Teaching about the Holocaust and Challenging Antisemitism

Teaching about the Holocaust and Challenging Antisemitism

by Cynthia Vitere

For more than a decade, I have been teaching an International Baccalaureate curriculum focusing on authoritarian states and twentieth-century wars. As part of this class, I lead students through a months-long exploration of the emergence German fascism, its promotion and weaponization of antisemitism as a means for consolidating power, and the implementation of the Holocaust within the broader context of World War II. Over the years, I have found my students to be curious and willing partners in our exploration of this essential subject. Our study of Nazism, antisemitism, and the Holocaust has included hosting in-person survivor testimonials and expanded to include a comparative analysis of the Rwandan genocide. This year, students and teachers participated in a three-day workshop with Carl Wilkens, the only American to remain in Rwanda during the genocide. While grounded in historical understanding, this workshop emphasized the possibility of peace and reconciliation through restorative justice practices. Students were eager to engage with history and to imagine peaceful outcomes through direct interaction with those who experienced it firsthand.

New York State’s mandate for Holocaust education and the requirements of the IB curriculum has made this work possible. In its absence, teachers would find it difficult to address antisemitism in a sustained and substantive way. Long Island communities have a proud history of supporting the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. However, as that era grows more distant and our demographics shift, that support has evolved in complex ways. In my own classroom I have witnessed student discomfort, especially among Jewish students who are in the minority, when these topics are addressed. Cast as representatives of Jewish identity within their peer groups, they sometimes encounter subtle antisemitic comments or assumptions.

In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the ongoing war involving the Unted States, Israel, and Iran, the potential for such dynamics have intensified. While students filter their assumptions and comments within the classroom, it is clear that beyond the classroom, they are being exposed to the familiar conspiracy theories of the “Jewish banker” and “international globalist” that are circulating across their social media feeds. In a recent poll I conducted with my own students, more than 65% acknowledged that they had regularly encountered these types of posts.

Educators must recognize the powerful role these online narratives play in the lives of our students. Their continuous exposure to misinformation and antisemitic tropes requires more than historical instruction alone. We must help students identify and deconstruct these viral feeds – treating digital content as a modern form of antisemitic propaganda, in the same way that we challenge the work of Goebbels and Hitler.

This work calls for a curriculum that connects media literacy and historical study to the students’ lived experience. I recognize that this work is fraught with pedagogical and political hurdles, but it is a task worth addressing. Teachers, working collaboratively, can and must create safe spaces to examine these controversial issues, past and present. Within these spaces, students may express conspiracy theories and biases, but we cannot ignore them. Rather, these teachable moments are ripe for critical engagement. Together, we can examine the history and contemporary dangers of scapegoating and practice a civic minded response that nurtures our democracy.

Understanding and Teaching about the European Holocaust

Understanding and Teaching about the European Holocaust

By Joshua Wolk

The European Holocaust remains one of the most studied and debated events in modern human history by historians, philosophers and educators. Only conspiracy theorists question whether the European Holocaust and the extermination of six million Jews happened or happened on that scale. Debate centers on why it happened and whether it should be understood as a unique historical event, a singularity, incomparable to other historical events, or one of a number of 20th century genocides.

As a teacher, I believe what makes the European Holocaust unprecedented is that it was an industrialization of mass murder carried out by the Nazi regime utilizing modern bureaucracy, transportation networks, and mechanized killing center. This allowed the Nazis to create a system of extermination that functioned with an efficiency and scale previously unheard of and not since replicated. Understanding the Holocaust therefore requires recognizing both its place within the broader history of genocide as well as the distinctive features that made it historically unprecedented.

Sadly, genocide is far from a unique phenomenon in human history. Prior to the European Holocaust, societies had engaged in the systematic destruction of ethnic, religious or national groups. The word “genocide” itself was not coined until World War II by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish refugee to the United States from Poland in 1939. Lemkin did not limit the definition of holocaust to the extermination of European Jewry. In his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), he defined genocide as any coordinated plan aimed at destroying the life of a national group including the Ottoman treatment of Armenians during World War I. He included the destruction of cultural, economic, and religious life, not just physical extermination.

Genocidal campaigns attempt to eliminate populations viewed as threatening or undesirable. They are generally fueled by profound ethnic hatred, religious intolerance, political ideology, economic competition, and fears about national security. Studying earlier examples helps teachers and students better understand both the recurring nature of genocide while also understanding the ways in which the European Holocaust differed from other instances of mass violence. An important example of genocide was the Armenian Genocide, “Medz Yeghern” or “Great Catastrophe.” During the first World War, the Ottoman Empire carried out mass deportations and the murder of Armenians resulting in the death of an estimated one to one and a half million people. Communities were uprooted and subjected to violence by soldiers and paramilitary groups. Armenians were removed from their homes and forced to march through the Syrian desert under brutal conditions leading to widespread starvation. Property was confiscated and Armenian cultural institutions were destroyed. In this case, the killing process did not rely on technological systems or industrialized methods. Violence occurred through forced displacement and direct physical attacks carried out across large geographic areas.

Another example that illustrates the recurring nature of genocide, but also differences, is the Rwandan genocide in 1994 when over the course of 100 days the country’s Hutu majority murdered 800,000 members of its Tutsi minority. Radio broadcasts encouraged violence while simultaneously spreading propaganda that portrayed the Tutsi population as unhuman enemies who needed to be eliminated. Local Hutu communities were mobilized to participate and killings were often carried out by rampaging mobs with machetes and other basic weapons. These killing were personal and face-to-face unlike the Armenians who were left to die in the desert or European Jews murdered in concentration death camps.

What makes the European Holocaust unique is not murder, but the system by which Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies was carried out. One of the most significant elements of this system was the extensive use of transportation networks. Millions of victims were deported from cities and villages in countries under Nazi control and railroads were used to transport them across Europe to concentration and extermination camps. These deportations and executions were not random acts of violence but rather were carefully planned and coordinated operations. Trains were scheduled and routes were organized. Detailed records were kept in order to optimize the movement of people. This logistical coordination demonstrates how modern administrative systems were integrated into the machinery and fabric of genocide. Officials working in offices were able to be far removed from the killing sites.

The European Holocaust illustrates how genocide can be carried out, not only by perpetrators with weapons, but also by administrators who help maintain a system designed to maximize efficiency, maintain order, and enable mass murder. Once victims arrived at extermination camps, the killing process itself was organized in a manner that resembled an industrial system. In camps such as Auschwitz, gas chambers were used to quickly and efficiently kill large numbers of people. Victims were often deceived into believing they were entering showers or disinfection facilities and once inside the sealed chambers poison gas was released killing those trapped inside. Prisoners forced to work in the camps were assigned to specialized labor units responsible for removing bodies and operating crematoria expediting the process of killing and disposing of human remains at an efficient rate. This process allowed the Nazis to murder thousands of people each day and millions during the course of the war.

Historian Raul Hilberg, a refugee from Nazi occupied Europe and a World War II veteran serving with the American army, described the mass production of death through industrial means in his work The Destruction of the European Jews (Quadrangle, 1961). Hilberg, a professor at the University of Vermont, argued that the Holocaust was not simply the result of uncontrolled violence but instead was the culmination of a complex bureaucratic process that involved many institutions of the Nazi state. Hilberg explained the destruction of European Jews unfolded through a sequence of stages including identification, isolation, deportation, and extermination. Each stage required the participation of numerous officials who performed specialized roles within the broader system. Police forces enforced anti-Jewish regulations, civil administrators organized deportations, and transportation officials coordinated the movement of trains carrying victims to extermination camps.

It is important for teachers and students to examine survivor accounts to understand how detached bureaucratic systems impacted individuals and to humanize murder on such a grand scale. One of the most influential survivor testimonies is the work of Primo Levi. Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist who survived Auschwitz and in his memoir If This Is a Man, he describes his experiences within the camp system with clarity and reflection. Levi’s background as a scientist shaped the way he observed and interpreted the world around him in a way that is unique from many other stories of survivors. Levi portrayed described the organized and systematic nature operation of the concentration camps where prisoners were reduced to numbers tattooed onto their arms. This stripped them of their identities and allowed for the easier movement, organization, and murder of people. Every aspect of life in the camp was regulated by rules and procedures. Prisoners who were physically strong enough to work were assigned to labor units while others were selected for extermination. Levi’s account highlights how the camp system functioned as a mechanism designed to extract labor but simultaneously facilitated mass death. His observations reveal how the Nazis created a system that treated human beings as expendable resources within a larger machine.

Levi also wrote about the psychological strategies prisoners used in order to survive such harsh conditions. Many prisoners attempted to compartmentalize their experiences. These prisoners learned to focus on immediate survival rather than fully confronting the reality of the system surrounding them. Levi’s reflections illustrate how the industrialized structure of the European Holocaust affected not only the physical lives of prisoners but also played a large part in their mental and emotional experiences. Levi’s writing offers a powerful reminder that behind the bureaucratic machinery of genocide were millions of individual human lives.

The European Holocaust should be understood both as part of the broader history of genocide and as a uniquely industrialized form of mass murder. Genocide itself is not a singular phenomenon in human history. We see this demonstrated by events such as the Armenian and Rwandan genocides. The European Holocaust stands apart not due to the willingness to kill but because of the way the Nazi regime transformed the process of killing into a systematic and industrial enterprise. Through the use of transportation networks, mechanized killing centers and extensive administrative coordination the Nazis created a system capable of exterminating millions of people with unprecedented efficiency. The work of scholars like Raul Hilberg and the reflections of Primo Levi help us to better understand how this system operated. Studying the European Holocaust in this way helps illuminate the dangers that arise when modern systems of power are directed toward destructive and dehumanizing goals.

Rethinking Holocaust Education

Rethinking Holocaust Education

By Ari Mandel

Holocaust education occupies a paradoxical position in modern classrooms. It is one of the most widely taught subjects in social studies and history curricula in secondary schools and colleges, appearing in textbooks, museums, films, and commemorative programs across the world. Yet widespread exposure has not necessarily produced deeper historical understanding. Many students leave these lessons with strong impressions but only a limited grasp of the broader historical context, and of the historical forces that produced the Holocaust. In some cases, repeated exposure can even produce a kind of numbness in which the subject loses the weight it should carry.

