Homer's The Iliad is one of the most prolific works of Greek mythology and the most enduring image of the legendary Trojan War, servings as a springboard for the equally renowned works of the Greek Odyssey and the Roman Aeneid. But the Iliad stands apart from its successors and even a large portion of the Western canon in one crucial aspect – its stationary plot. Unlike the Odyssey and Aeneid where protagonists are swept across seas and exotic lands on a quest to find or return to a new life, the Iliad's Achilles, spends his entire story right before the walls of Troy, and within that a large majority is on a beach away from the main conflict. The Iliad is surprisingly subversive in respect to this structure, and this uniqueness imbues the myth with a restlessness channeled into an introspection on everything from the culture of the Greek world to the narrative expectations of epic literature. By examining how the unusual pacing of the Iliad relates to the character's movement through the setting and emotional development, this essay will explore how Homer's epic subverts character and plot conventions to enhance the underlying tragedy of the Trojan War.

Achilles at first glance appears as a typical war epic hero, but his introduction differs in many key ways from the average protagonist. One of the most widely recognized narrative archetypes is the "Hero's Journey", a concept developed by literary scholar Joseph Campbell to describe a near-universal plot structure within mythic literature^{( 1 )}. In The Power of Myth, Campbell reflects on his outline of the universal hero, describing it as, "a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experiences (151)", and "for whom something has been taken, or who feels there's something lacking in the normal experiences available (152)". In these aspects, Achilles fits perfectly into the mold of Campbell's hero. He was exalted as beyond other men as the greatest warrior of the Greeks, and his story begins with having his glory and prizes taken from him by the more powerful Agamemnon. Over the course of the story the events of the war move him in monumental ways, and he does so to the course of the war in turn.

But where he begins to break with tradition is in his response to the hero's calling. Campbell further declares that the Hero's Journey itself is about the hero, "[taking] off on a new series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir (152)". The Hero's Journey is meant to be a physical movement to compliment a spiritual transformation, but Achilles engages in quite the opposite. His response to his stolen valor is to withdraw from all conflict – participating neither in the status quo of the now years-long Trojan War, nor leaving for home across the sea as his contemporaries Odysseus or Aeneas due in later, more traditional stories. Achilles decides to camp on the beach between these two potential quests for seventeen of twenty-four books in the Iliad, refusing a chance to follow either option at least once. Other supporting characters of the epic engage in grand adventures across the Trojan battlefield, their struggles put in contrast to the unburdened Achilles who sits "delighting his heart now,/ plucking strong and clear on the fine lyre (Homer 9.223 – 24)" during an intermission between epic battles^{( 2 )}. Achilles in effect forfeits the Hero's Journey within the first books of the Iliad, rejecting participation in the status quo by binding himself to inaction rather than a quest of discovery or recovery.

Beginning in the second book, the siege of Troy takes precedence over Achilles loafing until the ninth, but his feud continues to shape the outcome of the intermediate plot. In his rage, Achilles returned to his sanctum and begged the gods through his divine mother "'to pin the Achaeans back against their ships/ [...] so even mighty Artrides can see how mad [Agamemnon] was/ to disgrace Achilles, the best of the Achaeans' (Homer 1.485 – 90)". When this comes to fruition and an embassy is sent to retrieve him, it is implied that now will be the beginning of Achilles' true Hero's Journey. As Caroline Alexander explains in her book, The War That Killed Achilles, "the withdrawal of an angry hero from his people is a standard motif in both folktale and epic – a motif that presupposes, however, the angered hero's eventual appeasement and return (87)". Unusual as his departure was in the context of Campbell's model, there is an expectation to all involved – characters and audience – that Achilles will express a renewed interest in duty over ego. But instead, the protagonist digs his heals into the sand. Achilles refuses to rejoin the war despite his earlier wishes, and lambastes not just the source of his slight, Agamemnon, but the entire logic of the war itself:

"'Why must we battle the Trojans,
men of Argos? Why must we muster an army, lead us here,
that son of Atreus? [...]
Are they the only men alive who love their wives,
those sons of Atreus?' (Homer 9.409 – 14)"

Again, Achilles rejects the call to launch himself into a hero's quest, only having grown stronger in his dedication to his physical and emotional stubbornness. Where the first subversion in another work may have just been used to build tension, here Achilles' proud and prolonged absence is used to pose questions about the value of the heroism the characters and setting have defined for him.

Achilles' patent lack of interest in the values of the Trojan War is not the only aspect of the epic in which physical stagnation defines greater conflict more than movement. The Trojan War was defined by a decade-long stalemate between the Greeks and Trojans, within which Achilles' story only takes up a fraction. The greater conflict was a mythical canvas upon which poets painted pictures of elaborate feats for centuries (Alexander 19), but as in this central chapter, it was not always understood as a noble war. Alexander highlights that historians have long determined that Homer's contemporaries would have seen the Trojan War as a unilateral tragedy, in which "the Greeks of that time, and the barbarians as well, list both what they had at home and what they had acquired by the campaign (Strabo qtd. in Alexander XVII)"^{( 3 )}. The idea that Achilles is choosing to sit out of a noble Hero's Journey which his allies are engaging in is a false dichotomy, as ultimately their activities move just as little about the state of the war as Achilles' absence. Characters such as Diomedes, Agamemnon, and Menelaus each get their moments of glory, only to have their victories quickly swallowed up by setbacks. Achilles' stasis in this whirlwind of warfare and the development of his pessimistic view represents the Iliad above these supporting scenes because his arc is a microcosmic reflection of the nature of the Trojan War. By not partaking in the illusion of movement and within the stalemate, he experiences a defining spiritual transformation apart from the chasing of heroic valor.

However, Achilles does not remain in his philosophical bubble for the whole story. As if to take a second spark to igniting his heart, Achilles loses something again that is far dearer to him than his honor – his companion Patroclus. Despite Patroclus' minor role before his death, his impact on Achilles is felt far above and beyond Agamemnon's slight, made clear in his reaction to news of his slaying:

"A black cloud of grief came shrouding over Achilles.
[...] Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust,
Achilles lay there, fallen...
tearing his hair, defiling it with his own hands (Homer 18.24 – 29)"

Rather than prideful anger and withdrawal before confiding in his mother, Thetis, here Achilles instantly gives in to grief, letting his ego crumble. This is Campbell's motivating heroic loss which spurs Achilles into action. But as a continued subversion, where Campbell's hero seeks new life, Achilles knowingly seeks his own death. He engages in what Bernard Knox describes as a "godlike, lonely, heroic fury from which all the rest of the world is excluded (qtd. in Homer 46)"^{( 4 )}. He engaged on his journey from the beach to the walls of Troy devoid of responsibility to anyone but Patroclus, not even to the etiquette of war. No where is this more exemplified than in the completion of his vengeful quest when he refuses to dignify the pleas of his noble rival Hector: "'Ransom?/ No man alive could keep the dog-packs off you,/ not if they haul ten, twenty times that random' (Homer 22.410 – 12)". When the Hero's Journey is fulfilled by Achilles and he is finally impassioned to act rather than wait it is no longer fueled by anything resembling heroism. The war only hollows out Achilles' transformation on the other end, trading his self-reflection for self-destruction to move him.

Another key theme of Campbell's hero explored and subverted within the Iliad is the notion of a protagonist's heroic self-sacrifice. Campbell, in reference to the complicated question of how to find a hero in war, declared that there is one defining quality of identification: "The moral objective is that of saving a people, a person, or supporting an idea. The hero sacrifices himself for something – that's the morality of it (156)". Despite how negative Achilles' final transformation is, it is a self-sacrifice to the effort of the Trojan War. Upon Patroclus' death, Achilles recognizes and accepts instantly that he must slay Hector and in doing so, seal his own fate, motivating his wild campaign. But as well as sealing his own doom, Hector's death does so for Troy itself, as lamented by his wife Andromache,

"'I cannot think [our son] will ever come to manhood.
Long before that the city will be sacked
and plundered from top to bottom! Because you are dead,
her great guardian' (Homer 24.856 – 59)"

Incidentally in his moving fury, Achilles began the end of the war's nine-year stalemate. After all the strife of his comrades engaged in the pursuit of glory, it was Achilles who truly shifted the overarching tide by rejecting this glory.

By the end of Achilles' journey, the only redemption he receives is in his forsaking of his rage, not to reassert his former glory among the Greeks, but to give pity to his enemies. His slaying of Hector does bring fanfare and ceremony from the Greeks, but it is hollow to Achilles who has long since shunned the trappings of wealth. Even his beloved Patroclus comes to him as a ghost not to thank him for his vengeance but to ask that Achilles move on: "'You never neglected me in life, only now in death./ Bury me, quickly – let me pass the Gate of Hades' (Homer 23.82 – 83)". The only thing that breaks Achilles from his enraged trance is looking into the eyes of Priam, the father of his enemy as he begs, "'Remember your own father, great godlike Achilles--/ as old as I am, past the threshold of deadly old age' (Homer 24.570 – 71)", which moves Achilles to lament his own father's destiny to mourn him in due time. As the ancient Greeks understood that the Trojan War was a tale of mutual destruction, so does Achilles' final spiritual transformation come when he sees his father in Hector's, and thus indirectly himself in Hector – the great warrior and symbol of his people doomed to die before the war's end. His heroic redemption only finds another symbolic death, and little solace but a recognition of the cruelty of fate.

