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The purpose of this paper is to explore a true World War One event, the Christmas Truce of 1914. The paper is inspired by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) award winning book, Shooting at the Stars: The Christmas Truce of 1914 by John Hendrix, which narrates the truce through a fictitious letter from a British soldier. On Christmas Eve, German soldiers on the western front line, specifically near the Belgium border, ceased fire and invited British soldiers to celebrate Christmas. Descriptions of events derive from oral histories and photos collected from actual soldiers who experienced this unusual historic event.

This lesson engages students in inquiry centers focused on events, location, soldiers, remembrance, and primary sources to answer the question: Why did the First World War Christmas Truce of 1914 occur?

World War One (AKA the First World War and The Great War) classroom history studies typically focus on tragic components of, what many call, a needless war. Many lessons examine military technologies, political power struggles, horrors of trench warfare, disease and casualties. In essence, “World War I saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction. By the time the war was over and the Allied Powers claimed victory, more than 16 million people – soldiers and civilians alike – were dead” (history.com Staff, 2009). This lesson reveals a spontaneous, impactful, emotionally charged event occurring during the worst of times. The Christmas Truce of 1914 moves students from thinking about the ravages of war into thinking deeply about what it truly means to be enemies, friends or even to mend relationships. Who are soldiers – what do they feel, need, believe and miss? During the truce, the longing for peace and human interaction superseded political ideologies, for a while. This lesson starts with students participating in a class discussion to uncover prior knowledge of the famous event. Students examine their real-life feelings regarding personal truces, answer guiding questions while rotating through classroom research centers, and collectively create a generalized response to answer the compelling question: Why did the First World War Truce of 1914 occur? Students will apply their understandings of the event, location, and feelings associated with the truce by taking a soldier’s persona and writing a letter home. Illustrations and maps further engage students’ creativity.

This true story about the Christmas Truce of 1914 reminds us that countries may have differing ideologies and political beliefs which cause conflicts, yet people, as individuals, find commonalities making them seek peaceful connections with one another.

“The soldiers of 1914 remind us of the choice we all can make: we can see others as humans who matter like we matter – even when they’re our enemies. They also show us what can happen when we make that choice: enemies can become friends and, at least for a moment, there is peace” (Arbinger Institute, 2017, Section 3). This quote embodies the lesson’s value, because it brings understanding to a personal level – soldiers on the field. First World War soldiers were typically powerless. For instance, as many as 250,000 boys under the age of 18 served in the British army during the First World War. Patriotic fervor, escape from poor conditions or hopes for adventure were motives for joining. Birth certificates were uncommon; war recruiters received money for each sign-on, so boys as young as 14 went to war. In this lesson, students examine First World War background information; analyze the truce’s events, geography, soldiers and memorials. Students are immersed in large numbers of resources including videos, music, photographs, maps, books, articles, newspapers, historians’ perspectives, oral histories, museum archives and the First World War soldiers’ original letters that help reveal the story and help students understand underlying feelings of soldiers and their families.

My Country ‘Tis of Thee: How One Song Reveals the History of Civil Rights offers insights into the historic significance of the song’s familiar melody as an instrument for change Protesting for freedom is universal, and songs have long provided a sense of solidarity and a means to communicate messages for protesters with strong beliefs about various causes. By hearing an instrumental recording, students first engage in an activity to identify the song, which, since 1831, has been known as “America” to many in the USA. Students become familiar with concepts and historic people named throughout the book by manipulating and sorting concept cards. Using historic events depicted in the book, students create timelines using a technological timeline tool. Then, after listening to a read-aloud of the book, they use clues to match different sets of lyrics with corresponding historical events. Civil rights history is revealed through different lyrics of this song.

The Austrian School of Economics, pioneered in the late nineteenth century by Menger and developed in the twentieth century by Mises and Hayek, is poised to make significant contributions to the methodology, analytics, and social philosophy of economics and political economy in the twenty-first century. But it can only do so if its practitioners accept responsibility to pursue the approach to its logical conclusions with confidence and absence of fear, and with an attitude of open inquiry, acceptance of their own fallibility, and a desire to track truth and offer social understanding. The reason the Austrian school is so well positioned to do this is because (1) it embraces its role as a human science, (2) it does not shy away from public engagement, (3) it takes a humble stance, (4) it seeks to be practical, and (5) there remains so much evolutionary potential to the ideas at the methodological, analytical, and social philosophical level that would challenge the conventional wisdom in economics, political science, sociology, history, law, business, and philosophy. The author explores these five tenants of Austrian economics as a response to the comments on his lead chapter “What Is Still Wrong with the Austrian School of Economics?”

During the last decade or so, philosophers of science have shown increasing interest in scientific models and modeling. The primary impetus seems to have come from the philosophy of biology, but increasingly the philosophy of economics has been drawn into the discussion. This paper will focus on the particular subset of this literature that emphasizes the difference between a scientific model being explanatory and one that provides explanations of specific events. The main differences are in the structure of the models and the characteristics of the explanatory target. Traditionally, scientific explanations have been framed in terms of explaining particular events, but many scientific models have targets that are hypothetical patterns: “patterns of macroscopic behavior across systems that are heterogeneous at smaller scales” (Batterman & Rice, 2014, p. 349). The models with this characteristic are often highly idealized, and have complex and heterogeneous targets; such models are “central to a kind of modeling that is widely used in biology and economics” (Rohwer & Rice, 2013, p. 335). This paper has three main goals: (i) to discuss the literature on such models in the philosophy of biology, (ii) to show that certain economic phenomena possess the same degree of heterogeneity and complexity often encountered in biology (and thus, that hypothetical pattern explanations may be appropriate in certain areas of economics), and (iii) to demonstrate that Hayek’s arguments about “pattern predictions” and “explanations of the principle” are essentially arguments for the importance of this type of modeling in economics.

When Beyond Positivism was published 35 years ago, it presented a compelling case for methodological change in the economics profession. That case remains equally compelling in the present day as, tragically, economics remains largely without the methodological pluralism at the heart of Beyond Positivism’s message. Among the costs of an environment of methodological myopia are widespread misinterpretations and the diversion of scholars from efforts at economic understanding to methodological wrangling, which we illustrate using the experience of Austrian economics in the 20th century. Beyond Positivism, we suggest, continues to provide the intellectual case for a pluralist discipline of economics, but one that requires complementary institutional reforms to come to fruition.

After a clarification of definitions important in methodological discussions, a brief history of early methodological thought in economics and political economy is presented. The development of “orthodox” methodology is traced, and the fundamental assumptions underlying neoclassical economic methodology are enumerated. Philosophical positions – both critical of and sympathetic to the orthodox assumptions – are presented. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of various heterodox positions are surveyed. Throughout the paper, methodological justifications for the emphasis on primarily deductive, complex mathematical models in contemporary economics as practiced in the USA – especially in light of the relevance and importance of primarily verbal, interpretive methodologies in the realm of applied and policy‐oriented economics – are examined.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.