The problem is clearly not a lack of exposure, but the way the history is framed and taught. Efforts to extract blunt moral lessons from the Holocaust may be well intentioned, but they risk reducing a complex historical catastrophe to a simplified parable. When history becomes primarily a vehicle for moral messaging, students may disengage or fail to grapple with the deeper questions the event raises.

Effective Holocaust education therefore requires a shift from quantity to quality. Instruction should prioritize historical context, careful analysis of evidence, and deep engagement with the social and political forces that made the genocide possible. Teaching the Holocaust as serious history allows students not only to understand the event itself, but also to examine how genocide develops, compare it with other episodes of mass violence, and evaluate contemporary issues with greater historical awareness.

Visibility Without Understanding

Despite its prominence in school curricula, Holocaust education often produces uneven results. Research and classroom experience suggest that many students retain only a fragmented grasp of the subject. They may recognize familiar symbols such as Auschwitz, Hitler, and concentration camps without understanding the broader context that made the genocide possible. Chronology is often unclear, the ideological foundations of Nazism are poorly understood, and the political and social mechanisms that enabled the Holocaust frequently remain unexplored.

Part of the difficulty lies in how instruction is structured. Lessons often prioritize emotional engagement over analysis. Graphic imagery, survivor testimony, and powerful narratives can leave lasting impressions, but without careful contextualization they may produce reactions without deeper comprehension. Students may remember what they saw or felt without understanding how or why events unfolded.

In some cases, the sheer volume of Holocaust imagery and storytelling has the opposite effect. Rather than strengthening engagement, repeated exposure can create a form of desensitization in which the subject becomes familiar but intellectually distant. Some historians have called this “Holocaust fatigue.” When it occurs, the Holocaust risks becoming just another tragedy rather than a historically specific event shaped by identifiable causes and decisions.

These patterns suggest that more exposure is not necessarily better. Depth of instruction matters more than frequency. A smaller number of carefully structured lessons that emphasize context, evidence, and inquiry may prove more effective than repeated encounters with sanitized and decontextualized narratives. Examined as a complex historical process shaped by ideology, political decisions, bureaucratic structures, and social participation, the Holocaust becomes far more intelligible.

The Problem with Moral Slogans

Attempts to extract blunt moral lessons from the Holocaust often produce the opposite of the intended effect. Teachers understandably want students to leave with a clear ethical message. Yet when the event is reduced to slogans about tolerance or bullying, its complexity disappears. Such framing turns a vast historical catastrophe into a simple moral parable and often produces indifference rather than engagement. More importantly, this framing allows students to distance themselves too easily. If the lesson is that Nazis were uniquely evil, students can reassure themselves that they are nothing like the perpetrators. As long as they are not committing atrocities, the history appears irrelevant. Modern Holocaust scholarship challenges this assumption. The individuals who carried out the Holocaust were not monsters drawn from some separate category of humanity. Most were ordinary people who lived ordinary lives, saw themselves as respectable, and participated in a system that persecuted and murdered millions.

Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley was a United States Army Military Intelligence Corps officer who served as chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg Prison prior to the post-World War II trial of leading Nazis. Kelley examined 22 high ranking officials of the Nazi party, including Hitler’s second-in-command Hermann Goring and his deputy Rudolf Hess to determine whether they were insane and predict if they would suffer a breakdown before and during their trial. In his book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg. A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals (London: W. H. Allen, 1947) published after the trial, Kelley argued the defendants did not represent a specifically Nazi pathology, but that “they were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are.” He believed that under similar circumstances, other people, including Americans might act in the same way. Kelley’s work with the Nazi prisoners is at the core of the recent movie Nuremberg.

Reaching similar conclusions, Hannah Arendt famously described this as the “banality of evil.” Observing Adolf Eichmann’s trial, she argued that genocide was often carried out not by fanatics but by individuals who were disturbingly normal. Eichmann presented himself as a bureaucrat who had simply performed his duties. While controversial, her argument forced historians to confront an unsettling reality: the Holocaust depended not only on ideology but on widespread participation.

Subsequent research reinforced this point. Stanley Milgram’s experiments demonstrated how ordinary individuals could be persuaded to harm others. Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men showed how middle-aged reservists, with little prior ideological commitment, became participants in mass murder through a mixture of obedience, peer pressure, and gradual moral accommodation.

Another crucial dimension concerns bystanders. Many people did not directly participate in violence, yet they witnessed persecution and chose not to intervene. Neighbors watched families disappear. Railway workers transported deportees. Civil servants processed the machinery of persecution. Their inaction helped sustain the system. For students, this category is often the most relevant. Few imagine themselves as perpetrators, and many hope they would be rescuers. In reality, most people occupy the space in between.

For Holocaust education, these insights are essential. The goal is not simply to label Nazis as evil, but to examine the social and psychological processes that made participation possible. Violence rarely begins with a single decision. It develops through smaller choices, compromises, and acts of conformity until the unthinkable becomes normalized. Taught this way, the Holocaust becomes not a distant moral fable but a deeply human and troubling historical process.

This approach also shifts the focus from abstract judgment to historical inquiry. Instead of asking whether people in the past were good or evil, students are encouraged to examine how ordinary individuals understood their actions, how institutions shaped behavior, and how social pressures influenced decision making. These questions do not excuse participation in violence, but they make it possible to understand how such participation occurs. In doing so, they bring the history closer to students’ own world, where moral choices are rarely presented in clear or dramatic terms.

What Students Never Learn: Jewish Life Before the Holocaust

Holocaust education often begins with persecution and ends with genocide. While these topics are essential, this framing creates a distorted picture of Jewish history. This problem is compounded by the fact that, for many students, Holocaust lessons may be their first real exposure to Jews or Judaism. Without prior knowledge or personal connection, their initial encounter may come through the lens of Nazi ideology itself. Students are often shown antisemitic caricatures to illustrate prejudice. These materials are important historical evidence, but without a broader context they can unintentionally reinforce the distortions they were meant to expose. With little else to draw on, students may come to understand Jews primarily through the representations created by their persecutors.

Before the Holocaust, Jewish communities across Europe were longstanding and integral parts of the social, cultural, and economic life of many cities and towns. Their traditions had evolved over millennia and supported vibrant intellectual, artistic, and political cultures. Jewish merchants, professionals, writers, musicians, and scholars played visible roles in the life of cities from Moscow to Paris. Political movements ranged from religious traditionalism to socialism and liberalism. Yiddish literature and theater flourished, and newspapers, schools, and community institutions shaped daily life across thousands of communities. This world was not defined solely by persecution. It was a living civilization with its own language, debates, and cultural achievements.

Understanding this world is essential to grasping the magnitude of the Holocaust. The destruction of European Jewry was not only the murder of millions but also the destruction of communities and traditions that had developed over generations. Without this context, students cannot fully understand what was destroyed.

Teaching Jewish life before the Holocaust corrects a deeper distortion. Jewish history is often presented as a sequence of persecutions culminating in genocide, reducing a complex civilization to a narrative of suffering. While antisemitism is part of that history, education should also present the richness of Jewish life that existed long before the Nazis attempted to eradicate it and that ultimately survived their attempt. Too often, students encounter Jews only as victims rather than as participants in a long and complex civilization.

This broader perspective has an additional benefit. When students encounter Jewish life as a living culture, they are better able to recognize the gap between antisemitic stereotypes and historical reality. In this sense, teaching Jewish life before the Holocaust is not a diversion but a necessary foundation for understanding it.

Why Holocaust Education Matters Now

Holocaust education matters not only because of the historical significance of the event itself, but also because the patterns that made it possible continue to appear in other contexts. Antisemitism has often flourished during periods of political instability, economic stress, or cultural anxiety. When individuals or communities explain difficult conditions by blaming vulnerable groups, it reflects a deeper failure to confront underlying problems and often leads to consequences that extend far beyond the targeted minority. In such moments, scapegoating replaces serious engagement with complex realities.

Crises have repeatedly produced movements that seek simple explanations for complex conditions. Economic hardship and rapid social change can generate narratives that attribute national decline to hidden enemies or internal betrayal. In these environments, conspiracy thinking takes hold and blame is redirected outward. Antisemitism has long provided one of the most persistent frameworks for this kind of explanation.

Teaching the Holocaust provides an opportunity to examine how such narratives develop and gain influence. Nazi ideology did not emerge in a vacuum. It drew on long standing traditions of antisemitism, racial theories, and conspiracy myths circulating across Europe, shaped in part by the political and economic crises that followed the first World War. Studied in context, these ideas reveal how prejudice becomes institutionalized and how conspiracy thinking can be translated into policy.

Holocaust education also encourages students to distinguish between different forms of mass violence. Genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity are related but distinct. Examining these categories allows for more precise analysis and comparison without diminishing the Holocaust.

In this sense, Holocaust education serves an important civic function. Students learn how propaganda reshapes public opinion, how institutions become instruments of persecution, and how narratives of blame take hold. The goal is not to draw simplistic parallels, but to equip students with the tools to recognize dangerous patterns.

Understanding the Holocaust therefore requires more than memorization. It requires examining how prejudice becomes normalized, how conspiracy thinking spreads, and how societies respond to crisis by directing anger toward vulnerable groups. When approached this way, Holocaust education becomes not only an exercise in remembrance but a framework for understanding how societies can descend into exclusion and violence.

Conclusion

Teaching the Holocaust presents educators with a difficult but essential responsibility. The challenge is not simply to present the facts, but to ensure that students understand the processes that made the genocide possible. Holocaust education can easily fall into repetition, emotional overload, or simplified moral messaging that leaves students with impressions but little analysis.

A more effective approach places historical inquiry at the center. Students should examine the ideological roots of antisemitism, the political and economic conditions that allowed extremism to flourish, and the structures that enabled genocide. This includes attention to the broader context in which Nazism emerged, including the aftermath of the First World War and the crises that followed. They should also confront the role of ordinary individuals, bystanders, and incremental choices in shaping events.