It would appear an oddity that the chapter of the Trojan cycle bearing the most prodigious name as that of the central set-piece would not be about its most dramatic turns, but how a highly personal tension subtly marked the beginning of its end. A tragic pre-climax in which the hero most central to this paradigm shift denounces the value of the conflict altogether, refusing to move from his comforts until spurred to swift, selfish and self-destructive action. But this uneven momentum is what the Iliad and its view of the Trojan War represent – the Trojan War was not in itself a heroic set for adventure as much as it was the formation of a stifling and bloody status quo. Engagement was the momentary illusion of movement within a broader societal stagnation, and it was only once this was reflected in the figure of Achilles that the illusion was broken, and true progress could occur. And that progress, the conclusion of the war, was not a celebration of rebirth, but of further death, as historically awaited the Greek and Trojan societies thereafter.

Site Notes

1. I'd heard for a while now that the Hero's Journey was blown out of proportion as a literary theory, and I was happy to have my first exposure to it be disproving its universality in relation to a very well known piece of the western canon. I also don't like Campbell's vibes after reading his interview, he seems to believe more in some spiritual power of fiction than like... social sciences. I love mythology and think it is vital to learn to develop your sense of humanity too, but I also believe in Conflict Theory, dingus.
2. This line was a bit of a fixation of Book 9 in our class and I felt compelled to reference it. It's just a great piece of characterization too that shows Achilles was really REALLY enjoying not fighting. It's not just that he withdrew angrily to brood, he was taking that as a lonog needed vacation and I think that's cute.
3. One of my beloved history books also explained this to me over a year ago. If you're unaware, following the historical Trojan War, the Greek World fell into a dark age, and Homer and all the lads who came after him were a new Greek culture which venerated the Myceneans but may have themselves been unrelated. The war taxed both sides so heavily it would have seemed to destroyed the region's culture for centuries.
4. I have a slight beef with this part of the book's introduction because it does a great analysis of Helen moving from a historically dehumanized (god-like) state of succubus to a character affected by her effect, I don't think Achille's transformation is to being a god in that meta-narrative way. It is very human for grief to change someone as it did him, to make him shun food and rest and to be self-destructively fixated on finding closure. Sometimes what we've written the gods to reflect is just how we feel.

Works Cited

• Alexander, Caroline. The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War. Penguin Publishing Group, 2009.
• Campbell, Joseph, et al. The Power of Myth. Turtleback Books, 2012.
• Homer, et al. The Iliad. Penguin Books, 1998.

It is not uncommon to hear the adage that children are more desensitized to violence today than in the past in discussions of modern cultural issues. Desensitization broadly refers to a lack of reactivity to stimulus, and in the context of violence refers to a lack of negative reactions to such acts. Those who say children are more desensitized to violence believe that they are less affected by violent and traumatic scenarios and consequently are more willing to glorify and re-enact them. This concern primarily originates from the advent of popular television and concern over the content of children's programming, but more recently fear of desensitization has been enflamed by linkage of perpetrators of school shootings to violent video games (APA Task Force, 2015). While politicians and scientists alike have been working to find the link between violent media and violent behavioral outcomes, few are asking whether media is most to blame. To say that children are more desensitized today than in the past would posit mass media as a dominant variable, when it is highly likely that life outside of the digital world plays a large role as well. In this essay, I will scrutinize the leading causes of desensitization to violence in children's lives and see how they have changed in frequency over time to determine whether it is the growing modern crisis it is feared to be.

Defining the Effects of Violence on Children

There are two kinds of long-term effects exposure to violence can have on a child, those being internalizing and externalizing problems - the latter of which desensitization plays a large role in. Mrug et al. (2016) defined internalizing problems as persistent disruptions in mood and emotional regulation seen in those exposed to violence which resemble traumatic symptoms, while externalizing problems are behavioral issues that arise when a child is desensitized to violence and thus is more likely to commit it against others. Desensitization itself was defined as "a form of habituation, a well-established type of non-associative learning that results in diminished response to a stimulus after repeated exposure" (p. 2). The heightened likeliness to commit violence is the product of many psycho-social factors that do not always occur together, but without the instinctive negative reaction, children are more likely to view violence as a neutral action and see benefit in it. Both social learning theory and social information processing theory would posit that children viewing violence neutrally would either begin to mimic the behavior out of pure instinct or pick up on how violence can be instrumental to their goals, working it into their social scripts (Liu et al., 2013). Most children exposed to real or fictional violence will come away with internalizing issues before they become desensitized and are even less likely to come away with externalizing symptoms (Mrug et al., 2016). But for those who do become violent the adoption of violent behavior from their environment may be a primary culprit alongside a myriad of psychological, biological, and other environmental factors.

To measure how children are most exposed to violence it is important to understand the most crucial contexts in which violence is met with dramatic psychological reactions. In the real world, children may experience violence in familial or community contexts. Mrug et al. (2016) explains that at home children may be witness to interparental abuse or be a victim of abuse themselves, and elsewhere violence could be seen in school bullying, communal crime, or accidents. Both contexts can be very impactful on their own often leading to internalizing reactions related to anxiety, depression, or trauma, but the effect of being exposed to violence in multiple contexts at once has a strong correlation with externalizing issues specifically. When violence becomes inescapable children may become conditioned to view it as a natural part of social interaction and are susceptible to the social conditioning towards violence described by social learning and social information processing theory.

Throughout human history, these real-world contexts would be the primary avenue through which violence would be seen by children and either feared or normalized. But since the 20th century new mediums have led to new and highly vivid methods of viewing fictional or recorded violence. Violence, from cartoonish to graphic, has been a staple of fiction across time and cultures, but older popular mediums (such as books) fail to convey the sensory intensity found in television, movies, and video games (Stevens, 2012)^{( 1 )}. It has been shown with little room for doubt that violent video games especially can have a negative impact on child players, primarily leaning towards desensitization and externalizing symptoms, whereas the intensity of real-world violence primarily has a traumatizing effect (APA Task Force, 2015). Video games bring a vivid play element to acting out aggression, encouraging children to "identify and then choose violent strategies" (Funk et al., 2004, p. 3). Violence in real world contexts will likely always be a primary detriment to the development of children, but modern mediums lend visceral new dimension to fictional violence which further emphasizes the act and repetition of it.

Trends in Prevalence of Violent Contexts

Understanding that fictional violence is most likely to lead to externalizing problems, it is concerning to consider the dramatic rise in screen-time viewing among children. Focusing on video games, according to the APA Task Force's (2015) review of literature on video game violence, over 90% of children of both genders interact with video games, and 85% contain forms of violence. At the same time, the fidelity of video games has increased with technology over time. Violence which once could only be expressed through crude, pixelated facsimiles of cartoon characters can now be shown with high-definition human models who speak and react realistically, lending strength to the idea that violent games can become simulations for anti-social scripts.

However, in the real world violent influences in children's lives have been on a steady decline over the past decades. In his article, Finkelhor (2020) compiled a list of significant Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and measured how they have changed in prevalence over the 20th and 21st centuries. Significant sources of exposure to violence such as intimate partner violence, childhood physical and sexual abuse, physical and verbal bullying, and community violence have all decreased. Additionally, the last statistic sheds light on a crucial component at the core of the concern over whether desensitization is more of an issue today than in the past: whether this trend has a real effect on the occurrences of violence among people today. Multiple sources conclude that interpersonal violence such as abuse and homicide have been declining since a heavy spike in the 1970s^{( 2 )}, and more so since the 1990s (Finkelhor, 2020). It would be hard to justify the claim that the presence of high-fidelity and interactive violent media leads to real-world violence when these trends have only shown strong negative correlation on a macro scale.

Violence and anti-social behavior are complex phenomena that cannot be blamed only on one source such as video games. What is most crucial, even in arguments towards mass media as a culprit, is how violence is interpreted as a social reality in the developing mind of a child. Most experiments which link video game violence to personal action measure a short-term form of aggression more than long-term tendencies towards interpersonal violence (APA Task Force, 2015) ^{( 3 )}, but studies such as Mrug et al., (2016) found that "the number of contexts in which youth experienced violence also contributed to emotional desensitization, over and above the effects of cumulative violence exposure" (p. 12). Desensitization is about more than just exposure, but about processing, as violence that appears inescapable is more likely to be normalized and analyzed. In this case, mass media and video game violence may not be impactful as its own variable in the long term, but as part of a larger climate of violence pervasive in every aspect of a child's family, community, and play.

