I do not have the scientific or historical chops to answer you adequately, but the question made me smile - the dialectical thinker discovers the dialect everywhere - evidence be damned! I love Hegel and yet I am sad to report that as I look at the news, especially current political discourse, I am dismayed. Where is the Aufhebung in a filibuster? I look forward to other replies!

I've always thought it would be interesting to do a history course in reverse. Start with the later events (beginning in present) and have students consider what history might have looked like to lead to these later events, working backwards as far as possible. I always hated that my history classes ended before things got interesting (where "interesting" means, you know, when I am on the scene).

(If you are ever in DC, the Newseum offers some good exhibits to learn recent history.)

I agree entirely with the general point that you are making. I think that the events of the last 60-70 years are worthy of discussion in high-school history classes. Although I don't really know how to measure whether they are "at least as critical to the understanding of modern society as the sum of all that came before", I'll admit that they are pretty darn critical. I don't think that the reason that relatively recent events are less often taught in history courses is that they aren't believed to be important.

There are many possible explanations for the relative neglect of recent history in high-school history classes. One is that there is so much older history to get through that teachers do not leave enough time for recent events. Another is that recent events are so much more controversial than earlier events that it is difficult to write textbooks that will be approved by school boards that cover these recent events. Another is that the overall significance of recent events is not yet entirely clear and will not be clear until we see what happens after those events, and there has not been sufficient time for this to emerge. Along the same lines, many high school history courses seem to be taught with the simplistic idea that there are "good guys" and "bad guys." When it comes to recent events, there may well be much less agreement about who is who. (Your example of the civil rights movement is the exception that proves the rule here.) There are undoubtedly other possible explanations as well.

I think that courses regarding recent events are more likely to appear in colleges than in high schools (and in private high schools than in public ones) -- partly because college (and private high school) teachers are generally more free than (public) high school teachers in the material that they can teach.

When I was in high school (1977-81), the Vietnam War was history -- just. My high-school history teacher very controversially decided to teach a unit on the Vietnam War, but he was highly constrained in what he could say about it. Could he say that the US government had perpetrated a fraud in connection with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? No, he could not. So he had to be very creative in how he went about it. Not every teacher is as creative as he was.

While there is progress in philosophy, what counts as philosophical progress is, I think, very different from what counts as progress in math and the sciences. There is no need for working mathematicians and scientists to know the history of their fields in order to contribute to 'state of the art' research, for most branches of most of the natural sciences build on theories that have been empirically confirmed, and mathematics builds on proofs known to be true, and so the present of these fields is what is most important to the researcher who wishes to contribute to ongoing work in those fields. Because, in contrast, philosophy consists in advancing arguments in favor of theses that cannot be resolved by appeal to facts or known with certainty, the history of philosophy is part of its present in a way that the history of (most of) the natural sciences and of mathematics is not part of their present. Not only is there a standing possibility in philosophy that some repressed historical view might go 'live' again and actually be drawn on in work in contemporary philosophy, since an important part of philosophy consists in posing, rather than resolving, questions, attention to the history of philosophy can lead philosophers to see new ways of posing questions of current concern and different questions to raise, as well as offering to them solutions to problems of current interest. To my mind, one important respect--there are others, of course--in which philosophy, despite the pretensions of certain of its practitioners over the centuries, differs from the natural sciences and mathematics, is that philosophy historically is a way to do philosophy, whereas one cannot 'do' mathematics or natural science historically. This is one important respect in which philosophy is, to my mind, a humanistic discipline, because its past is so inextricably bound up with its present. (To be sure, many philosophers have no interest in philosophy's history, and they need not, although I myself am inclined to think that all philosophers would benefit from some acquaintance with those aspects of philosophy's past relevant to their work. But this may simply reflect the prejudice of someone who works primarily in the history of philosophy.)

