Week of Sept. 17, 2007

Are you completely serious about the history of our nation?

Then director Nate Newell advises that you do not attend the comedy"The Complete History of America (Abridged)," which opens at Apple Hill Playhouse tonight.

"There is no huge moral here, and you're not going to learn much about history," he said."But you're going to get one heck of a show."

McClatchy reports that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has suspended the license of Blackwater to operate in Iraq while it is under investigation for recklessly killing civilians. Al-Maliki pointed to seven discrete incidents. An aide said that the Americans seemed shocked that the Iraqis were making a stand on the issue. Apparently sympathy with Iraqis about their innocent civilians being shot up by cowboys hired by a private American firm is not widespread in the Green Zone.

One of the great tragedies of Washington's Iraq war has been the destruction or looting of Iraq's historical heritage, as Robert Fisk explains. It seems clear that the 20th century history of an entire country is gone.

History has always been a popular subject, but with the advent of the celebrity historian, finding ever more inventive ways to present the facts on television over recent years has made it one of the coolest traditional subjects to study.

Humankind is losing its past for a cuneiform tablet or a sculpture or piece of jewellery that the dealer buys and pays for in cash in a country devastated by war. Humankind is losing its history for the pleasure of private collectors living safely in their luxurious houses and ordering specific objects for their collection.

While humanities departments thrive at elite institutions (at Yale, for example, history has long been the most popular major, with English usually beating out economics for second place), the high cost of college today exacerbates a utilitarian strain that’s always made it hard for the liberal arts to make a case for themselves in practical-minded America. According to the Department of Education, in the 2003-4 school year, only 1.6 percent of America’s 19 million undergraduates majored in English and 1.3 percent in history, compared with 20 percent in business, 16 percent in health, 9 percent in education and 6 percent in computer science.