Daniel Aaron Lazar

My Lecture on the Mao Years

Here is my powerpoint lecture

Posted in AP China, Dictatorship, World Civ-Cold War in East | No Comments »

Vietnam Four Options Assignment

A couple of notes before you get started:

• Read the instructions carefully.
• Make time to do this assignment well. Read everything and think about what you are reading.
• You will have been provided with the necessary background information in a class lecture. You may access this lecture on the website should you so desire.
• Page numbers below refer to those on the PDF file (as opposed to the numbers on the document itself).

The assignment:

1. Carefully take the survey on page 133.
2. Compare and contrast the two cartoons on page 38. In the process, examine the statement that each is making.
3. Study each of the four options presented. For EACH of the four options:
   1. In a succinct paragraph summarize the option using 2-3 relevant quotes to support your summary.
   2. Summarize the statement of the accompanying cartoon in 1-2 sentences.
   3. Briefly list 2-3 strengths AND 2-3 weaknesses of this option.
4. Typed Essay. You are an advisor to LBJ. Using your knowledge of the four options presented, write a strongly-worded one-page letter to LBJ explaining precisely what you feel he should advocate in the current state of affairs. Use evidence from the documents. Choose your words wisely.
5. Be prepared to take a clear stand in an extensive class debate.

Here is the reading packet (please be patient as it might take some time to open)

Posted in USH: Vietnam War, World Civ-Cold War in East | No Comments »

“Korea” from Ambrose’s “Rise to Globalism”

Read “Korea” from Ambrose’s “Rise to Globalism”

Here are the responses. Enjoy!

Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. He received his Ph.D. in 1960 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ambrose served as a professor of history at several universities from 1960 until his retirement in 1995, having spent the bulk of his time at the University of New Orleans. He was the military adviser on the movie Saving Private Ryan and was an executive producer on the television mini-series that was based on his book, Band of Brothers.

Eisenhower chose Ambrose as his biographer after admiring his work on Halleck: Lincoln’s Chief of Staff, which was based on his doctoral dissertation. The resulting Eisenhower biographies were generally enthusiastic, but contained many criticisms of the former commander in chief.

Ambrose also wrote a highly regarded three-volume biography of Richard Nixon, also generally positive, but his Band of Brothers (1993) and D-Day (1994), about the lives and fates of individual soldiers in the World War II invasion, catapulted him out of the ranks of academic history and into mainstream American culture. The mini-series ‘Band of Brothers’ (2001) lionized American troops and helped sustain the fresh interest in WWII that was stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, and the 60th anniversary of D-Day in 2004.

In 2002, Ambrose was found to have plagiarized several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard reported that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers. Ambrose and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, released an apology as a result. Ambrose had only footnoted sources and did not enclose in direct quotes significant passages taken from Childers’ book.

While Ambrose downplayed the incident, stating that only a few sentences in all of his numerous books were the work of other authors, Forbes’ investigation of his work found similar cases of plagiarism involving entire passages in at least six books and found a similar pattern of plagiarism going all the way back to his doctoral thesis.

He offered this defense to the New York Times:

“I tell stories. I don’t discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation.”

“I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn’t. I am not out there stealing other people’s writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people’s writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from.”

The “History News Network” web site of George Mason University, however, in a web article entitled “How the Ambrose story developed”, detailed seven of Ambrose works that had plagiarized at least 12 authors.

[note: I plagiarized this from Wikipedia.]

Posted in USH: The Cold War, World Civ-Cold War in East | No Comments »

Mao’s Propaganda Machine

Stephan Landsberger’s Collection of Chinese Propaganda Posters

Propaganda Posters from the Art Department at Ohio State University

Posted in Dictatorship, World Civ-Cold War in East | No Comments »

On Maoism

The Present Situation and Our Tasks

The People’s Democratic Dictatorship

Ten Quotes from Chairman Mao

Response Sheet to Mao Documents

Posted in Dictatorship, World Civ-Cold War in East | No Comments »

‘Who Controls the Internet?’

Fresh Air from WHYY, April 27, 2006

Recent controversies such as Google’s business in China and the U.S. government’s role in policing eBay transactions have put a spotlight on the intersection between governments and the Internet. Legal scholars Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu address the issue in their new book, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World.

Listen to the One Hour Segment Here

Posted in AP China, Dictatorship, World Civ-Cold War in East | No Comments »

In China, Blogs Are Revolutionary Tool of Opinion

China has more than 30 million bloggers, by some estimates. A few are political. Some are unusual, such as Mumu, a Communist Party member who has clips of herself doing dances. But the typical Chinese blogger is more like Jasmine Gu (“It’s all about me, myself and my life.”).

Listen to the short National Public Radio Clip Here

Posted in AP China, World Civ-Cold War in East | No Comments »

A symphony of civilizations

Used to innumerable discourses on the differences between the West and the East, one is not prepared to recognize two facts.

First, although Europe and China have been slowly elaborating two distinct civilizations, they cannot be absolutely separated. Having in common long maturations over millennia, the two old worlds have developed affinities and, despite all the exotic representations, the two edges of Eurasia are closer than they seem.

Second, one should not reduce the West to the US: that country, which from a colony has been rising to the rank of global hyperpower in only 230 years…

It is precisely based on their affinities that Europe and China have to build a partnership that goes beyond ever-varying trade, scientific or even political interests. In other words, by placing culture as the keystone of their relationship, the two Eurasian civilizations would enter a really stable and meaningful cooperation having over time global constructive impact.

Read Symphony of Civilizations

Responses to Symphony

Posted in AP China, AP Post AP Seminar, World Civ-Cold War in East | No Comments »