Chicago - A message from the station manager

By James E. Rosenbaum/The Hechinger Report

American society is obsessed with a single route to success.
We tell our children they must get high SAT scores, attend selective colleges, get bachelor’s degrees and get high paying jobs to have a successful life. They go through 12 years of incessant testing, test-prep lessons and test mania, as if tests were the key to success.
The nation’s education system has become an SAT rat race in which youth are judged on where they fall on the bell curve of test scores.
This message drives kids crazy. Even high-achieving students worry about their rankings and strive to improve them in hopes of college admissions. Since low test scores can hurt a school’s reputation and funding, high schools sometimes find ways to exclude low achieving students on test days, presaging future societal exclusion.
In our recent book, Bridging the Gaps, Caitlin Ahearn, Janet Rosenbaum and I find that although academic skills and high test scores are worthwhile goals, the narrow focus on one-dimensional attainments is a mistaken view that ignores many good options and creates unnecessary discouragement for students who feel they cannot meet college test-score requirements.

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Posted on October 24, 2017

Chicago History Museum Card Catalog Going Digital

By The Chicago History Museum

The Chicago History Museum is making its small manuscript collection, which includes personal accounts of early life in Chicago, discoverable online thanks to a generous Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
“Scholars have relied on visiting the Museum’s paper card catalog for the better part of a century,” said Russell Lewis, executive vice president and chief historian of the Chicago History Museum. “This grant will allow the Museum’s entire small manuscript collections to become discoverable online to researchers and scholars around the world.”

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Posted on October 23, 2017

Dots & Dashes

By SIU Press

Moving between the languages of love and war, Jehanne Dubrow’s latest book offers valuable testimony to the experiences of military wives.
Frequently employing rhyme, meter, and traditional forms, these poems examine what it means to be both a military spouse and an academic, straddling two communities that speak in very different and often conflicting terms.

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Posted on September 29, 2017

The Wrong Way To Save Your Life

By The Society of Midland Authors

In an event presented by the Society of Midland Authors, Megan Stielstra will discuss her new book The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, an insightful collection of essays about life and death, marriage and motherhood, joy and sorrow. It’s warm, witty and wise.
“For its wisdom and compassion, honesty and courage, Stielstra’s stellar essay collection is a lifeline and a microscope, a means of examining the dread of whatever one finds daunting and a manner of exorcising demons through the sheer power of commitment and desire,” says Booklist.

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Posted on September 26, 2017

Why Al-Qaeda Is Still Strong 16 Years After 9/11

By Tricia Bacon/The Conversation

Sixteen years ago, on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda conducted the most destructive terrorist attack in history.
An unprecedented onslaught from the U.S. followed. One-third of al-Qaeda’s leadership was killed or captured in the following year.
The group lost its safe haven in Afghanistan, including its extensive training infrastructure there. Its surviving members were on the run or in hiding.
Though it took nearly 10 years, the U.S. succeeded in killing al-Qaeda’s founding leader, Osama bin Laden.
Since 2014, al-Qaeda has been overshadowed by its former ally al-Qaeda in Iraq, now calling itself the Islamic State.
In other words, al-Qaeda should not have survived the 16 years since 9/11.
So why has it?

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Posted on September 22, 2017

Comics Captured America’s Growing Ambivalence About The Vietnam War

By Cathy Schlund-Vials/The Conversation

In America’s imagination, the Vietnam War is not so much celebrated as it is assiduously contemplated. This inward-looking approach is reflected in films like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, best-selling novels and popular memoirs that dwell on the psychological impact of the war.
Was the war worth the cost, human and otherwise? Was it a winnable war or doomed from the outset? What are its lessons and legacies?
These questions also underpin Ken Burns’ Vietnam War documentary, which premiered Sunday. But many forget that before the Vietnam War ended as a Cold War quagmire, it began as a clear-eyed anti-communist endeavor.
As a child, I was always fascinated by comics; now, as a cultural studies scholar, I’ve been able to fuse this passion with an interest in war narratives.
Comics – more than any medium – reflect the narrative trajectory of the war, and how the American public evolved from being generally supportive of the war to ambivalent about its purpose and prospects.

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Posted on September 20, 2017

A Bloody Decade Of The iPhone

By Jack Linchuan Qiu/The Conversation

Ten years ago the first iPhone went on sale. The iconic product not only profoundly altered the world of gadgets, but also of consumption and tall corporate profit; this world would be impossible without the toiling of millions along the assembly line.
I look back at the first 10 years of the iPhone and see a bloody decade of labor abuse, especially in Chinese factories such as those run by Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. At one point Foxconn had more employees in China than the U.S. armed forces combined.
Foxconn makes most of its money from assembling iPhones, iPads, iMacs and iPods. It’s notorious “military management” was blamed for causing a string of 17 worker suicides in 2010.

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Posted on September 19, 2017

How “White People” Were Invented By A Playwright In 1613

By Ed Simon/Aeon

The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of “white people” on October 29,1613, the date that his play The Triumphs of Truth was first performed.
The phrase was first uttered by the character of an African king who looks out upon an English audience and declares: “I see amazement set upon the faces/Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes.”
As far as I, and others, have been able to tell, Middleton’s play is the earliest printed example of a European author referring to fellow Europeans as “white people.”

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Posted on September 14, 2017

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