Equally important is situating the Holocaust within the broader history of Jewish life. The destruction of European Jewry cannot be understood solely through persecution. Without that context, the scale of the loss is diminished.

Ultimately, the purpose of Holocaust education is not only remembrance but understanding. Teaching the Holocaust as serious history allows students to grapple with the complexities of human behavior and the fragility of modern societies. It equips them to recognize patterns of scapegoating, conspiracy thinking, and political extremism before they escalate into something far more dangerous.

Remarks by German Chancellor Merkel, U.S. President Obama, and Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp

Source: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-obama-german-chancellor-merkel-and-elie-wiesel-buchenwald-concent

In June 2009, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, United States President Barack Obama, and Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel spoke at a memorial service at the Buchenwald Concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. Wiesel was fifteen years old when he was imprisoned by the Nazis, first at Auschwitz, and then at Buchenwald These are excerpts from their speeches.

CHANCELLOR MERKEL: “Unimaginable horror, shock — there are no words to adequately describe what we feel when we look at the suffering inflicted so cruelly upon so many people here and in other concentration and extermination camps under National Socialist terror. I bow my head before the victims. We, the Germans, are faced with the agonizing question how and why — how could this happen? How could Germany wreak such havoc in Europe and the world? It is therefore incumbent upon us Germans to show an unshakeable resolve to do everything we can so that something like this never happens again.

On the 25th of January, the presidents of the associations of former inmates at the concentration camps presented their request to the public, and this request closes with the following words: “The last eyewitness appeal to Germany, to all European states, and to the international community to continue preserving and honoring the human gift of remembrance and commemoration into the future. We ask young people to carry on our struggle against Nazi ideology, and for a just, peaceful and tolerant world; a world that has no place for anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, and right-wing extremism.”

This appeal of the survivors clearly defines the very special responsibility we Germans have to shoulder with regard to our history. And for me, therefore, there are three messages that are important today. First, let me emphasize, we Germans see it as past of our country’s raison d’être to keep the everlasting memory alive of the break with civilization that was the Shoah. Only in this way will we be able to shape our future. I am therefore very grateful that the Buchenwald memorial has always placed great emphasis on the dialogue with younger people, to conversations with eyewitnesses, to documentation, and a broad-based educational program. Second, it is most important to keep the memory of the great sacrifices alive that had to be made to put an end to the terror of National Socialism and to liberate its victims and to rid all people of its yoke . . .

Third, here in Buchenwald I would like to highlight an obligation placed on us Germans as a consequence of our past: to stand up for human rights, to stand up for rule of law, and for democracy. We shall fight against terror, extremism, and anti-Semitism. And in the awareness of our responsibility we shall strive for peace and freedom, together with our friends and partners in the United States and all over the world.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: “More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished. I will not forget what I’ve seen here today. I’ve known about this place since I was a boy, hearing stories about my great uncle, who was a very young man serving in World War II. He was part of the 89th Infantry Division, the first Americans to reach a concentration camp. They liberated Ohrdruf, one of Buchenwald’s sub-camps. … He returned from his service in a state of shock saying little and isolating himself for months on end from family and friends, alone with the painful memories that would not leave his head. And as we see — as we saw some of the images here, it’s understandable that someone who witnessed what had taken place here would be in a state of shock.

My great uncle’s commander, General Eisenhower, understood this impulse to silence. He had seen the piles of bodies and starving survivors and deplorable conditions that the American soldiers found when they arrived, and he knew that those who witnessed these things might be too stunned to speak about them or be able — be unable to find the words to describe them; that they might be rendered mute in the way my great uncle had. And he knew that what had happened here was so unthinkable that after the bodies had been taken away, that perhaps no one would believe it. And that’s why he ordered American troops and Germans from the nearby town to tour the camp. He invited congressmen and journalists to bear witness and ordered photographs and films to be made. And he insisted on viewing every corner of these camps so that — and I quote — he could “be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.”

We are here today because we know this work is not yet finished. To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened — a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful. This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts; a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history. Also to this day, there are those who perpetuate every form of intolerance — racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism, and more — hatred that degrades its victims and diminishes us all. In this century, we’ve seen genocide. We’ve seen mass graves and the ashes of villages burned to the ground; children used as soldiers and rape used as a weapon of war. This places teaches us that we must be ever vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time, that we must reject the false comfort that others’ suffering is not our problem and commit ourselves to resisting those who would subjugate others to serve their own interests . . .

When the American GIs arrived they were astonished to find more than 900 children still alive, and the youngest was just three years old. And I’m told that a couple of the prisoners even wrote a Buchenwald song that many here sang. Among the lyrics were these: “…whatever our fate, we will say yes to life, for the day will come when we are free…in our blood we carry the will to live and in our hearts, in our hearts — faith.”

ELIE WIESEL: “As I came here today it was actually a way of coming and visiting my father’s grave – but he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky. This has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people. The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. He became sick, weak, and I was there. I was there when he suffered. I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me, although we were in the same block; he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name, and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there, but I was not there. And I thought one day I will come back and speak to him, and tell him of the world that has become mine. I speak to him of times in which memory has become a sacred duty of all people of good will . . .

What can I tell him that the world has learned?

When I was liberated in 1945, April 11, by the American army, somehow many of us were convinced that at least one lesson will have been learned – that never again will there be war; that hatred is not an option, that racism is stupid; and the will to conquer other people’s minds or territories or aspirations, that will is meaningless . .

But again, the world hasn’t. Had the world learned, there would have been no Cambodia and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia. Will the world ever learn? I think that is why Buchenwald is so important – as important, of course, but differently as Auschwitz. It’s important because here the large – the big camp was a kind of international community. People came there from all horizons –

 political, economic, culture. The first globalization essay, experiment, were made in Buchenwald. And all that was meant to diminish the humanity of human beings . . .

Memory must bring people together rather than set them apart. Memories here not to sow anger in our hearts, but on the contrary, a sense of solidarity that all those who need us. What else can we do except invoke that memory so that people everywhere who say the 21st century is a century of new beginnings, filled with promise and infinite hope, and at times profound gratitude to all those who believe in our task, which is to improve the human condition.

A History of Civil Disobedience Lesson

A History of Civil Disobedience Lesson

by John Staudt

PBS and Ken Burns have a new three-part series on the legacy of 19th century American philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau and his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” which inspired activists including Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. The website includes a seven minute video and excerpts from the well-known essay.

Parts 1–2 work well as paired reading and analysis. Part 3 is designed for longer written responses or small-group discussion. Part 4 may be assigned as a take-home shot essay prompt. This worksheet is designed to serve as the capstone activity for a civil rights unit.

ADAPT (American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today)

Part 1Thoreau & the Origins of Civil Disobedience

CONTEXT: In 1846, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax, was arrested, and spent a night in jail. He opposed both slavery and the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), which he saw as an unjust war designed to expand slavery itself. His 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” became the philosophical foundation for mass movements around the world.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?… Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. – Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849

I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was still a more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. – Henry David Thoreau, regarding his night in jail

Questions:
1. Thoreau argues that “the true place for a just man” under an unjust government is prison. What does he mean? How can accepting imprisonment represent freedom rather than defeat?

2. Thoreau was upset not just with the federal government, but with Massachusetts (his home state), a state that claimed to oppose slavery but still collected taxes that funded it. What does his critique of complicity tell us about moral responsibility in a democracy? Is paying taxes that fund an unjust policy the same as supporting it?

3. Reportedly, when Thoreau was in jail, his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him and asked “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?” What argument is Thoreau making in this exchange? Why does he consider Emerson’s freedom to be a kind of imprisonment for his friend?

Part 2Four Movements Comparing Civil Disobedience in Practice

REFERENCE TABLE: Use the comparison table and the core principles card to ground your analysis. Return to both as you work through each question.

MovementAct of DisobedienceUnjust Law TargetedScaleOutcome
Henry David Thoreau 1846 United StatesRefused to pay state tax; accepted one night in jailFugitive Slave Act; tax support of an unjust warIndividualEssay “Civil Disobedience” (1849); philosophical foundation for all later movements
Mahatma Gandhi 1930 British IndiaLed 240-mile Salt March; thousands deliberately violated British salt lawBritish colonial salt monopolyMass MovementExposed colonial injustice globally; accelerated Indian independence (1947)
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1955–1968 United StatesSit-ins, marches, boycotts; Letter from Birmingham Jail written while imprisonedJim Crow segregation laws throughout the SouthMass MovementCivil Rights Act (1964); Voting Rights Act (1965)
ADAPT Disability Rights Activists; 1990 United States60 protesters crawled up 83 Capitol steps; arrestedInaccessible built environment; no federal disability civil rights lawOrganized movementADA signed July 26, 1990 four months after the Capitol Crawl
Thoreau’s Four Core Principles of Civil Disobedience
1. Break the unjust law publicly; The act itself is the argument made visible
2. Accept the legal consequences willingly; Punishment demonstrates the law’s injustice
3. Use sacrifice to awaken public conscience; Suffering must be made meaningful, not merely endured
4. Force systemic change through moral pressure; The goal is transformation of law or policy

Questions:

1. What core principles of civil disobedience remained unchanged across all four movements from Thoreau (1846) to the Capitol Crawl (1990)? Identify at least two that appear in every case and explain why those specific principles are essential to the strategy of Civil Disobedience.

2. Thoreau’s act was individual. Gandhi turned the principle into a mass movement. King organized city-wide boycotts, sit-ins, and marches. ADAPT mobilized a coordinated national campaign. What did each movement gain by expanding from individual to collective action? What did it risk losing?
3. Is individual civil disobedience one person refusing, accepting arrest, making a point politically effective on its own? Or does it require mass participation to force change? Explain your response.

Part 3Conditions for Success: What Made Each Movement Effective?

ANALYTICAL FRAME: Effective civil disobedience does not operate in a vacuum. Timing, media coverage, public response, government reaction, and the clarity of the injustice being demonstrated all shape whether a movement succeeds or fails. Use the reading and the comparison table to analyze what specific conditions made each movement’s disobedience effective.

