As class started, Ben passed around a contact sheet where we could include our email address (any one of our choice) and, if we like, our phone number. The contact sheet will be distributed to the class via email. He also passed around the protocol and difficultation schedule. There’s one change to the schedule: Jordan is moving to the February 15th group. Protocols, Ben reminded us, are due on the blog at 11:55 on the night of the class period, because the longer you wait, the harder it is to write. He then took attendance; four people were missing.
Last week’s blog posts will be graded by the weekend, and next week’s blog post is on Hegel (due on Sunday night). The people who are difficulting, he reminded us, do not need to blog that week, though they can for extra credit. Everyone needs to meet with Ben the week before their difficultation.
Next week’s Hegel reading is not in the course packet, but in a book that we need to buy (which was on the syllabus). Unfortunately, there is only one translation of the text, and it’s one hundred years old, and not a very good translation. Most classes only read the introduction to Hegel (which has many translations), not the main text where he’s actually talking about history. A more detailed reading guide will be sent out, as we don’t need to read the whole book. Don’t get discouraged when reading: Hegel wants you to not understand everything. Think about the reading in terms of what we’ve done in class so far; Hegel is just another part of our ‘history equation’ (along with Ranke). Be sure and annotate the reading!
Slight change to the schedule: we will be watching High Hitler on Tuesday.
After the housekeeping, we began a keyword review. Keywords can be used to structure ambiguous concepts and make them more tangible, and are more easily used in conversation.
Historiography: the study of writing history; the history of history
Metahistory: the history of history
History: the study of the past; the study of the study of the past
Intertextuality: subconsciously thinking about one text while reading another text, and how the framework of one book affects your reading of another
Primary sources: sources that come from the person or time that you’re studying; stuff that is of that moment. (We also talked about how primary sources exist in the present, even though they were made in the past. Historians study things in the present to infer things about the past)
Secondary source: accounts by historians, usually written using primary sources
Tertiary source: textbooks are a good example, and the information in tertiary sources is usually pulled entirely from secondary sources
Wie es eigentlich gewesen: how it really was
Rhetoric: the way you phrase an argument, talk, communicate, etc. in order to persuade people of a given point. Rhetoric is the way that you make your argument convincing
Confirmation bias: looking for sources that confirm your own opinion
We then all stood up and played a get-to-know-you game. Standing in a circle, we all closed our eyes. Ben told us to breathe, and then to think about Beck. How did we feel when watching The Revolutionary Holocaust? We were then told to think of a pose that reflects those feelings, and to hold that pose. Then he told us to make an even more extreme version of that gesture. After holding the positions for a little while, we stopped and opened our eyes.
We then went around the circle, starting with Elissa: she said her name and did her pose. We all repeated her pose and name. We went around the circle, and by the end were able to (almost) successfully remember everyone’s names and poses.
We then divided into small groups, grouping with the people whose gestures were most similar to ours.
My group discovered that we all had very different reactions, even though our gestures ended up looking similar. Rachel didn’t know what to think. Jordan couldn’t believe that this was happening, and that Beck was actually saying those things. Emily wondered if people actually watch him and take him seriously? Or do they watch him for entertainment? Elissa didn’t get what was going on: she didn’t understand a lot of the historical references, and thus couldn’t figure out if this conspiracy theory that he was creating was legitimate or not. Kate wanted to laugh at Beck, her reaction being more along the lines of ‘what in the world is wrong with you?’ and noted that our reactions were not apathetic. We also wondered if Becks good points get lost because he’s crazy, and if he’s even making any good points. We also noted that we went into the video expecting to not take him seriously, which definitely influenced the way that we interpreted it.
Halle, Heidi, Sophie, Gina and Tam’s group reacted to the ‘rediculousness’ of Beck, and think that we shouldn’t give him more credit than he deserves, make him more important than he should be, or put him on any sort of a pedestal. They also noted that he takes small pieces from different sources and puts them together to form his own idea, warping the sources and taking them completely out of context.
Lindsey noted that Beck recognizes people’s emotional connections to Nazi Germany, and uses that to his advantage.
We then looked at hipsterhitler.com and discussed Godwin’s Law, the idea that a Nazi reference is different to all other historical references: if you make a Nazi reference in an argument, the argument is over and you have lost it. But Ben thinks that it’s weird to say that one historical event is different from the rest. Can you exempt Nazis from history?
Kate, Mandy, Liz and Shukri note that Beck is not doing anything constitutionally wrong, and that responsibility lies with the viewers for listening to him. Also, should the network be held responsible for letting millions of people listen to him? From a strict Ranke-ian point of view, he is presenting the facts and citing his sources…but he twists it all around. Ben and Brittany thought that his rhetoric was actually very convincing. The rest of the class agreed that it might have been very easy to believe him had we not gone in video with a preconceived notion of how crazy he is. As the class ended, Ben was excited to discover that about a quarter of the class had not heard of Beck before this class.
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