The Western Tradition

Actually, the entire series is available as streamed content, online, at www.learner.org, and one might want to act quickly to view it seeing as how Bush W lapdog Tomlinson is still the head of the CPB, and has been working rather quickly to help Bush "Leave Every Child Behind" by attempting (thankfully failed) to cut the budget for PBS, pay investigators with your tax money to watch Bill Moyers for dissenting anti-GOP views, etc, so who knows how long this series will stay up, considering the amount of Marxism imbedded in the analysis (as far as economic determinism, class consciousness, anti-nationalism). Just do a search for 'western tradition' at the site. Or... [...] The texts that go along with it are fantastic for hands-on, and even if you don't agree with the sort of generalizations of periodicity or historicity that Eugen has had to construct in order squash our entire history into 52, 26 minute segments, it's better than anything a public school education will give you when you consider walking out of a classroom today will leave you with the narratives that Christopher Columbus was a hero, and not a genocidal maniac, and Abraham Lincoln was an emancipator, and not just a economic sabateur of the American pre-industrial south (let's just thank heavens for all free black men and women that his plan for economic reform had to do with making the southern white male landowners subserviant to the north by driving their production costs up by making them pay for labor, inadvertantly freeing slaves along the way, while the industrialized north continued to rely on machinery!). Anyway, these sorts of narratives, however over-generalized, offer the viewer at least a basis to have an arguable set of narratives, and the pair of books that goes along with the series are a fantastic way to let you conclude for yourself what Eugen Weber has to offer: if not a history, at least a fantastic tradition of your own western roots. Pair this with wikipedia.org, and you have a free online education on par with the greats. G