ANALYTICAL QUESTION COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS:

Compare the outcomes of at least two of the four movements identified above.

1. How did specific conditions, timing, public response, media attention, and government reaction make each form of civil disobedience effective?

2. Why did Thoreau’s individual act produce an essay rather than immediate political change? Why did the Capitol Crawl produce the ADA within four months?

3. Each of the four movements used protesters’ own bodies to make injustice visible: Thoreau in a jail cell, Gandhi marching to the sea, King’s marchers facing police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, disability activists crawling up the U.S. Capitol steps. Why is using the body itself as the instrument of protest so powerful? What does it communicate that speeches and petitions cannot?

4. King wrote in the ̈Letter from Birmingham Jail ̈ that direct action “creates such a crisis and fosters such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” How did each action or movement succeed in forcing confrontation?

Part 4Synthesis: The Legacy of Civil Disobedience

CORE SYNTHESIS QUESTION: Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and ADAPT activists all believed that breaking an unjust law openly, accepting punishment willingly, and making injustice visible could lead to changing unjust laws. Their success proves that civil disobedience works under specific conditions. What are those conditions?

PERSONAL REFLECTION: Is there an issue today for you which civil disobedience: breaking a law publicly and accepting the consequences willingly would be justified? What would be required before you made your move?

Excerpts from Thoreau’s Essay on “Civil Disobedience.”

Source: https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/10/Civil-Disobedience-by-Henry-David-Thoreau.pdf

Excerpt 1: Thoreau Believed there is a Moral Obligation to Resist Unjust Laws

“He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist. How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also. All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of ’75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is

most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.”

Excerpt 2: Thoreau Rejected a Moral Obligation to Obey Authority

“[William] Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his chapter on the “Duty of Submission to Civil Government,” resolves all civil obligation into expediency; and he proceeds to say that “so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is, so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed without public inconveniency, it is the will of God… that the established government be obeyed, —and no longer. This principle being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of redressing it on the other.” Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”

Note: William Paley was an 18th century British philosopher and theologian who argued that people had a duty to submit to government authority.

Excerpt 3: Thoreau Argued Against Waiting for Reforms that Might Never Happen

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?”

Excerpt 4: Thoreau Advocated for Nonviolent Resistance

“One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its authority was the only offence never contemplated by government; else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and proportionate, penalty? If a man who has no property refuses but once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the discretion of those who placed him there; but if he should steal ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to go at large again. If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth, — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

Excerpt 5: Thoreau Condemned the State’s Resistance to Change

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong. It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or the Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me; and if they should not bear my petition, what should I do then? But in this case the State has provided no way: its very Constitution is the evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory; but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. So is any change for the better, like birth and death, which convulse the body. I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

Excerpt 6: Thoreau Believed in the Power of Truth and the Individual

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable, ground, where the State places those who are not with her, but against her – the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.”

Using Graph Analysis to Document Climate Change

Using Graph Analysis to Document Climate Change

By Julianna Bellini

Social Studies teachers are expected to help students develop reading and analytical skills and promote written, oral, and numeric literacy. Including graphs like these in a lesson on the impact of climate change addresses both analytical skills and numeric literacy.

Graph #1: Global Average Surface Temperature (1885–2025)

Source: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature

A graph showing the temperature of the sun AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows changes in Earth’s global average surface temperature using temperature anomalies in °C. A temperature anomaly is how much the temperature is above or below a reference “normal” period (1850-1900), rather than the actual temperature. Temperatures stay fairly stable in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then rise noticeably from the mid-1900s, with the fastest warming in recent decades. This trend reflects the rise in greenhouse gases from human activities, especially burning fossil fuels, which trap heat in the atmosphere.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. At what point on this graph did global average temperature start to change?

4. What is the direction of this change?

5. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #2: Global Sea Level Average (1885–2025)

Source: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level

A graph of a sea level AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows changes in global average sea level from 1885 to 2025. Sea level is measured in centimeters compared to a long term baseline, so positive values mean higher than average seas. Over this period, sea level remained relatively low and stable in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then began a steady rise in the mid‐1900s. The rise accelerates in recent decades due to warming temperatures, which cause ocean water to expand and ice on land to melt. This long‐term increase in sea level is consistent with global warming driven by rising greenhouse gas concentrations.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. When did sea levels begin to rise?

4. When did sea level rise accelerate?

5. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #3: Ocean Heat Content (1955–2024)

Source: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-ocean-heat-content

A graph showing the growth of a company AI-generated content may be incorrect.


This graph shows changes in the amount of heat stored in the world’s oceans from 1955 to 2024. Ocean heat content is measured in joules, which are units of energy; the same unit scientists use to compare energy in different parts of the climate system. When greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, more than 90% of that excess energy goes into the oceans instead of staying in the air. Because water can store large amounts of energy with only small temperature changes, increases in ocean heat content clearly show the long‐term warming of the climate system. The graph shows that ocean heat content has risen steadily, reflecting continued heat absorption by the oceans as the planet warms.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. When did ocean heat content start to change?

4. What is the direction of the change?

5. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #4: Natural Disasters Reported (1955–2024)

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-natural-disaster-events

A graph showing the number of storms reported AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows the number of natural disaster events reported globally from 1955 to 2024. The data include disasters such as floods, storms, droughts, and wildfires that have been recorded in international disaster databases. The graph shows a clear upward trend in reported events over time. Some of this increase reflects better reporting and communication systems, especially in earlier decades.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. What is the trend in this graph?

4. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #5: CO2 Emissions (1885–2024)

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

A graph showing the growth of the company's growth AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows global carbon (CO2) emissions from 1885 to 2024, measured in gigatons of CO2 per year (GtCO2/yr). CO2 is the most abundant greenhouse gas emitted by human activities, mainly from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. The graph remains low and somewhat stable in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then rises sharply throughout the 20th century as industrialization spread. Emissions accelerate particularly after World War II with increased reliance on fossil energy and continue to grow into the 21st century.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. When did carbon dioxide emissions start to change?

4. What is the direction of the change?

5. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #6: Maximum Arctic Sea Ice Extent (1980–2024)

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/arctic-sea-ice

A graph of the arctic sea ice extent AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows the annual maximum extent of Arctic sea ice from 1980 to 2024, measured in million square kilometers. Maximum sea ice extent refers to the largest area covered by sea ice each year, usually occurring in late winter. The graph illustrates a long term decline in the size of the Arctic’s winter ice cover, even though there is variability. This downward trend is linked to rising global temperatures, since warmer air and ocean conditions reduce the formation and persistence of sea ice.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. What is the trend with the annual maximum extent of Arctic sea ice?

4. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #7: Global Atmospheric Methane Concentrations (1984–2024)

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-methane-concentrations?time=earliest..20 25-09-15

A graph showing the amount of methane in the amount of gas AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows changes in the concentration of methane (CH4) in Earth’s atmosphere from 1984 to 2024, measured in parts per billion (ppb). Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas (much more effective at trapping heat than CO2 over short time periods) and comes from both natural sources (wetlands) and human activities (agriculture, fossil fuel production). The graph reveals a steady rise in atmospheric methane over the time period, with especially notable increases in recent years. Rising methane contributes to enhanced greenhouse warming and amplifies climate change alongside carbon dioxide.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. When did the concentration of methane in the Earth’s atmosphere start to change?

4. What is the direction of the change?

5. What is the cause of this change?

Graph #8: Ice Sheet Mass Balance in Antarctica (2002–2020)

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ice-sheet-mass-balance

A graph showing the number of mass in the year AI-generated content may be incorrect.

This graph shows the change in the mass balance of Antarctica’s ice sheets from 2002 to 2020, measured in gigatons per year (Gt/yr). Ice sheet mass balance represents the net gain or loss of ice (positive values mean ice is being added, and negative values mean ice is being lost.) The graph demonstrates that Antarctica has been losing ice overall during this period, with increasingly negative values over time. This ice loss contributes to global sea level rise because ice previously stored on land flows into the ocean. The moving toward more negative mass balance is consistent with warming ocean and air temperatures affecting ice stability.

Questions

1. What does the horizontal x-axis represent?

2. What does the vertical y-axis represent?

3. What is the trend in the mass balance of Antarctica’s ice sheets?

4. What is the cause of this change?

More Than Meets the Axis: Helping Social Studies Students Understand Graphs

More Than Meets the Axis: Helping Social Studies Students Understand Graphs

by Marilyn DePietto

When James Baldwin wrote that “the purpose of education…is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions,” (Baldwin, 1963) he was not calling educators to produce agreement. He was calling us to find the courage to confront uncomfortable truths, to question what appears settled, and to resist the ease of acceptance. In today’s media-saturated world, that courage increasingly depends on a form of literacy that sits at the intersection of mathematics and social studies: the ability to critically interpret visual representations of data.

Mathematics is often framed as the domain of certainty and social studies as the domain of interpretation. Students are told that in mathematics, conclusions follow logically from established truths. In social studies, students weigh perspectives, contexts, and claims. But this division breaks down when we consider how quantitative information is used in public life. Graphs, charts, rankings, and statistics shape arguments about policy, economics, education, and justice. These representations carry the authority of mathematics while serving rhetorical purposes in ways that demand interpretation. If we teach students how to read and construct graphs but not how to interrogate them, we have only taught half the discipline.

The Myth of Neutral Numbers

There is a persistent belief among students and educators alike that numbers are inherently objective. “Numbers don’t lie” is often invoked as a shield against critique. Yet quantitative reasoning has historically been used to justify deeply flawed, oppressive, and harmful ideas. Pseudoscientific practices such as eugenics and phrenology relied heavily on measurement, classification, and statistical language to present social hierarchies as natural and inevitable. Their persuasive power depended not only on the claims themselves but on the perceived neutrality of the mathematical tools used to present them.

In contexts where numerical literacy is limited, the persuasive effect is amplified. When audiences are not equipped to question how data is gathered, represented, or framed, they are more likely to accept conclusions uncritically. The issue, therefore, is not whether the numbers themselves are “true,” but what viewers are urged to conclude from them. This distinction is crucial for both mathematics and social studies classrooms. It shifts the focus from accuracy alone to interpretation.

