RPTM Podcast Episode 43: Darwin, John Brown, King Cotton and Cassius Clay

Kids take books for the gospel. If it's in print, it must be true. But this is conditioning from the academic elite that wish to clutch their pearls and hold their nose around online sources. You know the big one I'm talking about: Wikipedia. 

In 2006, Stephen Colbert did a segment on his show, The Colbert Report, mocking the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The site was only a few years old and starting to become hugely popular. But it was also broadly debated. Educators were worried about when it came to students using the free site for research. Teachers, librarians, and professors started discouraging Wikipedia. Others outright banned students from using the site as a resource for projects and papers. A year after the Colbert episode, Senator Ted Stevens even introduced legislation that would have banned Wikipedia from public schools. What makes the site unique is also potentially problematic: Anyone can anonymously create entries about anything and, with some exceptions, can also anonymously edit entries.

Wikipedia is increasingly used by people in the academic community, from students to professors, as an easily accessible source for information about anything and everything. Regardless, citing Wikipedia in research papers is deemed unacceptable because Wikipedia is not considered a credible or authoritative source. We need to make a stand against the intellectual Illuminati. Wikipedia is the best and fastest way to get information in a manageable format. Wikipedia has led to many good discussions, and I have used it as a teaching tool throughout the year. Almost all my research begins there first.

While Wikipedia is tricky for students to navigate, especially when recognizing the difference between opinion and fact-checked research, the site has gotten better over the years, especially with footnotes. History is about being able to evaluate several sources, so it's essential to know who wrote the piece: what viewpoint they've come from, what their religion is, etc. History, as a discipline, is about being able to shop around for various specialists.

In 2011, former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin offered an alternative theory about Paul Revere's famous midnight ride. Many historians publicly disagreed with her, and immediately suspected Palin supporters rushed to the Paul Revere Wikipedia page and changed information to fit Palin's version of history better. And here's where the answer, and lesson, come in: The truth, in a sense, won out. Not only did Wikipedia editors instantly swoop in to delete misinformation, but the entry also ended up with more information and footnotes than before Palin's comments.

Academics are, to a certain extent, afraid of change. They do not want to be replaced by a database. But as Bob Dylan says, "the times are a-changin'." As educators, we should embrace how the river bends instead of damming up the entire work. In a practical sense, our high school math teachers warn us to remember all those complicated formulas because we might not have a calculator on us when the time comes. I smirk, thinking that you are most likely reading this on a smartphone you sleep next to every night.

HIGHLIGHTS

• In November 1859, Darwin published "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection," which detailed his theory. In the United States, which was on the verge of the Civil War, the publication of "Origin" went largely unnoticed. 
• John Brown was an American abolitionist leader. First reaching national prominence for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas, he was eventually captured and executed for a failed incitement of a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry preceding the American Civil War. 
• The original "King Cotton" thesis suffers from its ideological disposition. In the end, "King Cotton" proved to be a delusion that misled the Confederacy into a hopeless war that it ended up losing.
• Cassius Clay became an abolitionist early in his life after hearing a speech by William Lloyd Garrison while at Yale in 1832. He eventually founded the abolitionist newspaper True American.

CHAPTERS
0:37 Introduction
4:41 Darwinism in America
 8:28  John Brown
16:23King Cotton
24:12 Cassius Clay
27:37 Outro

RESOURCES
Truce Be Told
Charles Darwin’s American Adventure: A Melodrama in Three Acts
American_philosophy
John Brown (abolitionist)
John Brown (abolitionist)
John Brown (abolitionist) explained
The 1619 Project Resurrects King-Cotton Ideology of the Old South
Slavery Did Not Make America Rich
King Cotton
Cassius Marcellus Clay, fiery Kentucky abolitionist