Conclusion

If desensitization to violence is measured only through its theoretical effect – increased violence among those affected – it is certainly not more common today than in the past. Despite fears about the prevalence of violent images in the digital worlds children are increasingly drawn into, the world they are growing up in outside their screens is becoming safer for them. But this does not mean that the life of children is only changing for the better, as Finkelhor (2020) continues to expound on problematic trends that are increasing. Despite the decrease in overtly violent ACEs three that prevailed were parental drug abuse, incarceration, and divorce - non-violent issues which nonetheless harm the mental health of children, as seen in rising rates of suicidality and depression among them. In as many respects as the world is improving for children, it is still changing for the worse. For all the cultural anxiety around desensitization and externalizing behaviors, it appears that internalizing problems are the biggest issue today.

Adults have a right to be worried about the health of their children and society, especially in lieu of new popular technologies, but it is important to never underestimate old unsolved cultural issues. The biggest challenges children face today still revolve around parental and peer relationships, which can be helped or hindered by mass media. As Finkelhor concludes at the end of his article, "The ACE adversities compared to the technology effects have enduring, negative impacts that are well-established and uncontroversial and are not seen as having any countervailing benefits" (2020). If violent media is responsible for driving some children to violent behavior, it is likely because of an underlying current of negative emotions driven by a myriad of other environmental factors, which are more pressing to address. Protecting the well-being of today's children will rely mostly on how parents relate to and help their children understand the world rather than on the outside world alone.

Site Notes

1. Trying to find a source like this was funny. I really wanted to emphasize that violence content is not in any way unique to modern media (because so much demonization of it talks like it is), but that also brought up the great question on if books have any effect. I'll be honest, this source is not the best, its a dissertation not a peer-reviewed study and says it thinks it bungled its own research, but it was something and I needed it!
2. This is also relevant to a point FDSignifire made in a video where he mentioned that since rap music had its genesis in the late 70s and early 80s (and moreso since it became mainstream a few years later), crime statistics have only been plummeting. Fiction can effect reality, but not like this it seems; It can change peoples attitudes, but attitudes towards violence are not what causes crime in real life - its poverty motherfucker.
3. I wish I could emphasize more how stupid some of the research against video games sounds. It will genuinely be stuff like 'We made a kid play COD for 3 hours then put him in a room with a confederate and asked him if he wanted to blast him with an airhorn or put hotsauce on his food'. Those are not meaningful acts of violence! It's trolling!

Works Cited

• APA Task Force on Violent Media. (2015). Technical report on the review of the violent video game literature: APA Task Force. https://www.apa.org/pi/families/review-video-games.pdf
• Finkelhor, D. (2020). Trends in adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in the United States. Child Abuse & Neglect, 108, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2020.104641
• Funk, J. B., Baldacci, H. B., Pasold, T., & Baumgardner, J. (2004). Violence exposure in real-life, video games, television, movies, and the internet: Is there desensitization? Journal of Adolescence, 27(1), 23–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2003.10.005
• Liu, J., Lewis, G., & Evans, L. (2013). Understanding aggressive behavior across the life span. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 20(2), 156–168. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2850.2012.01902.x
• Mrug, S., Madan, A., & Windle, M. (2016). Emotional desensitization to violence contributes to adolescents' violent behavior. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 44(1), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-015-9986-x
• Stevens, M. R. (2012) The forgotten medium: The impact of reading violent literature on aggressive thoughts. Theses and Dissertations, 3741. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3741

Controversial as they are, few would deny that grades are – and from their personal memory, have always been – a quintessential aspect of the American public school experience. It would not be in the slightest bit difficult to find an American whose run in with this system they would describe as negative, but besides gleefully anarchic calls for abolition from the rabble, serious logistical proposals are found in political and pedagogical arenas of thought. Many of the most recent woes people hold with the public school experience can be traced to the remnants of the 2002 No Child Left Behind act which ushered in an era of "accountability-based" education, layering a mountain of standardized test atop ancient grudges held against grades. And in the most recent decade, post COVID-19 pandemic problems such as "grade inflation" have caught the eye of those high-minded reformers. The focus of reform ebbs and flows, sometimes without truly reconciling the missteps of the past, leaving one to wonder what baggage may be carried over from the long history of America and its experiment turned mammoth institution – the public school system. This essay will scrutinize the current trends within modern grading reform and put them into conversation with reform movements of the past as to re-contextualize what debates truly need to he had about what the grading system means for U.S. public education and the nation it serves.

Education reformers today find themselves within a paradigm established by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and the shadow of "accountability-based" education. Brought into existence by coalition of politicians, activists, and ideologues from across the political spectrum, No Child Left Behind was the new millennium refurbishment of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, whose Title I funds were used as a bargaining chip to get states on board ("No Child Left Behind"). Those states would be required to produce standardized tests for grade 3 – 12 students to measure their achievements and allocate resources -- or more fittingly, their punishments. Schools caught underperforming would be forced to produce new services for their student's benefit at their expense, such as offering vouchers for students to move schools or free tutoring programs, and after 3 years this would culminate in state seizure with the options "to shut these schools down, turn them into charter schools, take them over, or use another, significant turnaround strategy" ("No Child Left Behind"). With the plan's doubling of paperwork and weaponization of failure, No Child Left Behind resembles a meta-grade – a way for states to grade schools on how they grade their students. A comparison that becomes more apt as its motives and history are explored.

No Child Left Behind was filled to the brim with conceptual flaws beyond the immediate negative connotation of magnifying the already flawed grading system, as former proponent Diane Ravitch explores in her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Swept up into support of the accountability-based reform movement herself, Ravitch had been supportive of the program despite rather immediate pushback from school districts and parents. But in 2006 she attended a conference where she found that due to the program, "state education departments were drowning in new bureaucratic requirements, procedures, and routines, and that none of the prescribed remedies [were] making a difference" (99). Most parents and students were not taking advantage of the offers forced upon schools which drained their resources (100), representing a gross miscalculation of how the country's citizens interacted with the incentive system the program staked everything on. And they truly staked everything on it, as the threat of seizure and chartering was not just for low-performing schools, but any school which did not meet the impossible goal of 100-percent proficiency for all students in math and reading by the 2013-2014 school year – a goal which Ravitch called "a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States" (104). No Child Left Behind was far more than just an over-zealous piece of reform legislature, but a gamble placed on the worst of neoliberal ideals^{( a )}. Infatuated with itself, the program convinced Americans to look towards the privatization of the school system as a reasonable conclusion to unreasonable demands, causing school districts to buckle under their weight.

These failings of the federal program would have many lingering effects on education discourse in the political sphere. The program's failure to raise school performance while doubling down on education's most unpopular aspects encouraged a wave of anti-federal musings by politicians in the late 2000s, blind or purposefully ignorant to the federal government's importance in providing funding and protecting civil rights throughout history (Jennings). And after further years of stagnation, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic accelerated antagonism towards public schools with many taking frustration over shutdown policies as an invitation to transfer children to private schools (Black). To the federal government's credit, there was a response to NCLB's failings between all of this. In 2015, No Child Left Behind was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act which broadened the scope of school measurements with categories of school climate, student-teacher engagement, and course offerings, and nullified the now obsolete 2013-2014 edict ("The Every Student Succeeds Act"). The maddening rigidity of testing and the distant death knell of the 2013 – 14 milestone were alleviated, but the update did not address the core problems of incentives by still leaving seizure and chartering on the table. The era of accountability-based education did not at all dissipate, its flaws and discourse moved to the background noise of education as new trends appeared and caught the eye of reformers.

In the last decade, the enemy chosen by the popular discourse of education reform has been the issue of "grade inflation". Throughout the 2010s, there has been evidence that student grades were being artificially inflated as average GPA's rose while a wide variety of standardized measurements fell. Especially with the achievement loses of COVID-19 this has become obvious to those such as ACT research scientist Edgar Sanchez who explained: 'After the onset of the pandemic, high school GPA has become a less consistent predictor [of college readiness], while ACT composite scores have grown relative stability" (Najarro). Ignoring questions of the legitimacy of standards-based analysis which predominated anti-accountability movements earlier, today's reformers mostly single out teacher discretion and grade calibration - statistics which NCLB was designed to toss onto the table for scrutiny. Struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels of rigor, 82% of high school and college educators admitted that they give into student demands for altered grades, dubbed "grade-grubbing" ("Gen Z Students"). Still some others point not towards teachers per se, but towards the ways that measure of non-academic behavior from punctuality to bringing tissues to the classroom encourage students to seek extra credits rather than learning (Blad).