Why Graphs Matter

Graphs are particularly powerful tools for this kind of interdisciplinary work. They translate complex numerical information into visual form, allowing patterns and trends to emerge clearly. In a media environment dominated by images, headlines, and short-form content, graphs and charts often function as stand-alone arguments. A viewer may spend only a few seconds glancing at one before forming a conclusion.

This speed is precisely what makes graphs so potentially misleading. It is important to note that “misleading” does not mean “false.” A graph can accurately represent data while still encouraging interpretations that go beyond, or even contradict, the evidence. The “leading” in a misleading graph comes not from the data itself but from the choices made in its presentation including scale, labeling, comparison groups, visual emphasis, and omission.

Teaching students to recognize these choices is an essential component of both mathematical and civic thinking. New York State Next Generation Learning Standards in both mathematics and social studies call for students to analyze data, evaluate sources, and make evidence-based claims. Critically interpreting graphs sits squarely at the intersection of these expectations.

Seeing the Same Data Differently

One of the most effective ways to provide an entry point for this work is to present students with two graphs that display the same data in different ways (Figure 1). At first glance, students often assume that these wildly different visuals must reflect different datasets. When they discover that the underlying numbers are identical, it creates a productive moment of confusion and dissonance.

The two line graphs represent the same trend over time. In the left one, the vertical axis is truncated, which has the effect of exaggerating small changes. In the other, the axis begins at zero, making those same changes appear minimal. Technically, neither graph is “wrong.” Both accurately plot the data points. Note that in the exaggerated graph (left), the y-axis jumps from 0 to 6.9, but there is also a clearly visible break in the axis, properly indicating that part of the axis is not to scale. The break is indicated by the small zigzag line at the bottom. Yet they invite very different interpretations.

Figure 1 Source: Reconstructed from Identifying Misleading Graphs. Konst Math.

A graph of women's long jujubes AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Rather than immediately explaining the discrepancy, teachers may pose a series of questions:

  • What claim might each graph support?
  • What differences do you notice in how the data is displayed?
  • Why might someone choose to present the data this way?
  • What conclusions would go beyond what the data can actually support?

Students often begin by focusing on surface features (“This one goes up more”), but with guidance, they can move toward more sophisticated observations about scale, proportion, and visual emphasis. A common misconception is that if a graph is technically correct, it is also fair or neutral. This activity helps disrupt that assumption. The goal is not necessarily to accuse a creator of deception, but to analyze how representation shapes interpretation.

When Design Implies Argument

A graph of crime in florida AI-generated content may be incorrect.Figure 2 Source: The Society Pages   In other examples, the persuasive elements of a graph become even more apparent. Figure 2 shows a famously misleading and widely circulated news graphic from several years ago depicting trends before and after Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law was enacted. The graph includes dramatic shading and highlights a specific point in time, drawing the viewer’s attention and suggesting a causal relationship. At a glance, the message feels clear: gun deaths decreased because of this policy. Yet a closer and more critical look reveals that the y-axis is labeled in the opposite direction from established convention. Again, this graph is properly labeled, and there is nothing mathematically incorrect about it. But creating an axis that increases in the downward direction seems like an intentional effort to mislead viewers.

Furthermore, the shading, while seemingly a design choice, functions rhetorically by guiding the viewer’s eye away from the deceptive y-axis, and towards the stark drop off after 2005. If this graph were conventionally constructed, it would show a sharp upward spike after that year.

Students often struggle here with this misconception; they assume that critique requires identifying an error. When no calculation is wrong, they may conclude there is nothing to question. This is an opportunity to expand their understanding of critique. The issue is not whether the graph is accurate, but whether the conclusions it suggests are warranted. Framing questions like the following can help students move beyond correctness toward reasoning:

  • What is this graph encouraging us to believe?
  • What evidence would we need to support that claim?
  • Who designed this graph and why?

What’s Missing Matters

Another powerful example of misleading involves comparisons that appear straightforward but rest on incompatible measures. Figure 3 shows a graph that compares the cost of a college degree with annual earnings after graduation. Presented this way, the figure suggests that the cost drastically outweighs the benefit.

A graph showing the growth of a higher education AI-generated content may be incorrect.Figure 3 Source: The Atlantic   Students should be prompted to ask: Are these quantities measured over the same time frame?What happens if we consider earnings over a lifetime rather than a single year?What alternative scenarios should be included for comparison?Which quantities here occur once and which are repeated?

This last question gets to the central issue with this graph. The cost of a bachelor’s degree has indeed gone up in some cases by nearly 100%. However, this one-time cost is being compared to an annual salary, which not only repeats every year, but also increases for the earner over time.  Equally important is attending to what is omitted. If a graph argues that college is not “worth it,” what is the implied alternative? What are the earnings for individuals without a degree? What would a graph directly comparing salaries of people with and without a degree look like? What about in varied geographical areas? What other factors, like job stability, benefits, career mobility, might matter but are not represented? In both mathematics and social studies, absence is as important as presence. What is not shown can shape conclusions just as powerfully as what is. Students must be taught to courageously interrogate absences in visual representations so that their conclusions are shaped by well-contextualized facts and not a creator’s agenda.

Questioning Rankings

Ranking charts provide another rich context for critical analysis. Lists of “top” education systems, happiest countries, or most livable cities circulate widely and are often treated as objective measurements. Yet these rankings are constructed through a series of decisions: which variables to include, how to weight them, and how to aggregate results. Presenting students with two different rankings of the same phenomenon produced by different organizations, can prompt important questions:

  • Who created this ranking?
  • What criteria were used?
  • Why might those criteria have been chosen?
  • How might different choices lead to different results?

Students may initially look for which ranking is “correct.” Redirecting them to consider how each ranking reflects particular values or priorities helps shift the conversation. These are not naturally occurring facts; they are constructed representations. This kind of inquiry aligns closely with social studies practices of sourcing and contextualization, while also reinforcing mathematical ideas about measurement, weighting, and aggregation.

Teaching Students to Be Critical Thinkers

Ultimately, the goal of this work is not to turn students into the type skeptics who reject all data, but into thoughtful interpreters who engage with evidence responsibly. This skill requires explicit instruction. We cannot assume that students will naturally develop these skills simply by working with graphs in procedural ways.  One way to “wake students up” to how easy it is for graphs to be misleading is to assign them to create a graph that intentionally misleads.  This type of task is inspired by the classic 1954 book, How to Lie with Statistics. Author Darrell Huff opined, “The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense” (Huff, 1954).

An example task might include giving students a set of numerical data and a point of view that their graph or chart must suggest. Their first attempt at visually representing the data might not align with that point of view, so they should brainstorm ways of contorting the representation while still keeping it mathematically sound so that it implies a different conclusion.  Like Huff suggests, once students experience how easy it is to make a representation of data say something very different from what they initially thought, they will be more appropriately equipped to see it when other creators do it.

This practice cultivates several important habits of mind like wondering what a representation is designed to show and what it may obscure, asking who created it and for what purpose, distinguishing between what the data shows and what is being claimed, and recognizing that evidence has limits and that conclusions require justification. These habits support not only mathematical proficiency but also civic participation. In a democratic society, citizens are routinely asked to interpret data in order to make decisions about policy, voting, and public discourse. The ability to engage with that data critically is essential.

Courage in the Classroom

Baldwin’s call for courage in education is not limited to particular subjects. In the mathematics classroom, courage can take the form of resisting the comfort of neat answers and instead engaging with ambiguity, interpretation, and critique. It means acknowledging that even in a discipline grounded in logic, representations and conclusions can mislead. When we invite students to question graphs and consider alternative interpretations, we are not undermining mathematics, we are deepening it. We are showing students that mathematics is not just a set of procedures but a way of reasoning.

In a world of charts, headlines, TikTok reels, and YouTube shorts, this may be one of the most important lessons we can offer: every representation is created for an audience, for a purpose. The question students should carry with them is not simply “What does this show?” but “What is this trying to make me think, and why?” Helping students learn to ask that question, again and again, is both a mathematical responsibility and a civic one.

References

Baldwin, J. (1963). A talk to teachers. In The price of the ticket: Collected nonfiction 1948-1985. St. Martin’s Press.

Huff, D. (1954). How to lie with statistics. W. W. Norton & Company.

Konst, B. (n.d.). Identifying misleading graphs [Video]. YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETbc8GIhfHo

The Society Pages. (2014). How to lie with statistics: Stand your ground and gun deaths. Sociological Images. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/12/28/how-to-lie-with-statistics-stand-your-ground-and-gun-deaths/

Thompson, D. (2012). Hey, everyone, don’t fall for this misleading graph about college costs. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/hey-everyone-dont-fall-for-this-misleading-graph-about-college-costs/258299/

The Failures of the Recovery from the Great Recession

The Failures of the Recovery from the Great Recession

Michael Meeropol and Jared Ragusett

When Barack Obama took over as President, there were fears that the United States was heading for a re-run of the Great Depression. The financial meltdown that became apparent during the 2008 calendar year had sparked a dramatic recession – which has come to be known with 20-20 hindsight as the Great Recession. When Obama took office, the economy was hemorrhaging 700,000 jobs a month. The unemployment rate had climbed to 9 percent and it was still going up. Something had to be done.

Obama’s program passed the House and Senate in March of 2009. It was just enough to stop the bleeding and begin what turned out to be a painfully slow recovery. But because of a combination of Democratic timidity and Republican opposition, the size of the macroeconomic stimulation contained in the Recovery Act was much too small. In order to get the 60 votes needed to defeat a Republican filibuster, the Obama Administration had to pare back their proposed spending increases and tax cuts in order to satisfy the deficit hawks among the Democratic majority. The result was an historically slow recovery which was the reason the House flipped to the Republicans in 2010 and the Senate flipped to the Republicans in 2014. It  was also one of the reasons Donald Trump was elected President at the end of Obama’s two terms.

