Connecting Middle Schools in Ghana and Oregon

In two weeks I'll be in Ghana doing some research on how Ghanaian textbooks have depicted its history but mostly meeting with educators to talk about ways that they can collaborate with their counterparts in the Portland Metropolitan area.  The collaborations can be as simple as sharing a few letters during the school year.  I've been meeting with educators here in Oregon and corresponding with some in Ghana and am excited about helping to match some schools and classrooms.  I hope that it will be a vivid and personal way for students in the two places to learn about each others' lives.  Ghana is an ideal partner, as Ghanaians invest a great deal of money and energy in education, and Ghana defies a lot of common stereotypes that the western world has about Africa:  it is a stable democracy that has never had a bloody civil war.  I visited for the first time two years ago and was deeply impressed by the determination of the educators I met and the grace and hospitality of Ghanaians in general.  Please let me know if you are interested in this project for your school.

Survival of the Fittest Societies

A very interesting article in the November, 2011 issue of The Atlantic on the socio-biologist E. O. Wilson fits closely with a theme I tried to develop in The American Family: From Obligation to Freedom.  Socio-biologists used to be much denigrated by historians and other social scientists, as they were understood to be saying that biology was essentially destiny, that, for example, men were hard wired to be sex-crazed jerks and women had better just deal with it.  But over the years there has been a rapprochemont between the two sets of scholars, with each admitting that our genetic history and evolution greatly shape, without determining, our behavior.  It helps that more and more scholars of human evolution have been pointing out that human survival has depended not so much on survival of the fittest individuals but on the fittest societies, that effective and durable societies require lots of members willing to sacrifice their individual needs for the good of the group.  As Wilson puts it: "in competition between groups, groups of altruists are more likely to succeed."  In other words, we are hard wired to cooperate, as societies of cooperators are much more likely to survive (and reproduce) than are societies of individualists.  This helps to explain, as I argue in my own book, why American hyper-individualism contributes not only to the dissolution of families but to rising rates of individual unhappiness, such as rates of depression, and national decline, such as an unwillingness to accept the need for taxes and regulation.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/e-o-wilson-rsquo-s-theory-of-everything/8686/

Environmentalism, Revised Edition

Pearson Press has just released a revised edition of Environmentalism as part of their Seminar Studies series.  This book is an updated version of my book of the same title published in 2006 in their Short History of Big Ideas series but also contains twenty-seven primary sources, from Beowulf to the 2010 Report of the League Against Cruel Sports from England and Wales.  The book is intended largely for both the general reader and university courses.  It differs from most histories of nature loving in its length (short) and breadth (the western world).  This is not a celebration of nature loving.  Rather, I am interested in unraveling a disturbing paradox: why our celebrations of and efforts to conserve nature have been most intense at times and in places where people have most exploited it.
http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/Environmentalism/9781408255582.page
http://www.amazon.com/Environmentalism-Seminar-Studies-History-Peterson/dp/1408255588/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319475655&sr=1-2

The American Family: From Obligation to Freedom

After about six years of writing and many more years than that of researching and teaching on the subject, Palgrave Macmillan is publishing The American Family: From Obligation to Freedom.  The thesis is in the subtitle.  Jennifer S. Hirsch, a Professor at Columbia University and the author of a wonderful book on modern Mexicano families on both sides of the border, wrote a lovely blurb which sums up the book's goal: "this book manages the impressive feat of providing a coherent overview of the social roots of changing American kinship patterns while at the same time serving as a provocative meditation on the roots of American individualism and on the implications of that individualism for our collective well-being."  I hope that she is right!
 http://us.macmillan.com/theamericanfamily-1/DavidPetersondelMar
http://www.amazon.com/American-Family-Obligation-Freedom/dp/0230337457/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319474679&sr=1-1