“James Miles, who was the BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, admitted that he had “conveyed the wrong impression” and that “there was no massacre on Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops [ ...] There was no Tiananmen Square massacre, but there was a Beijing massacre”.

What!?

Why did he “convey the wrong impression”?

Well at least there was still a Beijing Massacre. I guess.

Sun Yatsen on Fundamentals of National Reconstruction, 1923

Mao on Classes in Chinese Society, 1926

Mao’s Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, 1927

White Paper Excerpt: United States Position on China, August 1949

Mao’s Response to White Paper, “Cast Away Illusions and Prepare for Struggle”, August 14, 1949

Ted Grant on the Chinese Revolution

Students must be able to synthesize these documents. Establish connections between them.

Here is the response sheet

Read more about US Cold War Policy in Iran (4 pages)

Lecture Outline:

1. Imperial Roots
2. On the Back of a Tiger
3. The Arrogance of Power
4. Opposition
5. Peace with Honor
6. Legacies

• 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)

Here are the responses

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. Eisenhower chose Ambrose as his biographer.

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.

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  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.”

A study by George Mason University, however, detailed how 7 of 12 major works of Ambrose had instances of plagiarism

[note: I plagiarized this from Wikipedia.]

Slate’s David Plotz goes on the attack, calling Ambrose a vampire. His point, so far as I see it, is irrefutable, “Ambrose’s assertion that he’s not a thief is ludicrous. One plagiarism is careless. Two is a pattern. Four, five, or more is pathology.” Plotz concludes that “The plagiarist is, in a minor way, the cop who frames innocents, the doctor who kills his patients. The plagiarist violates the essential rule of his trade. He steals the lifeblood of a colleague. A few paragraphs have made Stephen Ambrose a vampire.”

]]> http://www.daniellazar.com/2008/05/01/response-sheet-to-korea-from-ambroses-rise-to-globalism/feed/ 0 http://www.daniellazar.com/2008/01/12/maos-propaganda-machine/ http://www.daniellazar.com/2008/01/12/maos-propaganda-machine/#comments Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:24:27 +0000 Dan Lazar http://www.daniellazar.com/2008/01/12/maos-propaganda-machine/ Stephan Landsberger’s Collection of Chinese Propaganda Posters

Propaganda Posters from the Art Department at Ohio State University

The People’s Democratic Dictatorship

Ten Quotes from Chairman Mao

Response Sheet to Mao Documents

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