Test your history knowledge

[Guest guest]

These days, whenever he hears one of his British counterparts complain too

loudly about the woeful lack of historical knowledge among students, Anders

Henriksson offers a standard response.

 

Please send along your rottenest examples, this American educator chuckles,

and perhaps a place will be found for them in his next published collection

of student howlers, bloopers, malapropisms and markedly creative hypotheses,

all boasting a historical command and orthography worthy of the Fat Owl of

the Remove.

 

Be warned, however, that the competition is stiff. Dr Henriksson, a history

professor at Shepherd College, near Washington DC, has been collecting and

publishing material of this nature since 1983 - and his findings in North

America alone have filled volumes.

 

In the latest, Non Campus Mentis (Workman), he offers no fewer than 569

"mangled moments of western civilisation", all drawn from real exam papers

in Canada and the United States. A forthcoming edition of the book, which

has been a surprise bestseller this year in its country of origin, will

include additional entries from elsewhere in the English-speaking world,

including Britain, where he says the results so far have suggested that

"students everywhere are pretty interchangeable with those in North America,

and across a wide spectrum of subjects as well".

 

Dr Henriksson's academic speciality is Russian history. But the version of

the subject he presents here - call it "2002 and All That" - is spelt with a

very little "h" indeed. This is "a record of things left behind by past

generations started in 1815", as one of the book's introductory nuggets has

it, thus enabling those in the present day "to view historical times as the

behind of the present" and acquire "incite into the anals of the past".

 

Non Campus Mentis (named after a typical student mishearing of non compos

mentis) sets out to illustrate, good-humouredly and with all misspellings

intact, what its editor describes as the authentic voice of youth, "a

refreshing and daring reappraisal of how we came to be who we are".

 

At the same time, adds Dr Henriksson, it seeks to convey "the ingenious and

often comic ways we all attempt to make sense of information we can't

understand because we have no context or frame of reference for it".

 

Not everyone, perhaps, lacks quite the context of the student who notes that

mankind's origins "woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago". The

Nile, it goes on to point out, "was a river that had some water in it. Every

year it would flood and irritate the land. This tended to make the people

nervous."

 

And religious, too. "The history of the Jewish people begins with Abraham,

Isaac and their 12 children," explains another. "Judyism was the first

monolithic religion. It had one big God named . Old Testament profits

include Moses, Amy and Confucius, who believed in Fidel Piety."

 

Confucius? Yes, but "one of the only reasons Confucius was born was because

of a Chinese tradition", cautions the writer.

 

European traditions, especially those with a British slant, provide many

more such surprising revelations, including the one that Elizabeth I "was

the foremost monarch in the Elizabethan era", that Charles V "spent most of

his reign ageing" and that the beginning of the "European Empire" can be

traced back to "when the Europeans felt the need to reach out and smack

someone". (Somebody else contends that James Cook "located the perfect navel

spot near Africa's bottom".)

 

Another notes that during the time of witch hunts in England and Scotland,

the females most likely to be targeted by the righteous mobs tended to be

"older post-marsupial women unable to bare children. Those arrested were

torchured until they told a story. The worst of this could be the rack or

burning with hot porkers." Alas, some unfortunate suspects were even forced

"to endure the public duckling stool".

 

Closer to the present time, one student "quotes" George Orwell to the

dubious effect that "the British reduced Burma to a small city north of

India" and "Europeans in India inhabited designated spots where they could

practise their imperialist values on one another."

 

This was during the period when "the five European grade powers were

England, France, Germany, Russia and Australia-Mongolia", and, as a

consequence of their expansionist yearnings, "Europe grew fevered with

heated tensions thrusting toward an outlet." Including the Middle East, it

would seem, where one "major source of conflict has been Israel's relations

with the Parisians. The Carter administration found itself face to face with

this problem during the so-called Iran Hostess Crisis."

 

Dr Henriksson admits that he has worked hard to harvest this kind of

material, some of it drawn from "the most selective and academically

renowned" American institutions of higher learning. Yet he insists he is no

scholarly curmudgeon, shaking his head over the intellectual antics of a

younger generation going to blazes.

 

"We have to be cautious about this kind of conclusion," he says, laughing.

"I mean, yes, it's frightening to find out how many kids there are who don't

know how many world wars there were or that the overwhelming number of

American students cannot identify Winston Churchill, with some even thinking

he's an African-American civil rights leader or an American Civil War

leader." At the same time, he argues, you have to remember that at least

some of the wilder howlers come from panic and shortness of time - "the kid

who wrote that Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill and Truman were the 'Big Three'

probably could count to four, I guess."

 

Although Non Campus Mentis has been warmly received in most educational

quarters, it has attracted criticisms from "a few" fellow academics "whose

response has been along the lines of saying that anyone who insists on

teaching English grammar or conventional history is somehow being unfair to

students because they're imposing a certain, inflexible world view on them".

 

As far as criticisms go, Dr Henriksson finds the last "self-satirising to

the point of sheer lunacy".

 

If there is a serious, implicit indictment in his work "it's really of the

broader popular culture where we're so excited about the present. We don't

send cultural messages to students about how important it is to know where

you've been in order to know where you're going. Even where American kids

are taught who Winston Churchill really was, for instance, it often goes in

one ear and out the other."

 

Dr Henriksson, who was born in 1948, grew up in a different generation, he

says, with parents who lived through the Depression and other family members

who fought in the second world war. "There used to be a lot of talk around

the table about these things," he says. "That kind of environment gave many

of us the kind of grounding that I'm not sure happens so much any more -

families don't talk so much, there isn't so much time for communication."

 

He could be thinking of one of the final entries to Non Campus Mentis:

"There has been a change of social seen. The last stage is us. We, in all

humidity, are the people of currant times."

 

Think you're smart?

 

So you think you're pretty smart? For those who chuckle over his collection

of unspeakable howlers, Dr Henriksson's book offers a brief,

self-administered quiz including the kind of information a student would be

expected to know upon completion of a World History 101 survey course.

 

Among the questions:

 

1) In what decade(s) did the following occur?

a) Boxer Rebellion

b) Balfour Declaration

c) Unification of Italy

d) Meiji Restoration

e) Crimean War

f) Congress of Vienna

g) Cuban Missile Crisis

 

 

During which century did the following live?

a) Cleopatra

b) Charlemagne

c) Constantine

d) Mohammed

e) Martin Luther

f) Confucius

 

Answers

 

1. a) 1900 b) 1917 c) 1850s-70s d) 1868 e) 1853-56 f) 1814 g) 1962.

 

2. a) 1st century BC b) 8th-9th century AD c) 3rd-4th century d) 6th-7th

century e) 15th-16th century f) 6th-5th century BC.

 

Scoring

 

Choose one of the following:

A. Piece of cake! What's the matter with kids today?

B: Never mind.