"Equity-based" and "proficiency-based" grading are two popular examples of grade reform movements focusing on different areas but falling into structural pitfalls. Equity-based education focuses on what advocate Susan Brookhart described as, "reducing the 'noise'" of grades by raising the grade floor from a 0 to a 50 to remove outliers, allowing the re-takes of tests, and removing homework and extra credit from the overall grade (Blad). These measures are taken with the purpose of eliminating peripheral grades and allowing students to focus on gaining mastery in core learning. Slightly less concerned with classroom logistics and more with simply demystifying the grade, proficiency-based reform separates grades into specific skills with a 1 – 4 scale of mastery: 1 and 2 meaning room to grow, 3 meaning proficient, and 4 meaning exceptional (Stone). This scoring system makes meaning more concise on top of specifying the conglomerate of ideas that are the school grade. Even those non-academic skills which equity-based grading completely erases are classified under "a separate section rated students' 'habits of work'" (Stone). Both movements find fascination with micro-level management of the educational system; with the handiwork of teachers, but not with the incentives that motivate their work nor the greater systems that work interacts with.

For all their merits, these systems all have fundamental flaws. Equity-based grading's de-emphasizing of classroom behavior under the assumption that they are meaningless stands well criticized, with education scholar Fredick Hess calling the movement the product of "experts [...] increasingly uncomfortable with traditional notions of rigor or grading" ("Grade Inflation"). This criticism may be couched in conservative language, but it does allude to the value of work ethic, which tasks such as "getting to class on time", "contributing to every discussion", and even pithy things like "bringing in tissues for the classroom or a ticket receipt [...]" build despite the scoffing of advocates such as Joe Feldman ("What Many Advocates").^{( 1 )} The communicative innovations of proficiency-based grading dissolve once interacting with any external system, as schools are still required to calculate the disparate measurements into a single GPA to communicate with colleges (Stone). Grading children on an obscure scale would not help prepare them for how they will be evaluated at further institutions any more than devaluing work ethic prepares them for the behavioral expectations of others. These criticisms may seem inconsequential on the surface compared to the gains of individual districts which implement them, but they underline fundamental functions of grades within the education system which the movements do not seek to address on their scale. The rearrangement of teacher authority or scores and labels cannot fix the systemic blight within public schools rooted not just within the neglected presence of accountability-based education, but a web of historically unresolved problems which NCLB and modern reformers find themselves blindly entangled in.

Grades and their subsequent conceptual baggage have always existed within America in one form or another. The first true precursor to public education, the private primary education Grammar School had no standardized grades or tests like today, but had recommendations within a few textbooks of the 1820s for evaluating students with four Latin ranks - "Optime, Bene, Pessime, Male" - borrowed from the social rankings bestowed upon college graduates (Schneider & Hutt 204). In the early years before truly coming to terms with the scale of public education, there was a middle-class optimism for grade schools to be little colleges and centers of cultural revolution. But this was at a little college price. For the urban poor, the Monitorial School was developed by philanthropists to cheaply curb urban blight through nightmarish rigor and regulation. Within these schools, students would be monitored constantly and promoted or demoted based on random evaluations. Proficient students were promoted to 'monitor' where they would dispense the teachings of one teacher to the multitude of lesser students (206) – a marriage of economic and social efficiency which as Carl Kaestrle professed, "Our schools have not escaped [...], for we still live in an industrialized age" (qtd. in Button & Provenzo 78). From the antiquated Latin ranks to the workplace-like promotions of Monitorial Schools, any form of grading or classification existed to promote hierarchy only switching from the elitism of the old to the more competition of the Industrial Revolution.

In the 1830s, reformers such as Horace Mann re-focused public education towards those early revolutionary and republican ideals of enlightenment and growth with a mind towards contemporary ethics of socioeconomic mobility. Criticizing the incentive structure of Monitorial Schools in an annual report for the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann wrote that "if superior rank at recitation be the object, then, as soon as that superiority is obtained, the spring of desire and of effort for that occasion relaxes", leading to "moral hazards and delinquencies" (qtd. in Schneider & Hutt 206). Mann would be known as one of the main architects of the public school system, and at its early core was the sentiment that ranking and grading should not be abused to encourage extrinsic motivation, with Mann's advocation for private cumulative reports between parents and teachers rather than previous metaphorical and literal whips for regulating behavior found in earlier schools (Finkelstein 477)^{( 2 )}. But like the imagined collegiate national identity of the republican era, this rhetoric would be celebrated only until the scope of mass education became too large for optimism to bear.

During the post-civil war period, public school attendance nearly tripled in size (Schneider & Hutt 207)^{( 3 )}, leading to a subsequent tripling in magnitude and bureaucracy. As climbing high school graduation rates lead to synchronization with the college system, and the public schools began guzzling government resources to maintain and expand itself, administrators had to maintain professionalism and demonstrate their efficacy through standardized measurements (213). Grades went from a suggestion to a commandment within education, and efficiency-minded ideas of the past combined with the emerging field of psychology to lay the foundation for the modern understanding of grades: the popularization of the A-F, 100-point, and 4.0 scale, and the assumption of an IQ-like bell curve for grade distribution (Tocci 756). This would immediately lead to conflict with teachers whose experience with students could not fit into the numbers and curves of social sciences (Schneider & Hutt 213), but history would consistently lean in the administration's favor. In the age of nationalized industry and psychology, efficiency took precedent over pedagogy once again, firmly setting the groundwork for the next century.

Throughout the 20th century schools would only become larger and their grading systems more ingrained into American society. Grades were no longer the business of one teacher in one schoolhouse, but with the network of public and private institutions girdling the nation. Colleges would assign a cash value to grades through financial aid services further pressuring both systems to communicate more efficiently (Schneider & Hutt 211), and beyond or in place of college an employer would use a grade as symbol of social status and economic value (Tocci 768). School started to become not a great equalizer, but a great determinator, something far more like the visions of Jefferson and Mann than many may think. Jefferson who in a failed 1779 bill^{( b )} saw education as a means to find "those persons, whom nature hath endowed with genius and virtue" so they may "receive and [be] able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens" ("Founders Online")^{( 4 )}, and Mann who "suggest[ed] that public schooling would provide the talented and ambitious with the means to advance themselves socially and economically" (Button & Provenzo 106) would be delighted to see how grades so define the average American's early socioeconomic value. In the modern world, the integration of public education into society that many reformers dreamed of looks like the intensely bureaucratized and competitive system of ranking bearing down upon young Americans today, and less like the republican vision of the enlightened and uplifted voting masses.

Within this web, the discretion of teachers who chaff at the intense weight placed upon their most important teaching tool has been tolerated less and less, most clearly exemplified within the story of the "accountability-based" grading paradigm. The initial spark which grew into the flame of No Child Left Behind was the infamous Reagan-era report, "A Nation at Risk". The commission was the latest step in the long logical chain of equating academic achievement with national political and economic fitness found all the way back in the times of the Monitorial School, and fit snugly into the emerging ideology of neoliberalism and atomized socioeconomic responsibility (Lakes) ^{( 5 )} Fearsome criticism was laid upon the late 20th century landscape of teaching, defined by experimentation with social awareness of achievement gaps (Sleeter 565) and continued softening of grading's rigidity. While "A Nation at Risk" did propose real pedagogical solutions, the neoliberal climate called for market-inspired solutions, culminating in the promotion of "standards" and "accountability" above all else. The decades long cold war between educators and system-minded ideologues turned hot and legislators brought a boot down upon the entire school system to enforce the sanctity of standardization in the form of No Child Left Behind.

To Diane Ravitch, the very ineffectiveness of the "standards" promoted by this system showcases this lack of pedagogical merit. The categories of math and English proficiency were chosen at the federal level by NCLB, but what constitutes "proficiency" was left up to individual states who joined. Thus, as Ravitch criticizes, "Test-based accountability - not standards - became our national education policy" (21). This states-rights approach to standards was chosen due to an earlier backlash at drafted federal standards deemed too politicized (27), but this only resulted in allowing regional politics to dominate the creation of standards rather than a balanced national effort. On a state-by-state basis, the federal government had less authority to intervene with local political bias the way it did with school integration in the 1950s, and school districts could more easily engage in what urban education scholar Kris Gutierrez deemed "Backlash Pedagogy" – education reform meant to reverse the social and educational gains of marginalized students (337). Backlash Pedagogy makes an apt descriptor not just for the problematic "race-blind" qualities of No Child Left Behind explored by Gutierrez, Ravitch, and Christine Sleeter^{( 6 )}, but for the ideology of the entire movement. Accountability-based education was motivated by backlash against the autonomy of teachers who used their discretion to address the issues of student engagement and achievement gaps which grades could not address but only measure and exacerbate. For the 3rd time in education reform history, the call of efficiency and objectivity overtook those ideals and called ideological opposition noise.

