. Why do we have so few of these people left in politics? What happened to "respectfully disagree"? It's all Cleon nowadays, and far too few Pericles.