Kerby Anderson

Are there cycles in history? Yes, even though there is a linear trajectory in history, there are generational cycles we can observe. No doubt you have heard the phrase: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” Or you may have heard: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” And you may have heard the phrase “the fourth turning” that predicts a crisis at the end of a four-fold cycle.
Today and tomorrow, I will talk about three often quoted cycles: a political/cultural cycle, a technological cycle, and a financial cycle. And I might mention that all three seem to be converging today.
There appears to be about an eighty-year political/cultural cycle (which averages out to about 84 years). Go back to 1848 and you have Karl Marx publishing the Communist Manifesto and other works. The political and social impact of his Marxist perspective swept through Europe, changed the political structure of many countries, and is still an influence today.
Another important political change happened 84 years later in the 1930s. In Europe, you have the rise of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In this country, you had the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt who signed into law a significant number of New Deal programs that vastly expanded the scope of government and are influential in our lives today.
If you add another 84 years, you come to 2016. In Europe, you have the political battle known as Brexit and the beginning of some populist uprisings. In this country, you also had the rise of populism as illustrated by the election of Donald Trump.
Tomorrow I will show how this cycle coincides with the technological and financial cycles.

Kerby Anderson
Wilfred Reilly has written a book about how American history is taught today. It has the provocative title, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me. In some ways, it can be seen as a response to the book by James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me. You can read his opinion column that provides a summary of his book.
What is his concern? “We often, bizarrely, hear the claim that American history is taught mostly from the political right — and that it presents our nation as bucolic. But, in fact, many of the best-selling social-science books of the past few decades focus on the idea that the ‘real’ history of the United States was a virtually unending bloodbath.”
Two of those books are Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and the New York Times best seller The 1619 Project. He adds that “the contemporary US national media and professors lean roughly 93 percent to the left, and this has been the case for some time. Within the secondary schools, two popular curricula currently in use come from the 1619 Project and Dr. Zinn himself.”
As I have said before, there are many dark chapters in American history. Those need to be taught, but not to the exclusion of the many positive aspects of our history. Students are often left with the impression that the US was the only country that had slavery. They don’t learn about how nations in Europe and North America set out to end the institution of slavery. They may learn about European colonialism, but not about Ottoman, Mongol, or Arab Muslim colonialism.
Wilfred Reilly’s book reminds us that if there is a bias in the nation’s textbooks, it is a leftwing bias against America.