Thanks, I'll just go home
One thing I've discovered while writing these musings deals with the gaps in my historical knowledge. Like most subjects in my life, I'm interested in history, but my range could hardly be classified as "deep and wide," to borrow a phrase. One reason for that is that I, like most of us, have been taught a kind of abridged history that mainly hits the highlights. Honestly, there's not much time for anything else, especially in education. Study U.S. history in the space of a school year? How much of 400 years or so can you cram into that amount of time? Complicate that with balancing the knowledge professional historians think you need to know with the specific aims of educators and, dare I say it, politicians. Some of that dearth will be filled in public school when students take a course on the history of their particular state. But the rest of us don't have the opportunity to take those classes and supplement our education, and even then, we'd just be le...