Real GDP growth was slow through 2016. Investment incentives had been severely damaged by the housing bubble during the years 1995-2005 followed by housing bubble meltdown during the years 2005-2009. During the Obama recovery housing investment barely budged reducing the overall level of investment. This led to a miniscule productivity growth rate. Meanwhile consumption spending which is the key incentive for the revival of investment during business cycle upswings rose slowly as well. It took a long time for the unemployment rate to fall to its pre-recession level.

Obama won re-election in 2012, but up and down the ballot (including in many state legislatures and the House of Representatives beginning in 2010), Republicans cashed in on the impatience of citizens with the slow pace of recovery. The economy did not get back to “normal” until 2016 but it was too late for the Democrats. Trump was able to ride to a (razor thin) victory in part on the strength of disappointment by many people who had voted for Obama, both rural whites in key states like Wisconsin and Michigan who switched to Trump, as well as Black voters whose turnout fell in Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee. This had devastating electoral consequences for three crucial battleground states (Krogstad and Lopez, 2017).

Obama’s Challenge

When President Obama took office, all eyes were focused on the short run challenge of the Great Recession. Here’s how his Council of Economic Advisers stated it, a year later in the Economic Report of the President, 2010:

“In December 2007, the American economy entered what at first seemed likely to be a mild recession. … [R]eal house prices (that is, house prices adjusted for inflation) had risen to unprecedented levels, almost doubling between 1997 and 2006. The rapid run-up in prices was accompanied by a residential construction boom and the proliferation of complex mortgages and mortgage-related financial assets. The fall of national house prices starting in early 2007, and the associated declines in the values of mortgage-backed and other related assets, led to a slowdown in the growth of consumer spending, increases in mortgage defaults and home foreclosures, significant strains on financial institutions, and reduced credit availability. By early 2008, the economy was contracting. Employment fell by an average of 137,000 jobs per month over the first eight months of 2008. Real GDP rose only anemically from the third quarter of 2007 to the second quarter of 2008.

Then in September 2008, the character of the downturn worsened dramatically. The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the near-collapse of American International Group (AIG) led to a seizing up of financial markets and plummeting consumer and business confidence. Parts of the financial system froze, and assets once assumed to be completely safe, such as money-market mutual funds, became unstable and subject to runs. Credit spreads, a common indicator of credit market stress, spiked to unprecedented levels in the fall of 2008. The value of the stock market plunged 24 percent in September and October, and another 15 percent by the end of January. [O]ver the final four months of 2008 and the first month of 2009, the economy lost, on average, a staggering 544,000 jobs per month, the highest level of job loss since the demobilization at the end of World War II. Real GDP fell at an increasingly rapid pace: an annual rate of 2.7 percent in the third quarter of 2008, 5.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, and 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009.” (ERP, 2010: 26-27)

Here is how President Obama himself described the crisis that greeted him when he took office:

“Last January, (2009) years of irresponsible risk-taking and debt-fueled speculation—unchecked by sound oversight—led to the near-collapse of our financial system. We were losing an average of 700,000 jobs each month. Over the course of one year, $13 trillion of Americans’ household wealth had evaporated as stocks, pensions, and home values plummeted. Our gross domestic product was falling at the fastest rate in a quarter century. The flow of credit, vital to the functioning of businesses large and small, had ground to a halt. The fear among economists, from across the political spectrum, was that we could sink into a second Great Depression.” (ERP, 3)

Later in the same message he noted that there were also long-term problems that his administration had to confront.  

“At the same time, long before this crisis hit, middle-class families were under growing strain. For decades, Washington failed to address fundamental weaknesses in the economy: rising health care costs, growing dependence on foreign oil, an education system unable to prepare all of our children for the jobs of the future. In recent years, spending bills and tax cuts for the very wealthiest were approved without paying for any of it, leaving behind a mountain of debt. And while Wall Street gambled without regard for the consequences, Washington looked the other way.

As a result, the economy may have been working for some at the very top, but it was not working for all American families. Year after year, folks were forced to work longer hours, spend more time away from their loved ones, all while their incomes flat-lined and their sense of economic security evaporated. Growth in our country was neither sustained nor broadly shared. Instead of a prosperity powered by smart ideas and sound investments, growth was fueled in large part by a rapid rise in consumer borrowing and consumer spending.” (ERP, 5-6)

The Council of Economic Advisers elaborated a bit more on these long run problems:

“… even before the crisis, the economy faced significant long-term challenges. As a result, it was doing poorly at providing rising standards of living for the vast majority of Americans…Beginning around 1970, slower productivity growth and rising income inequality caused incomes for most families to grow only slowly. After a half-decade of higher growth in the 1990s, the real income of the typical American family actually fell between 2000 and 2006.” (ERP, 28)

As to what had caused the increase in inequality and slower productivity growth over the long run, the Council members were silent. They did, however, identify a rising share of debt-financed consumption as the problem for the decade since 2000:

“The expansion of the 2000s was fueled in part by high consumption. [T]he share of GDP that takes the form of consumption has been on a generally upward trend for decades and reached unprecedented heights in the 2000s. The personal saving rate fell to exceptionally low levels, and trade deficits were large and persistent. A substantial amount of the remainder of GDP took the form of housing construction, which may have crowded out other kinds of investment. Such an expansion is not just unstable, as we have learned painfully over the past two years. It also contributes too little to increases in standards of living. Low investment in equipment and factories slows the growth of productivity and wages.” (ERP, 29- 30)

Plan For Recovery: Success Or Failure?

In order to assess this issue, one must first explain how to judge success or failure. In the Economic Report of the President for 2017, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers certainly argued that what they had done since January 2009 had been a great success. Here is how they argued:

“Over the two terms of the Obama Administration, the U.S. economy has made a remarkable recovery from the Great Recession. After peaking at 10.0 percent in October 2009, the unemployment rate has been cut by more than half to 4.6 percent as of November 2016 … Real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita recovered fully to its pre-crisis peak in the fourth quarter of 2013, … As of November 2016, the economy has added 14.8 million jobs over 74 months, the longest streak of total job growth on record. Since private-sector job growth turned positive in March 2010, U.S. businesses have added 15.6 million jobs. Real wage growth has been faster in the current business cycle than in any since the early 1970s.” [ERP: 2017: 21]

The forceful response of the federal government to the crisis in 2008 and 2009 helped stave off a potential second Great Depression, setting the U.S. economy on track to rebuild, reinvest, and recover. Everything the Obama Council of Economic Advisers marked in their 2017 Report is correct. Their emphasis on the importance of both the fiscal stimulus of the Recovery Act and the temporary payroll tax holiday as detailed in Figure 1-9 (pg. 35) from that report is not misplaced. Unfortunately, because of the political constraints on big deficits and the almost universal opposition of the Congressional Republicans, the Obama Administration had to be content with a fiscal stimulus which, though the largest in the post-World War II economy, turned out to be woefully insufficient.

Notice what was left out of the Council of Economic Advisers’ celebration of the successes of the post 2009 recovery? There was no sense of how the post 2009 period, the period of recovery according to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, compared with previous recoveries from previous recessions. In general, it is essential that such comparisons be made across the board so that we can judge whether a particular set of policies was successful or not.

The economy did recover. By the time Obama left office in 2017, all economic indicators were significantly better than they were when he took office. If that is all the evidence that is needed then the economic policies of every President from Truman to Obama, except Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump, represents an economic success story. The only reasons those might be considered failures is because unemployment was higher when they ran for reelection than when they took office.

Was the Recovery from the Great Recession a Relative Success?

Examining every recovery going back to 1961, they all showed an average Investment/GDP ratio above 17% except for the 1961-70 recovery where investment as a percentage of GDP was below that level. The recovery from the Great Recession was significantly lower than the previous recoveries averaging just over 16 percent. This does not fully capture the seriousness of the problem. When President Obama took office, the Investment/GDP ratio was 12.7% at the trough of the Great Recession. Unfortunately, unlike some earlier recessions when the ratio rebounded dramatically, it took three years between 2009 and 2012 for the ratio to reach 15.5%. It averaged only 16.2% of GDP for the entire period through the first quarter of 2017 and in fact never broke 18% until after 2017. The reason for the sluggish recovery of investment is easy to see; the fall in residential housing investment that had been the proximate cause of the Great Recession. If housing investment had just returned to that level, overall investment would have broken 18% significantly earlier. The extraordinary nature of the deep dive that occurred in investment and the growth of GDP called for a significantly bigger stimulus to aggregate demand than in previous periods. Government spending at levels similar to previous business cycle recoveries was not enough.

As a result of the slow recovery from the Great Recession, median incomes of ordinary Americans hardly budged and there was a high level of dissatisfaction within large swaths of the American people. Though there are many reasons for the surprise victory of Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election, one element that clearly contributed to it was the failed recovery from the Great Recession.

Bibliography

Council of Economic Advisers. (2010). Economic report of the President.

Council of Economic Advisers. (2017). Economic report of the President.

Krogstad, J.M. & Lopez, M.H. (2017, May 12). “Black voter turnout fell in 2016, even as a record number of Americans cast ballots.” Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org

Lessons from the Past Help Shape Civic Minds

Lessons from the Past Help Shape Civic Minds

By Carolyn Faggioni

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905)

In this era of educational systems dominated by the pursuit of all things STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), this retired social studies teacher would like to buck the trend — stem the tide, if you will — and make the case for the expansion of social studies education.

So, why study social studies? It’s not so you can do well at Trivia Night at the pub or impress your friends with your knowledge of arcane facts. We can Google that stuff.

The Spanish American philosopher George Santayana, in warning of the dire consequence of not knowing history, provided perhaps the strongest argument. We study history to learn from the past, which enables an educated citizenry, the lifeblood of a genuine democracy, to repeat successes while avoiding pitfalls.

Students in social studies classes examine events, movements, ideas and people to uncover lessons that can be applied today and in the future.

Studying global history helps one navigate an increasingly interdependent world, and in a diverse nation like the United States, it will help us to understand and appreciate one another, leading to greater peace and harmony and less tension, animosity and turmoil. With greater understanding of other cultures, international relations will improve.

