In November, 1995 the Department of Education issued its report on the knowledge of American history on the part of 22,000 students in fifty states. Lewis Lapham, Editor of Harper's Magazine, was utterly dismayed. He wrote that "More than 50 percent of all high school seniors were unaware of the Cold War. Nearly six of ten were bereft of even a primitive understanding of where America came from ... For twenty years, the ministers of American education (university deans as well as federal bureaucrats) have been reporting signs of decay -- low SAT scores, declining verbal aptitude and a general inability to find Tokyo on a map.... The news is familiar but it takes on a fresh urgency in the context of the present mood of suspicion and resentment: Washington perceived as the temple of doom, the nation betrayed by demogogues of all descriptions. Our ignorance adds to our stores of anger. The practice of our democracy depends on a sense of, and knowledge of, history in the same way that playing in the World Series requires a bat and a ball."

I asked a high school teacher of American history why so many students got turned off. Was it by boring textbooks, too much television, or some mediocre teachers? "It's not really any of the above," he replied. "They simply don't feel connected to history. They don't relate to it." Most of today's parents have long commutes, more often than not at least two hours one way; today's cities have run out of affordable housing, but that's where both parents have jobs. The bottom-line result is less quality time with growing children. So they feel left out and parents don't sense this lack of "connectedness." Parents who may not have travelled outside the United States, who have not seen Westminister Cathedral in London, for example, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Berlin Wall, now levelled with the end of the Cold War, the pyramids in Egypt, the Vatican in Rome, or even Constitution Hall in Philadelphia cannot share their own experience with their own children. Most of the history of Western Civilization is thus very abstract and non-personal. The Constitution itself was drafted by scholars familiar with their history and Western civilization.

Today, the way government operates, how members of our Congress are elected, and how the judicial system functions are all determined by the Constitution. It was ratified in 1789 and amended in 1791 by adding the first ten amendments as a Bill of Rights. The First Amendment, for example, guaranteed freedom of speech and the press. It was not until 1920, however, that women got the right to vote. Then, in 1971, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment provided that the voting age for all elections was set at 18 years. It was ratified by the states in record time.

Until 1882, the individual states regulated immigration. In that year, Congress enacted the Immigration Act of 1882 which imposed a federal head tax of fifty cents per immigrant. This tax was challenged by those who paid it, but the Supreme Court upheld Congressional power to regulate immigration. The Head Money Cases, 112 U.S. 580 (1885). Within seven years (1892), Ellis Island opened as the point of entry for immigrants into the United States. Until it closed in 1954, approximately 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island. An estimated forty percent of today's population of 260 million people can trace their ancestry to those who entered the United States via Ellis Island. Over 122 distinct ethnic groups brought their culture to the shores of America, making the United States the most multicultural nation in the world. The countries with the most migrants going through Ellis Island included Italy, Russia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, England, Ireland, Sweden, Greece, Norway, Turkey, and Scotland. More recently, China, other Asian nations, and Vietnam were added to the countries of origin. The Internet offers an American Studies Site that includes African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Native American Studies, Latino and Chicano Studies, and Other Race and Ethnic Studies.

The Internet also offers a Biodiversity Policy Briefing on Global Resources and international efforts to prevent further environmental degradation. The material was organized and made available to Internet users by the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Three important policy vehicles for protecting biodiversity are the Endangered Species Act, the National Biological Service of the Department of the Interior, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. In 1993, this convention was signed by President Clinton, but a Republican Senate has ended attempts to ratify this critical treaty.

The Rainforest Action Network (RAN) offers an Internet campaign to stop the World Bank from financing environmentally destructive projects. Most of these projects are in the Third World. RAN also describes its efforts to boycott products sold by the Mitsubishi Corporation, one of the largest corporate destroyers of the world's forests in the Phillipines, Malaysia, Papua, New Guinea, Bolivia, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Canada, and Siberia. The products sold by the Mitsubishi Corporation or by one of its 190 interlinked companies worldwide include automobiles, trucks, bicycles, television sets, VCRs, fax machines, microchips, Nikon cameras, Kirin beer, Value Rent-A-Car, and the Bank of California. Protection of the environment is now seen as a way of stabilizing the political economies of Third World nations. A failure to consider their stability leads to the alternative, chaos and the collapse of order. Liberia is an example, with anarchy in Monrovia, its capital.

Farmers in Liberia used destructive agricultural practices, probably from the beginning of time. The nutrients in the soil have been depleted by overtilled, overfertilized, and overirrigated earth. Excessive irrigation depletes the water level. Additionally, the farmers used dangerous pesticides-ones already labeled as unsafe in the United States. As a result, farmers had to encroach further into the rainforest to find more arable land after a few years at one location. Soon, the rainforest, as a complete ecosystem, all but disappeared, and farmers had to abandon the soil. They moved to the cities, where there were no jobs, housing or food for all these new arrivals from the abandoned farms. The cities could not support the influx of these rural migrants. Crime raged, tribal warfare erupted, and disease spun out of control. Without waste treatment and disposal systems, the rivers of Liberia were polluted beyond belief. This is the story of most West African countries, such as Sierra Leone, Gabon, Togo, Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, Cìte d'Ivoire, and Burkina Faso. Some of these countries are either decayed or on the brink of decaying. With population pressures and without internal resources -- Nigeria does have oil -- governments weaken only to be replaced by private armies and urban chaos. It is time to understand just what the environment is and the importance of its preservation.

Robert D. Kaplan wrote "The Coming Anarchy" which was published by The Atlantic Monthly in its February, 1994 issue. Random House published his recent book, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century. Kaplan who had expanded his earlier article into a 441-page book, describes the environment as the "national security issue of the early twenty-first century." The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and possibly, rising sea levels on critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh -- are developments that will prompt mass migrations and in turn, incite group conflicts...." Resolution of the problems created by this chaos will be the foreign policy challenge of the next decades, and only those versed in history need apply.

William M. Brinton
San Francisco
August 1996




All contents © 1996 William M. Brinton
All photographs © Archive Photos, New York
All film © Archive Film, New York