In episode 9, Dr. Bezio discussed the study of history and its role in the humanities. During the discussion, one of the most interesting points raised, to me, was the Great Man Theory of leadership. This theory argued that individuals, or in this case white men, are born with the traits that make them good leaders. With this theory, and with the almost exclusive writings about male accomplishments due to rich white men funding many of the writing expeditions, history has come to focus predominantly on the male experience and tends to ignore the accomplishments and history of women, poor people, and POC. While listening to this discussion of the rich white male-centric account of history, I was reminded of the books and history that I – and I bet many other students – were taught growing up. Throughout k-12 public school, the majority of the books we read were written by white men, along with many of our classes focusing only on the history and accounts of white men and their accomplishments, lives, and thoughts. For example, until I was a senior in high school, I never read any book in school written by an African author about African history, and only a handful of the 400 students in my grade read that book. The focus of history and historical writings is apparent in our education system that focuses almost exclusive attention on the history and accounts of, and the writings of, rich white men.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In episode 9, Dr. Bezio discussed the study of history and its role in the humanities. During the discussion, one of the most interesting points raised, to me, was the Great Man Theory of leadership. This theory argued that individuals, or in this case white men, are born with the traits that make them good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5108,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5108"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7123,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7120\/revisions\/7123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}