Studying civics provides students the opportunity to become familiar with the basic features of representative democracy and how to function effectively as citizens. When informed citizens are at the helm, actively participating in our democracy, liberty is safeguarded. Conversely, if citizens are ill-informed, lack the requisite critical thinking skills to analyze information, do not know how to engage with one another in a civil manner, or check out entirely by not bothering to stay informed or participate in the democratic process, the void will be filled by special interests, often narrowly defined and committed to pursuing policies that may not be for the greater good.

As Founding Father James Madison asserted in 1822, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

Social studies education not only equips students with essential knowledge of the past, but a skill set that will empower them as citizens of this nation and members of the global community.

Albert Einstein and the Problem of War

Albert Einstein and the Problem of War

By Lawrence Wittner

Reposted from the Peace and Health Blog of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (https://peaceandhealthblog.com/2025/10/11/albert-einstein-and-the-problem-of-war/)

Although Albert Einstein is best-known as a theoretical physicist, he also spent much of his life grappling with the problem of war. In 1914, shortly after he moved to Berlin to serve as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, Einstein was horrified by the onset of World War I. “Europe, in her insanity, has started something unbelievable,” he told a friend. “In such times one realizes to what a sad species of animal one belongs.” Writing to the French author Romain Rolland, he wondered whether “centuries of painstaking cultural effort” have “carried us no further than . . . the insanity of nationalism.”

As militarist propaganda swept through Germany, accompanied that fall by a heated patriotic “Manifesto” from 93 prominent German intellectuals, Einstein teamed up with the German pacifist Georg Friedrich Nicolai to draft an antiwar response, the “Manifesto to Europeans.” Condemning “this barbarous war” and the “hostile spirit” of its intellectual apologists, the Einstein-Nicolai statement maintained that “nationalist passions cannot excuse this attitude which is unworthy of what the world has heretofore called culture.”

In the context of the war’s growing destructiveness, Einstein also helped launch and promote a new German antiwar organization, the New Fatherland League, which called for a prompt peace without annexations and the formation of a world government to make future wars impossible. It engaged in petitioning the Reichstag, challenging proposals for territorial gain, and distributing statements by British pacifists. In response, the German government harassed the League and, in 1916, formally suppressed it.

After the World War came to an end, Einstein became one of the Weimar Republic’s most influential pacifists and internationalists. Despite venomous attacks by Germany’s rightwing nationalists, he grew increasingly outspoken. “I believe the world has had enough of war,” he told an American journalist. “Some sort of international agreement must be reached among nations.” Meanwhile, he promoted organized war resistance, denounced military conscription, and, in 1932, drew Sigmund Freud into a famous exchange of letters, later published as Why War.

Although technically a Zionist, Einstein had a rather relaxed view of that term, contending that it meant a respect for Jewish rights around the world. Appalled by Palestinian-Jewish violence in British-ruled Palestine, he pleaded for cooperation between the two constituencies. In 1938, he declared that he would “much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state.” He disliked “the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power,” plus “the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks.”

The most serious challenge to Einstein’s pacifism came with the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933 and the advent of that nation’s imperialist juggernaut. “My views have not changed,” he told a French pacifist, “but the European situation has.” As long as “Germany persists in rearming and systematically indoctrinating its citizens in preparation for a war of revenge, the nations of Western Europe depend, unfortunately, on military defense.” In his heart, he said, he continued to “loathe violence and militarism as much as ever; but I cannot shut my eyes to realities.” Consequently, Einstein became a proponent of collective security against fascism.

Fleeing from Nazi Germany, Einstein took refuge in the United States, which became his new home. Thanks to his renown, he was approached in 1939 by one of his former physics students, Leo Szilard, a Hungarian refugee who brought ominous news about advances in nuclear fission research in Nazi Germany. At Szilard’s urging, Einstein sent a warning letter to President Franklin Roosevelt about German nuclear progress. In response, the U.S. government launched the Manhattan Project, a secret program to build an atomic bomb.

Einstein, like Szilard, considered the Manhattan Project necessary solely to prevent Nazi Germany’s employment of nuclear weapons to conquer the world. Therefore, when Germany’s war effort neared collapse and the U.S. bomb project neared completion, Einstein helped facilitate a mission by Szilard to Roosevelt with the goal of preventing the use of atomic bombs by the United States. He also fired off an impassioned appeal to the prominent Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, urging scientists to take the lead in heading off a dangerous postwar nuclear arms race. Neither venture proved successful, and the U.S. government, under the direction of the new president, Harry Truman, launched the nuclear age with the atomic bombing of Japan. Einstein later remarked that his 1939 letter to Roosevelt had been the worst mistake of his life.

Convinced that humanity now faced the prospect of utter annihilation, Einstein resurrected one of his earlier ideas and organized a new campaign against war. “The only salvation for civilization and the human race,” he told an interviewer in September 1945, “lies in the creation of a world government, with security of nations founded upon law.” Again and again, he reiterated this message. In January 1946, he declared: “As long as there exist sovereign states, each with its own, independent armaments, the prevention of war becomes a virtual impossibility.” Consequently, humanity’s “desire for peace can be realized only by the creation of a world government.”

In 1946, he and other prominent scientists, fearful of the world’s future, established the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. As chair of the new venture, Einstein repeatedly assailed militarism, nuclear weapons, and runaway nationalism. “We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking,” he said, “if mankind is to survive.”

Until his death in 1955, Einstein continued his quest for peace, criticizing the Cold War and the nuclear arms race and calling for strengthened global governance as the only “way out of the impasse.” Today, as we face a violent, nuclear-armed world, Einstein’s warnings about unrestrained nationalism and his proposals to control it are increasingly relevant.

Documenting the Debate Over the Use of Nuclear Weapons Against Japan

Einstein-Szilard Letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, August 2, 1939

Source: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/einstein-szilard-letter/

Background: Albert Einstein was the world’s most renowned physicist and a Nobel Prize winner. He fled Germany in the 1930s and established himself in the United States. Nuclear scientists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller, refugees from Nazi occupied Europe, persuaded Einstein to send a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the possibility that Germany could develop an atomic bomb. In this letter, Einstein urged Roosevelt to support a program to develop atomic weapons.

“Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable — through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America — that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future. This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable — though much less certain — that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air. The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is Belgian Congo.

In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America. One possible way of achieving this might be for you to entrust with this task a person who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an unofficial capacity. His task might comprise the following:

a) to approach Government Departments, keep them informed of the further development, and put forward recommendations for Government action, giving particular attention to the problem of securing a supply of uranium ore for the United States.

b)  to speed up the experimental work, which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of University laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause, and perhaps also by obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.

I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.

The Franck Report, Report of the Committee on Political and Social Problems

Manhattan Project “Metallurgical Laboratory,” University of Chicago, June 11, 1945

Sources: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/franck-report/; https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/prominent-nuclear-scientists-did-not-recommend-the-atomic-bombings-of-japan/

Background: As the U.S. drew up plans to drop the first atomic bomb in August 1945, a group of scientists at the University of Chicago prepared a report arguing against the use of the bomb. Headed by James Franck and including notable scientists such as Leo Szilard and Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel laureate. The classified document was submitted to the Interim Committee, a group appointed by President Truman to advise him on the use of the bomb, in June 1945, one month before the Trinity test and two months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Interim Committee rejected their recommendations.

A) “The development of nuclear power not only constitutes an important addition to the technological and military power of the United States, but also creates grave political and economic problems for the future of this country.”

B) “Nuclear bombs cannot possibly remain a ‘secret weapon’ at the exclusive disposal of this country, for more than a few years. The scientific facts on which their construction is based are well known to scientists of other countries. Unless an effective international control of nuclear explosives is instituted, a race of nuclear armaments is certain to ensue following the first revelation of our possession of nuclear weapons to the world. Within ten years other countries may have nuclear bombs, each of which, weighing less than a ton, could destroy an urban area of more than ten square miles. In the war to which such an armaments race is likely to lead, the United States, with its agglomeration of population and industry in comparatively few metropolitan districts, will be at a disadvantage compared to the nations whose population and industry are scattered over large areas.”

C) “We believe that these considerations make the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan inadvisable. If the United States would be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race of armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.”

D) “Much more favorable conditions for the eventual achievement of such an agreement could be created if nuclear bombs were first revealed to the world by a demonstration in an appropriately selected uninhabited area.”

Recommendation of the Scientific Panel of the Interim Committee

Sources: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/19.pdf; https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/recommendations-on-the-immediate-use-of-nuclear-weapons/

Background: The panel that issued this report to Secretary of War Henry Stimson consisted of four prominent physicists who were part of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory; Enrico Fermi, lead scientist for the first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago Met Lab; Arthur Compton, Nobel laureate and head of the Metallurgical Laboratory; and Ernest Lawrence, Nobel laureate and head of the Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley.

“You have asked us to comment on the initial use of the new weapon. This use, in our opinion, should be such as to promote a satisfactory adjustment of our international relations. At the same time, we recognize our obligation to our nation to use the weapons to help save American lives in the Japanese war.

(1) To accomplish these ends we recommend that before the weapons are used not only Britain, but also Russia, France, and China be advised that we have made considerable progress in our work on atomic weapons, and that we would welcome suggestions as to how we can cooperate in making this development contribute to improved international relations.

(2) The opinions of our scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons are not unanimous: they range from the proposal of a purely technical demonstration to that of the military application best designed to induce surrender. Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced. Others emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use, and believe that such use will improve the international prospects, in that they are more concerned with the prevention of war than with the elimination of this specific weapon. We find ourselves closer to these latter views; we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.

(3) With regard to these general aspects of the use of atomic energy, it is clear that we, as scientific men, have no proprietary rights. It is true that we are among the few citizens who have had occasion to give thoughtful consideration to these problems during the past few years. We have, however, no claim to special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic power.”

Petition to the President of the United States, July 17, 1945

Source: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/szilard-petition/

Background: Nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, a refugee from Hungary who worked on the Manhattan Project, drafted a petition to President Harry Truman in the summer of 1945 hoping to avert the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. The petition was signed by seventy other scientists but was not seen by the President or the Secretary of War before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer were not listed as signers.

