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

[Tony Whitson <twhitson@UDel.Edu>]

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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