"moments" in history

[Matthew Hurwitz]

I found the lecture interesting in that it presented a complete picture of Japan as it transformed and changed over the course of 100 years. I realized that I have only ever learned about Japanese as a series of "moments", short snippets of time when something "important" happened. Getting the chance to look beyond the "moments", the Rape of Nanking, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Russo-Japanese War, has been interesting. It's made me think about how our selective telling of only certain events throughout history colors our understanding of those events. It's made me think about what I skip, and what I don't skip in my own curiculum, what's "important" and what's not. Obviously, you can't teach all of world history in the course of 40 weeks, hence the eternal history teacher struggle of what the rush through/skip and what to spend more time on. But it's sobering to realize that our time constraints mean that something inevitably ends up getting the short straw, and that that lack of attention impacts the way that our students view the history of certain regions.