Discoveries of which the people of the United States are not aware may affect the welfare of this nation in the near future. The liberation of the atomic power which has been achieved places atomic bombs in the hands of the Army. It places in your hands, as Commander-in-Chief, the fateful decision whether or not to sanction the use of such bombs in the present phase of the war against Japan. We, the undersigned scientists, have been working in the field of atomic power. Until recently we have had to fear that the United States might be attacked by atomic bombs during this war and that her only defense might lie in a counterattack by the same means. Today, with the defeat of Germany, this danger is averted and we feel impelled to say what follows: The war has to be brought speedily to a successful conclusion and attacks by atomic bombs may very well be an effective method of warfare. We feel, however, that such attacks on Japan could not be justified, at least not until the terms which will be imposed after the war on Japan were made public in detail and Japan were given an opportunity to surrender. If such public announcement gave assurance to the Japanese that they could look forward to a life devoted to peaceful pursuit in their homeland and if Japan still refused to surrender, our nation might then, in certain circumstances, find itself forced to resort to the use of atomic bombs. Such a step, however, ought not to be made at any time without seriously considering the moral responsibilities which are involved.

The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.

If after the war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation. All the resources of the United States, moral and material, may have to be mobilized to prevent the advent of such a world situation. Its prevention is at present the solemn responsibility of the United States—singled out by virtue of her lead in the field of atomic power. The added material strength which this lead gives to the United States brings with it the obligation of restraint and if we were to violate this obligation our moral position would be weakened in the eyes of the world and in our own eyes. It would then be more difficult for us to live up to our responsibility of bringing the unloosened forces of destruction under control.

In view of the foregoing, we, the undersigned, respectfully petition: first, that you exercise your power as Commander-in-Chief, to rule that the United States shall not resort to the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender; second, that in such an event the question whether or not to use atomic bombs be decided by you in the light of the consideration presented in this petition as well as all the other moral responsibilities which are involved.

A Policy for Survival: A Statement by the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists

Published in the June 1948 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Source: https://thebulletin.org/archive/a-policy-for-survival-a-statement-by-the-emergency-committee-of-atomic-scientists/

Background: The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists was formed in May, 1946, by Albert Einstein, R.F. Bacher, Hans A. Bethe, Edward U. Condon, R. Hogness, Leo Szilard, Harold C. Urey, and V.F. Weisskopf. Their objective was to encourage and further the peaceful uses of atomic energy and to do this they would solicit private contributions in support of the work of the National Committee for Atomic Information. 

“Two years ago this month the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission was in process of formation. Now the discussions on international control of atomic energy are about to be adjourned indefinitely, perhaps never again to be resumed. One of the most fateful events in history has passed almost unnoticed. Its importance must be realized: its lesson for mankind must be made clear. To clarify the importance of the collapse of these discussions, we reiterate here our Six Point Statement published originally on November 17, 1946:

  1. Atomic bombs can now be made cheaply and in large number. They will become more destructive.
  2. There is no military defense against atomic bombs and none is to be expected.
  3. Other nations can rediscover our secret processes by themselves.
  4. Preparedness against atomic war is futile, and if attempted, will ruin the structure of our social order.
  5. If war breaks out, atomic bombs will be used and they will surely destroy our civilization.
  6. There is no solution to this problem except international control of atomic energy, and ultimately, the elimination of war.”

Book Review: When the Declaration of Independence Was News by Dr. Emily Sneff

When the Declaration of Independence Was News

by Emily Sneff

Reviewed by Hank Bitten, NJCSS Executive Director

Let me begin my review with the 63 pages of Notes to the sources used in this book of 187 pages. After reading through the 15 pages of the Introduction, I recognized the wealth of new scholarship available to students and historians from when I studied colonial history. The Papers of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and John Jay, Journals of the Continental Congress, documents from theCommittee of Secret Correspondence, and The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States provide historical information that has become available through generous research grants from our government and the scholarship of distinguished historians and editors and the work of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Teaching American History grants. The benefit to the American public, teachers, and students is enormous!

Dr. Emily Sneff takes the readers behind the scenes into the political, economic, and diplomatic correspondence in colonial state congresses, correspondence transported by ship captains from the harbors of Philadelphia and New York to the Caribbean and Europe, and the economic blockades by foreign ships on America’s rivers, especially the Delaware. For example, this is her report for the week of May 6, 1776:

“The mood in Philadelphia became anxious, and the Continental Congress witnessed how much terror British ships could cause. No one in the Congress knew yet if the British and German reinforcements were going to target Philadelphia or New York City.  They could only rely in intelligence from captains of merchant vessels who sailed alongside the massive, slow-moving fleet of British ships bringing supplies and soldiers across the Atlantic.” (page 22)

The debate over rights and rebellion was further complicated by the fact that the Continental Congress and the Pennsylvania State House met in the same building. “The Congress shared the Pennsylvania State House with the provincial assembly.  In the first few months of 1776, the delegates were increasingly aware that the decisions they made on the first floor of the State House might be undermined by decisions made by the conservative Pennsylvania Assembly on the second floor.” (page 23)

The book provides important contextual information for teachers who want their students to debate if the Continental Congress should have passed the Articles of Confederation at the time of the Declaration of Independence. The articles of Confederation were discussed in the Second Continental Congress but adopted four months after the Declaration of Independence and formally ratified on March 1, 1781, seven months before the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. During this time, the 13 states were at risk of attack, surrender, rebellion, and disease. The purpose of the Articles was to establish and protect the sovereignty of the original 13 colonies and now the ‘league of friendship’ of the 13 states.

As of May 15, 1776, “There was no consensus on what a declaration of independence needed to be, or whether it needed to be issued before or after the plans for a confederation and foreign treaties. From its context to its contents to the men who voted for and against it, the Declaration of Independence was a product of specific circumstances, including multiple proponents of the debate about whether or not to separate from Great Britain.” (page 34)

The resolution proposed by Richard Henry Lee on June 7 included the clause “That a plan of confederation be prepare and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.” (page 37)

This is an important discussion or debate for students regarding the political, economic, and diplomatic issues that are part of the debate for independence. The risks the representatives faced in Philadelphia were high as was the protection of the 2.5 million colonists. One week before the vote on the Declaration of Independence, the plot by Thomas Hickey to assassinate General George Washington in New York City was revealed. Emily Sneff provides an excellent account of this plot and its relevance to the Declaration of Independence, especially if the British were victorious, even in one colony or region. (pages 41-42)

Students, especially from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York will find the information regarding the printing of the Declaration by John Dunlop and others to be of interest. The ability to duplicate multiple copies, setting the type for newspapers, the shortage of paper, the presence of British ships along the coast and in rivers, and the translation of the document into German should engage students with asking many questions and the opportunity for students studying German to analyze the translations and understand how the colonists of German heritage viewed the relationship of the House of Hanover to King George III.

Dr. Sneff takes us on a journey through the perspective of the forming of an American identity as the Declaration was read in Philadelphia, Easton, Hamburg, Reading, Trenton, the College of New Jersey (Princeton University), New York City, Boston and New England, and the arduous journey by land to the Carolinas and Savannah.

Col. John Nixon reading the Declaration of Independence at the New Jersey state capitol in Trenton on July 8, 1776. The New Jersey Constitution ratified on July 2 was also read.

Princeton, July 10

“Last night Nassau Halls was grandly illuminated, and INDEPENDANCY proclaimed under a triple volley of musketry, and universal acclamation for the prosperity of the UNITED STATES. The ceremony was conducted with the greatest decorum.” (From NJ. State Library)

General William Howe arrived on board HMS Greyhound off the coast at Sandy Hook on June 25 waiting for his brother Vice-Admiral Richard Howe on board HMS Eagle on July 12. There was an armada of British ships carrying 32,000 soldiers in the area of New York when General Washington read the Declaration of Independence to his troops at 6:00 p.m. on July 9 on the Commons (now City Hall Park). A few hours later the statue of King George III on horseback was pulled down and transported to the farm of Oliver Wolcott in Litchfield, Connecticut to be melted into 42,088 bullets.

Students discuss the Preamble of the Declaration and its importance of human rights. The insights on the British perspective of the Declaration are often ignored but important for students to understand.

“Washington hoped that hearing the Declaration would provide a ‘fresh incentive to every officer, and soldier, to act with Fidelity and Courage, as knowing that now the peace and safety of his country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms.” (page 80)

Students need to view this in contrast to the statement by Ambrose Serle, Vice Admiral Richard Howe’s Secretary, in his journal, dated July 12, 1776:

“The Declaration of Independence proved that the Continental Congress had never truly wanted to reconcile with Great Britain.  Independence had been ‘their Object from the Beginning.’ Serle had never seen ‘a more impudent, false and atrocious Proclamation’ than the Declaration. As he vented in his journal, Serle noted that, in their previous petitions, the Congress had ‘thrown all the Blame and Insult upon the Parliament and ministry,’ but in the declaration they had ‘the Audacity to calumniate the King and People of Great Britain.’ Even worse, they dared to invoke divine protection. ‘Tis impossible to read this Paper,’ Serle wrote, ‘without Horror at the Hypocrisy of these Men, who call GOD to witness the uprightness of their Proceedings.’” (page 73)

Students should ask “What if?” ‘What if’ the British negotiated a diplomatic solution? ‘What if’ the attack on Brooklyn Heights happened in July? ‘What if’ the Articles of Confederation were ratified in July, 1776? When the Declaration of Independence Was News provides important primary sources and historical context for teachers.  

The chapter on Massachusetts provides an excellent analysis of the smallpox epidemic in 1776 and the inoculation of Abigail Adams and her children. The letters from the Adams Family Papers are clearly documented and helpful to teachers who want their students to explore the impact of smallpox in the year of our independence. There is also information available online about the spread of smallpox in other colonies, especially in New York and New Jersey.

Some of the most important information in the book explains the impact of the naval blockade on mail delivery to Europe, the behind-the-scenes diplomatic negotiations with the Dutch Republic, France and Spain, the relocation of the Continental Congress from Philadelphia to Baltimore in December 1776, the role of Mary Katherine Goddard in printing the “official” signed copy of the Declaration for each of the 13 states.