I think the sort of language you are complaining about does incorporate the human characteristics you mention at the end, it is just that the argument goes that we act within a context defined by the basic power relationships in our culture, and the norms which have been created as a result. This seems plausible to me. In a culture in which men and women are not free to flirt with each other the notion of flirting would take on an entirely different character, as a subversive act, perhaps. Who can flirt with whom, how they go about it, where it degenerates into something objectionable or even illegal, are all reflections of basic social rules. Lust and greed are certainly important, but they operate within parameters defined by more general relationships between people, or so it is argued, and this is not to suggest that there is no interaction between individuals. It is just that that sort of interaction is affected strongly by interaction between social groups.

I am interacting with you now by responding to your question, and that is an interaction between individuals. But since I am using the institution of a common language and the medium provided by the askphilosophers institution I am acting within and through a social group.

Why mention the Holocaust example specifically? Any worries about the "certainty" of historical knowledge would equally apply to every single piece of historical knowledge. Of course, what makes the Holocaust example stand out is that it does get challenged -- by people who have typically deeper agendas -- so perhaps what you should be asking is this: whenever you read about any historical event, and whenever you find people challenging conventional historical events, can you distinguish what is driven by "agenda" and what is driven by actual consideration of the available "facts"? (An excellent general book on the subject is the recent book "Voodoo Histories", which is a study of various conspiracy theories (including Holocaust denial and others), trying to articulate how/when people with agendas choose to selectively apply ordinary standards of reason and evidence ......)

best, Andrew

One more thought: if you are interested in twentieth century analytic philosophy, Scott Soames' two-volume history provides clear and reasonably reliable interpretations of the history of some of the movements within that tradition.

Even though Soames does not provide a full or completely satisfactory history of analytic philosophy--his central narrative focuses narrowly on those treatments of the analytic/synthetic, necessary/contingent, and apriori/aposteriori distinctions that are most closely connected to Saul Kripke's celebrated work in Naming and Necessity, and the emphasis he places on the historical significance of Kripke's achievements creates some some significant gaps and oversimplifications--these texts are extremely engaging and reading them can be a good way to gain sophisticated introductory knowledge about some vital figures in recent philosophical history:

Soames, Scott, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The Dawn of Analysis. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) http://books.google.com/books?id=sS_lToqtGrIC&pgis=1.

Soames, Scott, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: The Age of Meaning. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) http://books.google.com/books?id=M5umcZlECGQC&pgis=1.

Of the three histories listed so far, my assessment is that Russell's is the least reliable (but most fun to read), Kenny's is the most reliable and employs the best historiography (and so is the best elementary introduction to many Western philosophical traditions), and Soames offers the most sophisticated discussion of a much more limited range of figures and themes.

Russell's book is lively, but not that reliable. The best one-volume history of philosophy I've found is A Brief History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny, which is accessible but sophisticated and concise yet comprehensive.

Unlike Russell, Kenny develops develop a sophisticated historiography that draws helpfully from wider cultural and historical events and trends. This gives his text a much more interestingly nuanced view than is normal in introductory histories of philosophy.

The book is entertaining and deeply informative -- and I consider it the very best of its genre! Here's an Amazon link (note -- the text I have mind is the one published by Blackwell in 1998; Kenny has published other histories of philosophy since then that I don't like as much):

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0631201327

Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy immediately comes to mind.

There is a number of different issues here. Let me comment on just one of them. We may indeed wonder how people, in certain situations, can come to act in appalling ways. The question as asked perhaps suggests that arm-chair philosophy might help in understanding this. But not so. This "how come?" question is an empirical one. What is needed is e.g. a knowledge of empirical work in social psychology, such as the Milgram experiment, which explored the willingness of subjects to inflict (apparent) suffering at the behest of an authoritative figure. The results of such work are highly alarming but also, I take it, highly salient for the historian. For they suggest something of the ready possibility of authority structures that might facilitate widespread evil behaviour. We can oh-so-easily be led to do terrible things.