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As the smoke cleared from around the United States Capitol in January, the phrase "conspiracy theory" quickly became an epithet. However, history shows us that conspiracies do exist and have altered the course of history. Citizens, therefore, need the skills and dispositions to examine and intelligently assess the merits of conspiracies. This article argues that social studies and history teachers are uniquely qualified and situated to speak to what is an emerging crisis within our nation, while also arguing that social studies educators have a professional, civic, and moral obligation to confront this issue.

When Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers football team, "took a knee" during the playing of the National Anthem, he outlined his rationale for protest: "this country stands for freedom, liberty, and justice for all. And it's not happening for all right now." He also spoke specifically about police brutality and the killing of African American men and women at the hands of police: "There's people being murdered unjustly and not being held accountable. People are being given paid leave for killing people. That's not right. That's not right by anyone's standards." However the reaction was that he was disrespecting the National Anthem, the flag and the military. James Bryant argues that the flag, the anthem, and the military could become so fully intertwined is a powerful indictment of the failure to teach history in the schools. He blames policy makers, textbook publishers, and colleges of education who are more interested in obedience and compliance than vision or integrity, having all played a role. Having fetishized the military, many Americans arrive at adulthood utterly ignorant of the men and women who, often without having ever worn the uniform, advanced the cause of freedom for Americans. It must be a matter of concern that both the flag and the national anthem have become synonymous with the military rather than the freedom, democracy, or even the rule of law. He surmises that have arrived at this troubling place in part due to what passes for historical study in the schools, which sanitizes, co-opts, or erases the troublemakers who painfully yet relentlessly pushed America towards the more perfect union Colin Kaepernick has told us he envisions and for which he is protesting. He examines five social studies/American history textbooks to get an idea of how they portray, approach, and/or discuss the movements and people--non-military--that have served as freedom fighters in American history.

On discovering Lucille Clifton's poem "Spring Thought for Thelma," the author remembered the story his mother had told him of his grandmother's sudden passing in the garden of her Rubonia, Florida, home. While the initial lines of "Spring Thought" closely resembled his mother's recounting of his grandmother's final moments, the last sentence of the poem led the author to consider Rubonia's changing demographic makeup and the neglectful decisions of local government bodies that undermine the community's environmental conditions. Reading Clifton's poem allowed the author to reflect on how the garden, the community, and stories of his grandmother created his sense of home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The professionalization of yoga teacher-training at Kripalu Center, a yoga facility named after Swami Kripalu, not only displaces the forms of spiritual quest from which the Center emerged. It also makes its yoga culture vulnerable to the circulation and consumption of racial fetishes, or racially inscribed images that distract from, or magically veil altogether, the endemic complications and histories of racial capitalism. Kripalu Center installs professionalization procedures – including the standardization of curriculum and assessment to legitimate teachers for competition in an expanding yoga market – that make it complicit with the transmission of racial fetishes. Ultimately, professionalization becomes one vector of a larger complex I call the metaphysic of racial capital, or an underlying narrative of capitalist production plotted by various forms of racial fetishes that ensure capital’s continuous regeneration.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) relieves disabling symptoms of neurologic and psychiatric diseases when medical treatments fail, yet its therapeutic mechanism is unknown. We hypothesized that ventral intermediate (VIM) nucleus stimulation for essential tremor activates the cortex at short latencies, and that this potential is related to the suppression of tremor in the contralateral arm. We measured cortical activity with electroencephalography in 5 subjects (seven brain hemispheres) across a range of stimulator settings, and reversal of the anode and cathode electrode contacts minimized the stimulus artifact, allowing visualization of brain activity. Regression quantified the relationship between stimulation parameters and both the peak of the short latency potential and tremor suppression. Stimulation generated a polyphasic event-related potential in the ipsilateral sensorimotor cortex, with peaks at discrete latencies beginning less than 1 ms after stimulus onset (mean latencies 0.9 ± 0.2, 5.6 ± 0.7, and 13.9 ± 1.4 ms, denoted R1, R2, and R3, respectively). R1 showed more fixed timing than the subsequent peaks in the response (P < 0.0001, Levene's test), and R1 amplitude and frequency were both closely associated with tremor suppression (P < 0.0001, respectively). These findings demonstrate that effective VIM thalamic stimulation for essential tremor activates the cerebral cortex at approximately 1 ms after the stimulus pulse. The association between this short latency potential and tremor suppression suggests that DBS may improve tremor by synchronizing the precise timing of discharges in nearby axons and, by extension, the distributed motor network to the stimulation frequency or one of its subharmonics.

Subthalamic deep brain stimulation (DBS) is superior to medical therapy for the motor symptoms of advanced Parkinson's disease (PD), and additional evidence suggests that it improves refractory symptoms of essential tremor, primary generalized dystonia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Despite this, its therapeutic mechanism is unknown. We hypothesized that subthalamic stimulation activates the cerebral cortex at short latencies after stimulus onset during clinically effective stimulation for PD. In 5 subjects (six hemispheres), EEG measured the response of cortex to subthalamic stimulation across a range of stimulation voltages and frequencies. Novel analytical techniques reversed the anode and cathode electrode contacts and summed the resulting pair of event-related potentials to suppress the stimulation artifact. We found that subthalamic brain stimulation at 20 Hz activates the somatosensory cortex at discrete latencies (mean latencies: 1.0 ± 0.4, 5.7 ± 1.1, and 22.2 ± 1.8 ms, denoted as R1, R2, and R3, respectively). The amplitude of the short latency peak (R1) during clinically effective high-frequency stimulation is nonlinearly dependent on stimulation voltage (P < 0.001; repeated-measures analysis of variance), and its latency is less variable than that of R3 (1.02 versus 19.46 ms; P < 0.001, Levene's test). We conclude that clinically effective subthalamic brain stimulation in humans with PD activates the cerebral cortex at 1 ms after stimulus onset, most likely by antidromic activation. These findings suggest that alteration of the precise timing of action potentials in cortical neurons with axonal projections to the subthalamic region may be an important component of the therapeutic mechanism of subthalamic brain stimulation.