The purely pedagogical landscape of public education has been left in a state of ruin, where the rigidity of standardized tests and the ire of regional politics binds teachers' creativity and reinforces decades - if not centuries - old faults in our system. Why then do the popular reform movements of "equity" and "proficiency" reflect such a disconnect from this reality? Because they are making the same crucial mistake that has defined school reform since the very genesis of the modern grade. While early public school architects such as Mann had room to suggest and speculate pedagogical philosophies widely different from those of the past, the architects of the early 20th century consolidated grades seemingly as a means of survival. Before schools even reached the post-WWII baby boom, the extrinsic incentives so criticized by Mann were seen by a 1921 reformer as a "spur to the laggard, [as] even their most outspoken opponents must admit" (qtd. in Schneider & Hutt 212). From there into the 40s, scholarship would spiritually coin the concept of grade inflation through its fervent quest for legitimizing the objectivity of grades and blaming discrepancies on teachers (214; Tocci 766). Grades quickly emerged, solidified, and became an unquestionable fixture of education before anyone could call for their scrutiny or abolition with any true legitimacy ever again. The same happened to No Child Left Behind, which withstood an immediate onslaught of controversy by those on the ground but was held firm by legislators and administrators until the program became so fixed within the world of education that reformers do not think to question why grade inflation and integrity would not spiral out of control in a system predicated on infinite growth under threat of financial ruin and closure.

Examining the paper trail that led to the issues which assume attention in the current day, not just through the scope of the most immediate trends, but to the roots of the system itself provide and infinitely more productive grounds for discourse on the American education system. Grades and standard-based metrics of measuring academic performance have created widely criticized incentives and reinforced social stratification for all their history, yet since the modern era of the 20th century reformers, they have gone ignored beyond the most radical and isolated experiments. The ways in which grading systems have intertwined themselves with those which ring the entire country hold doubtless utility, but this purely systemic efficiency cannot be mistaken with the social, cultural, and pedagogical efficiency education reformer seek. Public education cannot begin to approach its ideals of socioeconomic empowerment nor systemic objectivity until centuries of pre-conceptions and blunders are re-examined and replaced.

Notes (Original)

1. Hess's article, "What Many Advocates -and Critics - Get Wrong About 'Equitable Grading'" offers a direct discussion between Feldman and himself, and great elaboration on the merits of equity-based grading as a micro-level reform. My own middle and high school district adopted equity-based grading reform to initial confusion and later acceptance by students and parents alike – it is not a bad idea, just missing the most crucial macro-level marks.
2. Finkelstein's essay, "Dollars and Dreams: Classrooms as Fictitious Message Systems, 1790-1930" offers incredible insight into the ulterior motives of reformers and how often their efforts are the results of unreasonable projection of ideals. Also relevant to late 19th century reform was an analysis of how the rural education system that Horace Mann grew up in informed his views for public education.
3. In his article, "Old Ideas, Not New Ones, Are the Key To Education – And Democracy", Derek Black explains the federal government's hand in this boom: "As a condition for rejoining the Union after the war, Congress forced Southern states to rewrite their constitutions to include the right to education. Northern states soon followed suit. A constitutional guarantee of education became the new norm among states: No state would ever again enter the Union without guaranteeing education in its constitution". An interesting piece of history which further illustrates just how crucial federal legislation was towards accomplishing modern levels of educational attainment even if most decisions are handled at the state level.
4. In Button and Provenzo's book, History of Education and Culture in America, they argue that Jefferson's 1779 "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" was defeated due to "cost and class interests" within the House of Burgesses (68). As well, later successful legislation which allotted space and funds for the building of public schools such as the Land Ordinance of 1787 – acclaimed by Black and Jennings – were routinely abused by states where "money received for them was not always used for the intended purpose", instead going towards other public works (79). It cannot be understated just how much financial interests and logistics conflicted with the monumental undertaking of establishing free mass public education.
5. Richard Lakes' article "The Neoliberal Rhetoric of Workforce Readiness" offers in-depth critique of "A Nation at Risk" and how it grew and encompassed many of the sins of neoliberalism. The article's most prescient claim was that "neoliberal discourse of monolithic college attainment and lock-step entrance into professional occupations is misguided and misleading; the future of work is in the lower-paying service economy", and that globalization and natural products of the market itself create many of the issues reformers promised accountability-based education could fix.
6. All three of these authors offer insight into the racist underbelly of accountability-based education reform of the recent decades. "Backlash Pedagogy: Language and Culture and the Politics of Reform" by Gutierrez and others explores how "race-blind" policies are used as cover to strip marginalized communities of the educational services which are proven to cover their deficits and build cultural community. "Confronting the Marginalization of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy" by Sleeter offers insight into the critical pedagogy developed post-segregation and how current policies do not just remove it but try to replace it with hollow imitations of cultural sensitivity. And in chapter seven of her book, "Choice: The Story of an Idea", Ravitch explains the roots of the voucher system and "school choice" within anti-integration efforts in the south.

Site Notes

1. Studies say you should define academic terms used in your essay instead of just assuming people can read your mind. Neoliberalism is a late 20th century political and economic strategy based around privatizing as much of people's lives as possible to be brief. In relation to schools, it's the idea that this public institution should be able to run self-sustainingly like a for-profit business rather than being actively invested into by the government. This term was thrown around so much in the last few weeks of my semester I forgot its not a universal term, and it became crucial to my thesis.
2. This whole essay actually began with me researching the Founding Fathers' plans for public education, because I naievely believed that they simply implemented it then and there and I would follow a sane journey to the current day public school. That is where my foot slipped into the rabbit hole, these idiots quickly became the least important part of the picture.

Works Cited

• Black, Derek W. "Old Ideas, Not New Ones, Are the Key to Education -- And Democracy." Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 102, no. 5, Feb. 2021, pp. 38–41.
• Blad, Evie. "As They Revamp Grading, Districts Try to Improve Consistency, Prevent Inflation." Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/consistency-vs-grade-inflation-a-tough-balancing-act-for-districts/2024/02.
• Button, H. W., and Eugene F. Provenzo. History of Education and Culture in America. 2. ed, Prentice-Hall, 1989.
• Finkelstein, Barbara. "Dollars and Dreams: Classrooms as Fictitious Message Systems, 1790-1930." History of Education Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 4, 1991, pp. 463–87. https://doi.org/10.2307/368169.
• Founders Online: 79. A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, 18 Jun ... . University of Virginia Press, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-02-02-0132-0004-0079.
• "Gen Z Students Often Beg for Grade Changes; 8 in 10 Educators Give In." Intelligent, https://www.intelligent.com/gen-z-students-often-beg-for-grade-changes-8-in-10-educators-give-in/.
• Gutirrez, Kris D., et al. "Backlash Pedagogy: Language and Culture and the Politics of Reform." Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, vol. 24, no. 4, Jan. 2002, pp. 335–51. , https://doi.org/10.1080/10714410214744.
• Hess, Frederick. "Grade Inflation Is Not A Victimless Crime." Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2023/09/05/grade-inflation-is-not-a-victimless-crime/.
• Hess, Rick. "What Many Advocates—and Critics—Get Wrong About ‘Equitable Grading.'" Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-what-many-advocates-and-critics-get-wrong-about-equitable-grading/2024/01.
• Jennings, Jack. "Get the Federal Government out of Education? That Wasn't the Founding Fathers' Vision". Center on Education Policy, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED518386.
• Klein, Alyson. "No Child Left Behind: An Overview." Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/no-child-left-behind-an-overview/2015/04.
• Klein, Alyson. "The Every Student Succeeds Act: An ESSA Overview." Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/the-every-student-succeeds-act-an-essa-overview/2016/03.
• Lakes, Richard D.. "The Neoliberal Rhetoric of Workforce Readiness." The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 6, (2008). https://www.jceps.com/wp-content/uploads/PDFs/06-1-13.pdf.
• Najarro, Ileana. "Grades and Standardized Test Scores Aren't Matching Up. Here's Why." Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/grades-and-standardized-test-scores-arent-matching-up-heres-why/2024/10,
• Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Basic Books, 2010.
• Schneider, Jack, and Ethan Hutt. "Making the Grade: A History of the A-F Marking Scheme." Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, Apr. 2014, pp. 201–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2013.790480.
• Sleeter, Christine E. "Confronting the Marginalization of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy." Urban Education, vol. 47, no. 3, May 2012, pp. 562–84. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042085911431472.
• Stone, Matthew. "What Is Standards-Based Grading, and How Does It Work?" Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/what-is-standards-based-grading-and-how-does-it-work/2024/09.
• Tocci, Charles. "An Immanent Machine: Reconsidering Grades, Historical and Present." Educational Philosophy & Theory, vol. 42, no. 7, Oct. 2010, pp. 762–78. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2008.00440.x.

It is gross understatement to say that the U.S. bares a deeply complicated relationship with the peoples indigenous to the lands it now claims as its own. For much of the country's history, that relationship was defined by ethnocentric antagonism towards Native Americans with rhetoric ranging from patronizing to downright genocidal, but in recent times, the image of native peoples has softened. Now in mainstream U.S. society, there is a melancholic reverence for Native Americans and the crimes committed against them, seen in everything from movies like Dances With Wolves (1990) to federal recognition of the Indigenous People's Day ("A Proclamation on Indigenous Peoples' Day, 2021"). Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the U.S. environmentalist movements, which often looks towards surviving Native American practices and wisdom to form new strategies for conserving the natural world and reversing the harm done to it. This new image is seen as progressive and liberating by U.S. activists and Native Americans alike, but in the end, the image was still created by and for the white American imagination. In this essay, I will demonstrate how the seemingly progressive fascination with Native Americans as spiritual naturalists and perfect stewards of U.S. land is a centuries old myth which continues to harm Native Americans and white movements.

