Greywar wrote an article about a movie called Brainwashing 101, about the biases developing on American college campuses, and after watching the movie, I was reminded of my own time in college when I was getting my history degree. Even then I was seeing a shift... though not so much in campus politics.... but in what was "important" in my field. 

When I started, the first year courses were pretty much all General history-type courses, and as your progressed, you would get more and more targeted to a region/nation, with the focus sometimes being in a specific type of history... ie, intellectual, social, military. However, by my second and third years, I noticed that a lot of the first and second year general courses were becoming social history courses, which means that a lot of people were learning very specific things about a time period without having learned the context of the events they are studying. Names, dates and places ARE important.  

Let's put this in perspective. Let's say you were taking a course on the social history of France 1750-1871... and you had no real background in French history. Well, when looking at all the demographic data and personal letters about and from farmers, clerks and other professions and then trying to piece together the story of what was going on in the country at the time, I think you'd end up lost. Social history should be the basis of a deeper study in a time and place... not where you should begin studying. In any other field, it would be utter madness to start extremely deep in a subject and expect someone to pick up the basics later. Its like expecting someone who wants to learn about cars to start on their first day by rebuilding an engine... before they've even know how an engine works, or expecting someone who is taking computer science to debug C++ before they've had an overview of programming logic. As the old cliche goes... its like putting the cart before the horse. And this isn't a rant against social history... because it has its place in the field. I just think it is inappropriate to make it the focus of study for college freshmen and sophomores... it should be confined to higher-level study.

Another thing which brought me to the point of writing this article was the fact that I recently read that Stephen Ambrose, the famed historian, offered his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1 million dollars to set up a chair for military history and though they were cash-strapped, they refused the offer, which is sort of a subtle(and costly) way to imply the military history is not worth study. Some fields they did deem worthy of study were: "The History of Tourism," "American Business History," "Dimensions Of Material Culture," "Global Car Cultures," and a myriad of very, very specific courses on either race, religious or gender issues. Again, interesting topics... but should so much focus be on groups who had a marginal impact on history as a whole at best(discounting the modern era of course)? Let's look at the logic here by using two sample seconf year courses.. On one hand, we have a subject that we know a lot about (like the History of the Thirty-Years War (1614-1655)), and there is a lot to teach about it. We have another topic that there is relatively little information on(like Early 17th-century European Women's Studies). Which course do you think you would receive a more comprehensive picture of the events of that time? To me, the answer is obvious.

And then there is the little matter of trying to cover up past errors in judgment by changing histories to not discuss things in the context in which they happened. I don't mean that research changed the interpretation of what happened. I mean, bias changed the importance of events, obscuring what was once visible. This is especially prevalent in public and high school textbooks, but it is also a feature of college textbooks. The modern sensibility that because we don't AGREE with someone's actions in the past means that they are automatically condemned to be looked upon entirely unfavorably is contrary to a lot of the precepts of the study of subject. Colonialism is now looked at unfavorably, so now it is presented unfavorably many textbooks, when at the time it happened, that was not the prevailing wisdom. But of course, the context in which colonialism isn't important in the present intellectual climate. There is a difference between discussing a nation or person in context and condoning the actions of that person or nation.... but its a difference that some people can't see, and its disturbing to me that these kinds of reactions are being almost encouraged in colleges today.  So yes, there is bias at almost every university... at least in history.