Collapse By Jared Diamond: A Critical Analysis

All varying societies of world prehistory share a common outcome as they all go through and endure stages of development where they all experience some form of collapse because it is inevitably. When it comes down to prehistoric societal breakdown and complete disintegration it is widely attested in the archaeological events that take place and is typically happens very sudden, rapidly, and often entails regional abandonment, the implementation of another source of subsistence and leads to the evident breakdown differing factors including climate change.

As the professor James W Loewer, author of the book, referred that Americans have lost touch with their history. Our teachers and textbooks play important roles in our history study. However, it is their eliding and misrepresenting factoids that have been obstacles in our history studying. Because access to too much errors and distortion, many Americans can hardly understand the past of the country. As a result, we lack the ability to reflect on what’s going on right now and in the future.

She carries the audience through her argument in a logical sequence. First, she makes her claim that student do not know history and explains her reasons (250). She then elaborates on what history students are taught and what exactly is wrong with the methods by which they learn (251). After this, she explains the job of a historian to the reader – how historians confront primary sources to “make some sense of what once happened” (252). To end the article, Simon describes how students can better learn history through exploring primary sources (253). This structuring and organization helps the reader to understand and to believe Simon’s

The study of history and the teaching of history has come under intense public debate in the United States in the last few decades. The “culture-wars” began with the call to add more works by non-Caucasians and women and has bled into the study of history. Not only in the study of history or literature, this debate has spread into American culture like wildfire.

History engages me like no other subject. History is unrivaled in complexity and depth compared to other areas of study, but many do not realize this because we choose to gloss over the vast majority, reducing entire sagas into little more than a footnote on a single page. The American revolution, while celebrated in the US, is little more than a paragraph in European history, overlooked because of the more relevant Napoleonic era. My passion for learning encourages me to read into these footnotes and discover the lessons and ideas that are ignored by the common curriculum.

The book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, begins with an introduction in which author James W. Loewen empathizes with the students. He discusses how History, specifically American History, is taught incorrectly. Loewen is able to share his understanding of why high school students think history is boring. He begins his argument with facts and numbers by saying that out of all the subjects in school, history is almost every student's least favorite subject. He goes on to say that teachers also misrepresent history to students by teaching history as a ¨set of facts¨ rather than ¨showing how we got to this point.¨ Loewen’s writing style is much more relaxed than a typical non-fiction

Many Americans today are extremely uneducated and misinformed when it comes to the history of their nation purely because they find the learning of it boring. Because of the nature of American history courses and the distribution of knowledge in America, James W. Loewen wrote the book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, to make history more relevant to people who’ve been “bored to tears by their high school American history courses” (xii) because to be effective citizens today we must be able to understand our past.

Never was I taught my ancestor’s side of the story until high school. Never have I heard of the Joseon Dynasty, Kublai Khan, or Qin Shi Huang, the history that was my forefather’s life. I always knew Columbus’s achievements as the discoverer of America, but I was not taught his abhorrent treatment to the Native Americans. I was told about the British royal family founded by Alfred the Great, but they never mentioned about the Japanese emperor. I was forced to memorize the facts from a Western-based history textbook, but never have they told me to remember even one date of the Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese history.

To begin, a major flaw in the way American history courses are taught is due to the fact that textbooks do not allow students to form their own opinions, for everything is presented as “fact”. This is exemplified through the way early American life is taught. For example, a controversial topic is the specific destination of the Mayflower during the Pilgrim’s journey to America. Some historians believe their arrival in Massachusetts was on purpose to be far from Anglican control in Virginia, while others believe violent storms lead them off track, or there were just navigation errors. The flaw then arises for all textbooks only pick one, and present it as fact to their readers for they believe it is the students’ only way to “learn” about the past (81).

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, says Spanish philosopher George Satayana. Remembering the past is important, as it affects all present and future outcomes. The first step to remembering the past is acknowledging the facts and what is true. This is seen in the graphic memoir, Maus and Maus II, written by Art Spiegelman. In this book, Spiegelman writes using his and father’s dialogue, in which his father, Vladek, recounts his experiences of the Holocaust. With the importance of these events in mind, in order to accurately depict these experiences Spiegelman tries his best to gather any documentations, such as his mother’s diaries, sketches and diagrams of the camps back then, and a real life photo of Vladek to

The issues that people had with old historiographies were that they weren’t complex enough and lacked comprehension of cultural aspects. They rarely strayed from the political or economic topics and never discussed important cultural avenues. Levine talks of synthesis in historical writing but deems this as a way to dismiss the introduction of new subject matter into history. He, on the contrary, wishes for the expansion of subjects in history and feels there has been too much neglect on cultural aspects and the importance that it offers to understanding the past as it really was. Levine believes historians need to increase their tolerance and acceptance of the complexities of the past as well as the historian profession in order to effectively and accurately write about the

Although Greenland and Australia are thousands of miles apart and very different in geography, they also have many similarities. In his book “Collapse”, Jared Diamond shows that both countries have the five factors that can contribute to a society’s collapse. Greenland’s Norse society already collapsed a long time ago, while Australia is still a First World country going strong. If some things there don’t change, the country’s living standard will go down and there could be major problems.

The idea of history as a subjective collection of malleable information rather than a gathering of facts confused me as a child. As I grew up, I learned about the effect of culture and context on information and the way it is spread, written, and remembered, and often incorporated this belief into my classwork. The idea of something as both a product of and contributor to its culture and the way that culture shifts its interpretation slowly over time has always been particularly interesting to me. At the time, I had no clue that this way a key concept in new historical criticism, but, then again, I think everyone in our class has repeatedly said that we had not realized that we were using different forms of criticism throughout our careers

This week’s topic was the book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts by Sam Wineburg. There is an old quote that states “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” (Santanya, 2006). This has long been the worry of educators and policy makers in the United States, how should history be taught and what parts of history are the best to teach? The focus of Wineburg is not which part of history or which version of history should be taught but he asks why teach history at all. As he states the answer is that history has the potential of humanizing us in ways that are offered sparsely in the other

Steven Weinberg said, “After you learn quantum mechanics, you are never really the same again.” After reading through Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 in In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat, this quote absolutely makes sense. Quantum Mechanics has greatly changed my general perception of a classical particle, especially with the wave-particle duality. Aside from learning that a particle can exhibit wave-like behaviors and particle-like behaviors, there were other interesting circumstances that quantum mechanics brought to my attention in the subject’s rich history.