It is important to understand where popular belief about Native Americans, both positive and negative, stem from to see how they borrow from the same problematic roots. No misguided belief is more prevalent in western understanding of indigenous peoples than the "Pristine Myth" – that the pre-Columbian Americas were a land of bountiful natural beauty hardly touched by human hands (Mann 5). When Columbus and other European explorers first set foot in the Americas, they fancifully described it as a natural paradise and undermined the way of life of the native inhabitants, which was later bolstered by 18th and 19th century expeditions into the continent's interior (Denevan 379). But from the beginning this view was complicated by conflicting expeditions in the South by Hernando De Soto in 1539 and Sieur La Salle in 1682 (Mann 108), such as remnants of monumental architecture around the Mississippi river (285) and seemingly "wild" forests having remarkably clear passageways (Denevan 371). These discrepancies were the remnants of the chilling truth that many Native Americans died at presumed rates of around 95% due to a wave of European diseases which preceded the explorers themselves (Mann 110). As Mann states, "the first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated" (103), creating the idea of an eternally emptied land. An assumed insignificance of the indigenous cultures ignored hints of the truth for centuries in academia and popular belief.

The scientific legitimization of the simple, naturalist, child-like American Indian is to be blamed on what Charles Mann dubs, "Holmberg's Mistake", based on a misunderstanding anthropologist Allen Holmberg made of a Native South American people, but which he applied to the entire hemisphere (Mann 9). Finding the Sirionó people after very recent devastation from ethnic displacement and disease (Mann 10), Holmberg observed the survivors struggling to live in the wilderness with little of their culture still intact, and thus concluded that they were "among the most culturally backward peoples of the world" (Qtd. in Mann 8). Unlike other historians who used this assumed inferiority to justify further abuse, Holmberg was invested in attempts to help the Sirionó and alleviate poverty (9), but at the same time, spread a myth that utterly belittled them and complicated understanding of their history and sovereignty. Misunderstanding of Native Americans does not always have to be done in a malicious light, ethnocentrism can sometimes take the form of paternalistic conceit towards a seemingly helpless people.

The myth of a pristine wilderness full of wild people combined with a paternalistic, ethnocentric interest in charity towards Native Americans pervades seemingly pro-indigenous movements throughout U.S. history. In the 19th and 20th century many "Indian Boarding Schools" were created with an at-the-time progressive goal to "kill the Indian in him, and save the man" (Pratt), but later in the 20th century, American progressives began looking to learn from Native American cultures rather than destroy it. In the 1980s and 90s, a storm of controversy erupted around the building of an observatory atop Arizona's Mt. Graham. It was originally only protested by environmentalists, but eventually Native Americans such as Apache spokesmen, Ola Cassadore Davis became involved. In his book, Killing the White Man's Indian, Fergus Bordewich examined how she and the movement avidly spread the myth that "as the original environmentalists, so a certain type of popular thinking goes, Indians everywhere have always lived in a state of unchanging and profound communion with nature" (210). The Native American's light touch on nature became a belief in spiritual oneness with it, allowing Davis and the movement to make claims unfounded in anthropology (206) or Apache popular understanding (217), about her people's connection to the mountain to halt construction of the telescope. Whether or not there is a cultural basis for this connection, some Apache disavow Davis, such as one man who said, "When I hear non-Indians going on about how this is going to destroy our culture [...] I think what are they talking about? If they really want to help, let them bring $10 million onto the reservation to build youth centers and schools and to fence in our real sacred sites and make them worthy" (Qtd. in Bordewich 238). While the fantasies of Native Americans as mystical stewards attract national attention today, the actual people living day to day between impoverished reservations and a complicated bi-cultural life are far from this image and are hardly helped by its perpetuation.

The Pristine Myth and Holmberg's Mistake are pervasive ideas which even after centuries of research and social movements paint not only how U.S. citizens view Native Americans, but even how some view themselves. A long history of cultural erasure and violence has distanced many people of different races from the truth of the impact and diversity of Native American cultures, and what is most important for those who seek to empower these groups or learn from them is to try and see them as complex peoples, not as less than human or an enlightened monolith.

Works Cited

• "A Proclamation on Indigenous Peoples' Day, 2021." The White House, 8 Oct. 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/10/08/a-proclamation-indigenous-peoples-day-2021/.
  [Archive]
• Bordewich, Fergus M. Killing the White Man's Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century. 1. ed, Doubleday, 1996.
• Denevan, William M. "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492." Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 82, no. 3, 1992, pp. 369–85.
• Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. 2. ed, Vintage Books, 2011.
• Pratt, R.H. "Proceedings of the National Conference or Charities and the Correction". Nineteenth Annual Sessions Held in Denver, Col., 1892.

When one thinks of the legacy of Walt Disney Animation Studios, they likely picture princesses, talking animals, and glamourized medieval fantasy, but to some more familiar with the studio's golden age, this image is accompanied by those of screeching Nazi caricatures and dramatically painted warzones. Disney historians and PR managers alike regularly attempt to separate these films from the studio's animated canon, and to re-contextualize them as artifacts of a time when Disney Studios was "taken over" by the U.S. military. But one film that truly puts that assertion to the test is the 1942 film, Victory Through Air Power -- commissioned by Walt Disney himself and adapted from a military manifesto on the role of the U.S. Air Force in World War II. Though shunted from the prestige of the hyper-visible Disney catalogue, from inception to structure to presentation the film brims with historical and artistic merits that has long been ignored, but which sheds unique light into animation's role as entertainment and sociopolitical tool.

From Snow White, to Fantasia, to Bambi, Disney Animation Studios has always produced films with the mission to legitimize animation as an artistic medium capable of effecting audiences, and Victory Through Air Power is no different. In the wake of World War II, both the U.S. government and Walt Disney saw potential in that effect for military propaganda rather than the studio's usual fantasy fair, with the former commissioning the studio to produce many infamous short films to sow fear, pity, and derision towards the Axis forces – such as "Reason and Emotion" (1943), "Education for Death" (1943), and "Der Fuehrer's Face" (1942)^{( 1 )}. But the latter saw something even grander for the medium after reading the then controversial book by Major Alexander de Seversky which Victory Through Air Power brings to life with his voice and face. Walt Disney stated that, "I felt that the facts of air power contained in this book should reach far beyond the limited audience of the book-reading public" ("Walt Disney's Victory"), seeing a call to action for his studio to create truly impactful military film beyond the slew of gag cartoons of the era^{( 2 )}. Victory Through Air Power exists today as that non-fiction animated adaption Walt Disney envisioned, and one that pushed the boundaries of what kinds of stories animations could tell, as many of the studio's great films did, even if the work would be doomed to obscurity past the fervor of the war effort which inspired it.

Besides its historically sensitive subject, as an adaptation of a non-fiction, argumentative manifesto, the structure and tone of Victory Through Air Power is unlike anything the studio has produced then or since. A military essay replaced a fantasy plotline -- beginning with an animated history of the airplane, before introducing the book's author and his presentations on matters of the European and Pacific front, accompanied by evocative animated visuals. Most familiar to Disney audiences would be the first sequence, opening with a storybook cover and comedically following the blunders and advancements of the airplane. Even in the plane's casual use in World War I things begin lightheartedly, tension building later through more dramatic narration and realistically drawn characters manning the plane's first true weapons. From the inter-war period to World War II, the tone grows from proudly industrious to gravely militaristic, and the animation and narrator parallel the clumsy first flying machines to their successive steel behemoths. An earlier description of a pleasure flight over the English Channel plays over the visualization of the Royal Air Force bombing mainland Europe: "Reaching the other side and being recognized, dropped greetings. And without stopping, returned home safely without mishap" (Dailymotion 14:44). This initially unassuming introduction to the film works perfectly to transition the audiences then and today from the expectations of other parodic wartime shorts to that of Victory Through Air Power's grandiosity. From then on it lends itself, the airplane, and the audience entirely to the authority of the military world and its spokesman in de Seversky, uniquely demonstrating the immense tonal flexibility of animation in matters as dire and previously alien as essay on war.

Direct parallels to Victory Through Air Power's more well-remembered contemporaries in Bambi (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944) further highlight how the film finds unexpected roots within the Disney legacy to bolster its messages. Bambi's revered use of colorful backgrounds to evoke the purity and goodness of nature can be seen in direct opposition to the violent clashes of Victory Through Air Power, but the film borrows from its symbology to paint its scenes. Many visual dichotomies are illustrated between the Allied and Axis powers throughout the film, but most striking of all are the shots which associate decommissioned Allied forces with the solemn and serene natural landscapes, such as the ruined French trenches of the Blitzkrieg (22:53) and U.S. arms shipments (38:23). However, when showcasing the annihilation of Nazi Germany's air fleet by the Royal Air Force (27:11), all that is left in their wake is a wasteland of smoke and twisted metal. Behind the authoritative description of the narrators, the film visually sews a moral fabric into the same instruments of war determined by whether they belong to the audiences' allies or enemies, disarming audiences to de Seversky's later calls for endless funding of military projects. Once inanimate, the film wordlessly argues, the weapons once employed by the audience's allies are pure enough to not scar the land as those of the enemies do; the are as natural as the woodland characters and vistas of Bambi.

