Faculty Retreat Program (Wednesday, May 22)

Faculty Retreat

Department of History, Government and Economics

Math and Science Building, Room 119 (Lecture Hall)

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

9:00-9:30 am

Continental Breakfast (provided by the department-- Old Cafeteria, Math

and Science Building)

9:30-10:15 am

Moonsu Han and the Economics Club, “Mock FOMC Meeting”

10:30-11:45 am

Keynote Address

Professor Cyrus Veeser (Bentley University), “Bricks and mortar, flesh

and blood: Why real humans in real classrooms are still better than online

learning”

11:45 am-1:00 pm

Lunch (provided by the department—Old Cafeteria, Math and Science

Building)

1:00 pm-2:00 pm

Kara Kaufman and the Debate Club: “Make me an argument I can’t refute:

Incorporating debate into the classroom”

If you plan to attend the retreat, please RSVP to Larry Davis @

LDAVIS@northshore.edu by Wednesday, May 15.

Racism: A History

Hi everyone. I thought I'd share a documentary that I show in my World History II courses. It's called "Racism: A History". http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/racism-history/ There are three parts to it, and I show the second part called "Fatal Impact". This hour-long episode traces the history of the British Empire from the early 1800s to the middle 1900s. The film shows how the ideology of race went from White Man's Burden, to Social Darwinism, to scientific racism (phrenology and Eugenics). Students like it very much because it gets into events that are usually not covered in high school, such as: colonization of Tasmania and the subsequent annihilation of the indigenous peoples there; famines in British India that were made worse by colonization, and the British justification of allowing millions of Indians to starve to death; the German execution of Namibian people on Shark Island; the forced sterilization or "race hygiene" committed by Americans and Europeans during the Eugenics movement; etc. The first unit in my course deals with the debate among world historians regarding the nature of the West--was the rise of the West inevitable, should we even label it the 'rise of the West', why does our modern world look so Western, is there something better about Western culture over others, etc.? We discuss Eurocentrism and how it is used as a perspective to tell the story of the modern world. This documentary fits in well because it shows how the West developed Eurocentric attitudes and the consequences of the same. Kara Kaufman