#everythinghasahistory

[historybizarre]

The Lessons of a School Shooting–in 1853

How a now-forgotten classroom murder inflamed the national gun argument.

Though little remembered now, the first high-profile school shooting in the U.S. was more than 150 years ago, in Louisville, Kentucky. The 1853 murder of William Butler by Matthews F. Ward was a news sensation, prompting national outrage over the slave South’s libertarian gun rights vision and its deadly consequences. At a time when there wasn’t yet a national media, this case prompted a legal conversation that might be worth resurrecting today.

Further reading: 

Saul Cornell, A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (New York : Oxford University Press, 2008); 

Lorri Glover, Southern sons : becoming men in the new nation (Baltimore, Md. ; London : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)

[jmacommonplace]

When you study history, you’re not just studying the history of, for example, colonial America. You’ll learn a great deal about the specifics of colonial America in such a class, of course, but you’ll also learn about the role of economics in the establishment of human societies and about how class and racial divisions can either weaken the stability of a government or be used to shore it up.

Heather Cox Richardson, “Richardson's Rules of Order, Part I: Why Study History?” The Historical Society Blog, March 20, 2009.

[jmacommonplace]

Everything has a history. To think historically is to recognize that all problems, all situations, all institutions exist in contexts that must be understood before informed decisions can be made. No entity — corporate, government, nonprofit — can afford not to have a historian at the table. We need more history majors, not fewer.

James Grossman, “History isn't a 'useless' major. It teaches critical thinking, something America needs plenty more of,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2016.