Victory Through Air Power's successor, The Three Caballeros, similarly would appear to be a break from the dramatic images of war and jingoism to a colorful celebration of foreign culture. But anyone familiar with the cultural impact of President Roosevelt's 1933 "Good Neighbor Policy" would know that it too was made for the sake of the war effort. Its sister film, Saludos Amigos (1942) better highlights this fact by showing the very government sponsored tour of Latin America the Disney artists went on to inspire the films (Giroux 135), both of which were made to educate the U.S. public on their potential allies to their south. Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros can be viewed as mirrors of the educational aspects and showcased by Victory Through Air Power's, but simply reused to foster amicability rather than fear and hatred.

None of the three films have aged perfectly due to their employment of racial and ethnic caricatures lighthearted and malicious, but the range of caricatures within Victory Through Air Power further bolsters its propagandistic purposes^{( 3 )}. The German on the European front are introduced through mild caricatures at first, but in further discussions of Nazi pursuits are characterized by such harsh but impersonal symbols as an armored gauntlet (28:55) and a spoked, iron wheel (38:44). But in the introduction to the Pacific front – unsurprisingly though the bombing of Pearl Harbor – the audience is immediately met with the familiar caricature of a grinning, slant-eyed Japanese airman (29:17). As well, like the symbol of Germany's wheel used to illustrate the advantages of interior supply lines, Japan's lines are first drawn as a clever reference to the rising sun imperial flag, but over time, morph into snaking shadows grasping the islands of the Pacific, in order to "gorge[...] on this new life blood" (48:05). This visceral demonization of Japan comes to a boil in the final sequence of the film where a bald eagle swoops down from the sky to slay a black octopus with daggers stabbed into its Pacific holdings (57:31). An unequal depiction of the German and Japanese threat creates a twofold effect: to enflame racially motivated resentment, and to dramatize the scale of the Pacific conflict to support de Seversky's argument for drastic investment in the U.S. Air Force. While distant battles of Europe are used as reference, those of the Pacific are given a monumental scope to explain the inefficiencies of previously proposed approaches and stoke racialized righteousness in the propositions of the film.

The details of Victory Through Air Power's proudly motivated inception by Walt Disney, its disarming transitions into a propagandistic lens, and its encroaching use of moralistic and racist visual language to paint the arguments of de Seversky are not in themselves the virtuous accomplishments many wish to associate with the Disney legacy, but they are nonetheless exceptional as they are typical. Propaganda is an insidious art, but it is an art; one that deserves to be disassembled and studied, especially when so brazenly taking cues from less overtly political works. Those tropes which appear in Victory Through Air Power, its wartime contemporaries, and the entire Disney catalogue are all one in the same, and to only acknowledge them when they are being used in an agreeable fashion cuts out chunks of their historic development, as well as making it easier for them to reanimate themselves for modern propagandistic uses. Victory Through Air Power speaks to Disney Animation Studio's expertise in their craft and their tonal range far beyond what they have historically explored, and at the same time, that range dives straight into politically harmful territory that many would rather forget. Though contradictory merits, when taken together, these contexts better inform how the history of the studio, animation, and entertainment can reflect and effect the world around it.

Site Notes

1. This little interjection is all the proof you need to see how over the top I was going on this essay. If I had my way each of these shorts would have had its own comparative paragraph like Bambi and Caballeros. As a compromise I'll leave a small analysis in the footnotes
   ...
   Der Fuehrer's Face is an entirely parodic short with some absolutely stellar gags, coming off as a toned down Looney Tunes gig. But in that it also means it doesn't say all that much besides boo the Nazi's and rah-rah America. Reason and Emotion and Education for Death on the other hand have their own attempts at the parody to PSA transition, but in much sloppier ways. Education for Death is very lopsided, beginning and ending with a darkness surpassing Air Power, but interjecting a full parody cartoon into the middle that is barely relevant to the end. Reason and Emotion hits a transition most paced like Air Power's genius opening, but still trips over an almost comical introduction of Hitler into an otherwise unrelated creative exercise (which most definitely inspired Inside Out). It is really amazing how Victory Through Air Power takes so many clumsy propagandistic tropes of Disney's early shorts and makes them deserving of the feature Disney film title.
2. I never took as much time as I would have liked to lambaste Walter for his jingoism. I wanted to get across how that pride Walt Disney had for so many of his endeavors was no different for this piece of blatant and offensive propaganda, and once again to not put up barriers between the studio's output in and out of wartime because one FEELS wrong. I watched this film in tandem with Bambi and I think that really inspired me to take both these sides of the Disney artists together in stride.
3. I wish I had more time to dig into the use of racist imagery to support the propaganda in this film, as I by no means meant to make light of its shittiness for the sake of some 'artistic vision' - its disgusting but worth understanding. But there was a page limit I had to just barely respect. It really is its own subject in my hands, and I do have plans for a project on racism in Golden Age cartoons as of finishing this year.

Works Cited

• Giroux, Henry A., and Grace Pollock. The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.
• Movies, Disney. "Victory through Air Power 1943 HD - Video Dailymotion." Dailymotion, www.dailymotion.com/video/x6kg32j.
• "Walt Disney's Victory Through Air Power: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Making and Impact of the Film." The Walt Disney Family Museum, www.waltdisney.org/blog/walt-disneys-victory-through-air-power-behind-scenes-look-making-and-impact-film.

For all their fame within the western world, the impact of Greek society upon India would appear to be very negligible, especially in comparison to their successors in the Kushana, Turks, and Mughals. Alexander the Great may be remembered for the extent of his conquest reaching the Indus River, but it was also where he was then forced to retreat (Trautman 58), and later remnant Greek states would eventually be swallowed up by the Kushana. The succeeding Kushana leader Kanishka would become renowned for his patronage of the native Buddhist faith, and later conquests by the Turks and Mughals would lead to such developments as the integration of Persian immigrants and culture into India, and the building of great structures such as the Taj Mahal respectively. The Greek conquest by comparison would seem to be an inconsequential blip in the great history of cultural exchanged between India and the rest of the world, but within the history of Buddhist art emerges subtle yet profound influence upon Indian society.

The most overt remnants of Greek relationships with the Indian culture comes from the Greek separatist Kingdom of Bactria and their fusion of Hellenistic and Indian iconography. Following the death of Alexander the Great, his empire was broken apart with the Asian portion becoming the Seleucid Greeks. In the 3rd century BCE, the satrap of Bactria in present day Afghanistan successfully revolted and separated from the larger empire, re-invading the Indian Punjab which stayed occupied until their replacement by the Kushana nomads in the 1st century BCE (Trautman 66). In these brief centuries, the Greek rulers culturally integrated with the Indian inhabitants, and this marriage reflected in coins baring simultaneously Greek and Indian figures, and the bringing Hellenistic sculptural practices (Trautman 67). This influence would be strongest in the northwest region of Gandhara, but would not have appeared to spread much further into India. As Trautman explains, "Hellenistic sculpture did establish itself in the northwest, but its themes were Indian and usually Buddhist" (67). But even from this modest exchange, are there underlying themes which may have further endured?

One example of this endurance of Hellenistic influence is in the Mahayana Buddhist figure of Vajrapani who bared resemblance to Heracles in a select few representations. The Mahayana tradition of Buddhism is one which emerged in the 2nd century CE during Kushana rule, and unlike its sister tradition, Theravada, it is concerned with figures known as bodhisattvas and devotion to them as idols. Bodhisattvas are "Buddhas-to-be" (Trautman), lesser figures who represent the Buddha's teaching and serve as idols. One of these is the figure of Vajrapani who traveled with the Buddha represented his wrath, as symbolized by the vajra or thunderbolt (Brancaccio 169). His portrayals across the vast domain of the Buddhist world range from that of an unassuming male figure to those of fearsome and fantastical figures, but within Gandhara, there are many depictions of him almost identical to that of Heracles. This is believed to be the result of a common practice of the Greeks combining their pantheons with those of their neighbors and conquered subjects such as the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis who can be found as far as Afghanistan (Hsing 113), and natively in the combination of Greek Fortune with the Buddhist god Hariti (Hsing 118). Unlike what would be assumed of these Indo-Greek traditions however, the association of Vajrapani with Heracles did not stay confined to Gandhara and Central Asia. Even as far as China the iconography of Heracles' lion-skin and his club can be found in depictions of Vajrapani, whose "appearance [...] together suggests that they could not have been coincidentally created by indigenous China" (Hsing 146). Through this small detail, Indo-Greek culture spread throughout the Buddhist world, incidentally, connecting far ends of the Eurasian continent.

