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[xmca] Off-topic: false history, Texas, & the Del. GOP House nominee



This is off-topic, but some people here have been interested in such items in the past (and besides, Jim Wertsch has written on the importance of such matters as the ideological distortion of national history).

This concerns a movement whoese propoenents claim, among other things, that the US founders did not advocate the separation of church and state, but that that idea originates from Hitler.

National media has been filled with news and commentary about popular mainstream Republican Congressman Mike Castle's loss to a "nutty" (Karl Rove) Tea Party candidate in the Republican primary to run for Joe Biden's seat in the U.S. Senate.

Less noticed, another Tea Party candidate, Glen Urquhart, defeated the moderate businesswoman who had been endorsed by the GOP state party convention to run for Delaware's only seat in the House of Representatives, vacated by Mike Castle in his run for the Senate.

Urquhart's campaign has featured the kind of outrageously false history propounded by David Barton and promoted by Glenn Beck that depends on a level of historical ignorance in the general population, and which threatens to displace real history in the public school curriculum, beginning with the Texas social studies standards.

For video and links, see
http://curricublog.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/tea-partiers-anti-democratic-ignorance/
shortlink: http://wp.me/p1V0H-14i

Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK  DE  19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
 are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                  -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
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