This essay celebrates John Wilson's visual masterpiece, The Richard Wright Suite (2001), a series of six elegant etchings that reimagine Richard Wright's novella, "Down by the Riverside." Wilson's images, and the story that inspired them, remember lives lost to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Just as Wright's novella has been associated with accounts of the flood lyricized in blues music, Wilson's etchings visualize the blues by depicting the Mississippi River as a striking blue stream. Laboriously crafted in aquatint, the river not only memorializes the power of climate disasters fomented by industrial capitalism, but honors those Black lives claimed in their devastation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The natural beauty that surrounds many rural schools hides the troubling realities that students in these schools frequently live in poverty and the schools struggle to give these students the education they need. James A. Bryant believes that one source of the problem is the fact that so many school reforms are designed with urban schools in mind. Charter schools, for example, don't necessarily work in rural districts because of the low student population and lack of funds. However, federal funding in initiatives such as Race to the Top appears to give preference to states and districts that remove caps on charters. Bryant suggests that education leaders need to become more informed about rural education issues so that reforms can be crafted to meet their particular needs. This article addresses charter schools, education reform, and school choice in rural communities.

This essay examines the dangers of attempts by educators to clothe the teaching profession in a veneer of scientific certainty. The author argues that teaching is an art, not a science, and should be proudly proclaimed as such.

This paper is an analytic essay that examines the treatment of the Cherokee Trail of Tears in a North Carolina fourth grade textbook. I begin by offering a satiric look at an imaginary textbook's treatment of the Holocaust that is based closely on the actual narrative of the Trail of Tears written in the fourth grade text. Following this, close scrutiny is applied to the fourth grade narrative, looking at its subtle messages, its questionable historical methodology, and its lack of drama. The second half of the paper is organized around the state of American Indian education in North Carolina as reported by the State Advisory Council on Indian Education. The challenges mentioned are investigated in light of the fourth grade text's treatment of the Cherokee Trail of tears and its possible repercussions. Finally, several ideas for reform are posited for consideration.

"Mission Creep: The Federal Government and America's Schools" is a historical overview of the progressive encroachment if the United States' federal government into the area of education. This involvement began as a way to compete with the Soviet Union in the areas of science and technology but has since morphed into virtually all areas if curriculum and instruction. Dr. Bryant discusses the political and pedagogical implications if this encroachment with an eye towards reclaiming local control of education within the United States and as a cautionary tale for other nations witnessing similar developments within their own educational systems.

In this article, the author presents how the tools and skills of a historian has made it possible to hold accountable the executive branch of the federal government in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington DC. Historian Philip Zelig made it possible to secure the testimony of National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice--a request was initially denied by President George Bush for fears that it would set a dangerous precedent that could damage the ability of future presidents to acquire advice from their advisors--after procuring a grainy photograph of Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, testifying last November 22, 1945 before a panel investigating the attack on Pearl Harbor. This story offers evidence of the immense power and practicality of studying history. The author also observes how the study of social studies has received less and less attention with the ascendance of each new curricular focus.

This essay celebrates John Wilson's visual masterpiece, The Richard Wright Suite (2001), a series of six elegant etchings that reimagine Richard Wright's novella, "Down by the Riverside." Wilson's images, and the story that inspired them, remember lives lost to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Just as Wright's novella has been associated with accounts of the flood lyricized in blues music, Wilson's etchings visualize the blues by depicting the Mississippi River as a striking blue stream. Laboriously crafted in aquatint, the river not only memorializes the power of climate disasters fomented by industrial capitalism, but honors those Black lives claimed in their devastation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author describes the thought process that led him to challenge his preservice teachers to develop and teach lesson plans based on photographs from their family records. Using oral history related to these pictures, it was possible for them to help their students learn, empathize with, and understand the existence of the figures of the past. The details of two such lesson plans are presented as examples.

In this article, the author describes how he developed a lesson that asks students to reflect upon different definitions and criteria for "citizenship" and to think critically about what makes a "good citizen." The lesson uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines standards of social studies education (including basic questions about citizenship and values such as tolerance, obedience, and honesty) along with reading and language arts skills. The heart of the lesson, which is targeted towards fourth or fifth graders, revolves around reading and discussing an excellent children's book entitled "Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story" written by Ken Mochizuki and illustrated by Dom Lee. The inspiring story of Chiune Sugihara makes the difficult issue of defining citizenship more than a mere analytical exercise; it becomes personal, which is precisely as it should be. Sugihara's agonizing decision--obey his government, protect his job, provide security for his family, or obey his conscious--shows students how complex and intimately intertwined is citizenship, moral consciousness, and social responsibility. Using memorable characters in children's literature is a way to place the debate before the class in an historical context. (Contains 5 notes.)

A novel approach to the exploration of the changes in relationships between Health Services organisations is described. The approach is based on the assumption that participants gain more than cognitive appreciation of the situation in which they are immersed.