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How might teachers challenge oversimplified narratives regarding the life and deedsof Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK), in order to support ideals of human rights in education?In this study, we examine ongoing history education where teachers try to promotea more radical human rights perspective on the history and legacy of MLK bycontrasting contemporary uses of history with primary sources from the era of thecivil rights movement. Teachers ask students to engage in tandem with what we callthe ‘historical’ and ‘practical’ past and we find that this may be constructive, but alsochallenging, in human rights education. We observe that students are able to deconstructtextbook narratives but find it difficult to challenge authorities and media thatoversimplify popular perceptions of the past. Yet many students did learn a more activeperspective on the life and deeds of MLK, evident even a year after the initialteaching took place, clearly influenced by the authentic historical writings of MLK.This study highlights important potentials and limitations in the attempts to teachstudents about, through and for human rights by making the past both historicaland practical. This study also illustrates ways that promoting alternative historicalperspectives can help students interrogate the past alongside their own present.

The Middle East was a funnel of human expansion out of Africa, a staging area for the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, and the home to some of the earliest world empires. Post LGM expansions into the region and subsequent population movements created a striking genetic mosaic with distinct sex-based genetic differentiation. While prior studies have examined the mtDNA and Y-chromosome contrast in focal populations in the Middle East, none have undertaken a broad-spectrum survey including North and sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and Middle Eastern populations. In this study 5,174 mtDNA and 4,658 Y-chromosome samples were investigated using PCA, MDS, mean-linkage clustering, AMOVA, and Fisher exact tests of FST's, RST's, and haplogroup frequencies. Geographic differentiation in affinities of Middle Eastern populations with Africa and Europe showed distinct contrasts between mtDNA and Y-chromosome data. Specifically, Lebanon's mtDNA shows a very strong association to Europe, while Yemen shows very strong affinity with Egypt and North and East Africa. Previous Y-chromosome results showed a Levantine coastal-inland contrast marked by J1 and J2, and a very strong North African component was evident throughout the Middle East. Neither of these patterns were observed in the mtDNA. While J2 has penetrated into Europe, the pattern of Y-chromosome diversity in Lebanon does not show the widespread affinities with Europe indicated by the mtDNA data. Lastly, while each population shows evidence of connections with expansions that now define the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, many of the populations in the Middle East show distinctive mtDNA and Y-haplogroup characteristics that indicate long standing settlement with relatively little impact from and movement into other populations.