The Greek influence in Buddhist tradition may extend even past the figure of Vajrapani to the very tradition of how the Buddha has been depicted. The image of the Buddha as a human figure seated in meditation is associated heavily with the Buddhist faith around the world, but it was not always the focus of Buddhist artwork. Before the 2nd century Buddhist imagery focused on symbols such as the Wheel of Samsara or the Bodhi Tree (Keown 17), and the shift towards depicting him as a human coincided broadly with the compiling of the Buddhacarita, an epic poem of the Buddha's life (Keown 16), and the expansion of Mahayana Buddhism with its focus on devotionalism. Mahayana Buddhism developed this devotional character in large part due to the rise of Hinduism and the exaltation of its principle deities Vishnu and Shiva (Trautman 75), but possibly also the character of Hellenistic cults, as "Mahayana Buddhism evolved during the early centuries of our era, a period when [...] the idea of the Hellenistic god-kingdom had gained popularity throughout the Mediterranean area and far beyond" (Lissner 219). As Lissner further speculates, the lack of idols of worship initially within Buddhism was inline with the traditional belief systems of not just Buddhism, but other religions which did not overly emphasize deities over philosophy (217), and it was in Gandhara – a center for Indo-Greek art – where "artists began to portray [the Buddha] sitting and standing, in relief in the round"(218). It is possible to assume that the character of the popular Mahayana Buddhism and its imagery may have been subtly inspired by the Hellenistic mode of idolatry, exemplified in the relationship between figures like Vajrapani and Heracles, but as well setting the precedent for the practice of Buddhist sculpture ^{( 1 )}.

The fleeting political presence of the Greeks in Northern India may seem cause for dismissal of their influence on the South Asian culture and its dissemination, but they have contributed to its development and Buddhist culture as well, not through imposition of their own but through subtle cultural exchange. These vestiges may only remain fully visible in coinage and a handful of artistic symbols, but it runs deeper as a reminder of the incredible Eurasian diversity which defines Indian culture. Within Mahayana Buddhism, are devotional and idolatrous aspects found within Hellenistic worship combined with the philosophical traditions of Eastern religions, combining characteristics from far ends of the continent.

Site Notes

1. The one book I found on this claim (in my very haphazard research) did not entirely sell me. It had a very speculative and dramatized tone, and was also just an old history book which you always have to be suspect of to me. But I tried to intergrate that speculation into my thesis as responsibly as possible.

Works Cited

• Brancaccio, Pia. The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad: Transformations in Art and Religion. Brill, 2011.
• Hsing, I-Tien, and William G. Growell. Heracles in the East: The Diffusion and Transformation of His Image in the Arts of Central Asia, India, and Medieval China. Princeton University Press Etc., 2005.
• Keown, Damien. Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Lissner, Ivar. The Silent Past: Mysterious and Forgotten Cultures of the World. Cape, 1965.
• Trautmann, Thomas R. India: Brief History of a Civilization. Oxford University Press, 2016.

The Mongolian Empire of the 13th and 14th century, which reigned across the largest land empire throughout history, is not as often remembered for its greatness as is its characterization as a horde or scourge which swept over the lands of Eurasia and left naught but devastation in its wake. Many nations from eastern Europe to Asia who were once ruled by the Mongols only wish to have the periods of occupation remembered as dark ages of suppressed national development, and even as the fault of modern-day shortcomings (Nardo 11). But the fact that so many powers from across such a vast continent can claim to still live in the shadow of the empire's reign centuries later speaks to its breadth, not even to mention what the empire accomplished despite the historical emphasis only on its negative qualities. By analyzing the actions of and reactions to the Mongol Empire's reign in China, Iran, and Russia, its role as a molder of world history becomes clear.

One of the single greatest accomplishments of the Mongol Empire was its establishment of the Silk Road that connected the ends of Eurasia^{( 1 )}, enriching and inspiring those inside and beyond its borders. Under the allied rule of Chinggis Khan's successors in Yuan China and the Il-khanate Iran, trade flourished between the two native cultures, with knowledge, crafts, and people flowing between. From Iran, China received various foods, medical texts, astronomical, and map-making instruments as well as scholars of said practices themselves (Rossabi 71 - 72, 82). And in turn, Iran received reciprocal transfer of similar goods and ideas, as well as staple east Asian exports such as porcelains, paintings and silk (Rossabi 104). Through Iran and the Silk Road, Russians and western Europeans would also be exposed to east Asian culture - the latter for the first time in history - bringing back those coveted Chinese exports as well as the tales of Marco Polo (Rossabi 94). Even after the dissolution of the empire, Chinese and Iranian culture would be enriched by the cultural exchanged between them and inspire trade and exploration from their neighbors. It could even be argued that Christopher Columbus wouldn't have made his historic expedition to the Americas if not for the Silk Road exposing western Europe to the crafts of China, which Columbus sought to re-establish through the Atlantic. The Mongols promoted unprecedented interconnectedness between their subjects' felt centuries after, even on a different continent.

As well as facilitating the exchange of wealth between civilizations, the Mongol khanates invested within their native subjects and preserved cultural institutions. Despite their nomadic traditions of pillaging and abandoning their victims, upon establishing an empire the Mongol rulers understood the importance of building back up what they destroyed. Cities such as Baghdad may have suffered greatly from their sieging, but as Rossabi states, "[...] within a decade or so, travelers again referred to Baghdad as a great commercial center" (57). New cities built by the Mongols such as Sarai, Khara Khorum, Daidu, and Shangdu were also made with both an eye for cosmopolitanism and native preferences. Religious customs were embraced or maintained, such as Khubilai Khan's support of Buddhism and peaceful resolution of conflict with Daosist in 1264 (Rossabi 55), and the Il-Khanate's embrace of its Iranian subjects' Islamic faith under Ghazan Khan. Though the Il-Khanate with its new religiosity would go onto harass its minority faith populations, the Golden Horde khanate would embrace Islam and support the native Orthodox church at the same time (Rossabi 88). Even while maintaining economic and political control over their regions, the Mongols did not seek ethnocentric campaigns of assimilation that hampered cultural development, they more often fostered diversity of culture within and across their borders.

Despite these positives, the Mongols were not perfect, and strife and resentment bred among their subject populations. But ironically those seeds of its downfall benefited those who deposed them and left a more unified identity in its wake. In China, Chinggis Khan and his successor Khubilai Khan unified a once fractured China, but under a repressive hierarchy with the native people below foreign tax collectors and the Mongols themselves. Once the Mongols were dethroned in the region, anxieties over their return bred a unified and long-standing Ming Dynasty (Rossabi 123). Similarly in Russia, ill will towards them bolstered a national identity, having "[...] set the foundation for the concept of unity and for the ensuing Muscovite state [...]" (Rossabi 120), and they were challenged by the very Orthodox church which they preserved through tax exemptions. Even in a cynical reading of Mongol reign of Iran, "Under their harsh stimulus, a national conscious emerged [...]" (Saunders 146). As Saunders states: "The Islam that conquered the Mongols in the West, as exemplified by the decisive conversions of Ghazan in 1296 and Ozbeg in 1312, was a Persianized Islam [...]" (184), an example of how long-standing national and ethnic identities of those who shun Mongol reign today can be traced back to their legacy. Even in their failures, the sheer historic impact of Mongolian rule across Eurasia cannot be understated^{( 2 )}, as many of their greatest critics would likely not exist as they do today had it not been for their struggles under the empire.

In conclusion, the Mongolian Empire in its inter-khanate and domestic policies – successful and failed – left an undeniable mark on the pages of world history. From their previous vassals still grappling with the vestiges of their subjugation, to western European and American cultures shaped by the butterfly effect of trade and exploration, the Mongol Empire's legacy can still be felt. Even as the wider world endeavors to reject the Mongols wholesale for their negative attributes, their history has been remembered favorably within the heartland itself. "[Chinggis Khan's] empire brought a stability to the Mongol peoples and to Central Asia that had never before existed. His unification of the Mongol tribes forged a new national identity among them that still exists in modern times. It is this accomplishment that gives him the title of father of Mongolia" (Behnke 127). It is ignorant to regard the Mongol Empire as anything less than one of the greatest and most impactful empires of world history, the native Mongols, their neighbors, and distant cultures of the world experienced anything but a dark age in lieu of their reign.

Site Notes

1. My history teacher informed me in grading that the Silk Road was a thing long before the Mongols, they just built upon it. I knew that when I wrote this line... not sure why I worded it like this.
2. Would just like to overemphasize this - The Mongols are not great because their failures caused change, the fact they did to this extent is proof of their impact in these culture's histories, not just as negative footnotes or setbacks. We often consider conflicts between nations as important milestones of development, but the Mongol threats rarely get this respect from these cultures.

Works Cited

• Behnke, Alison. The Conquests of Genghis Khan. Twenty-First Century Books, 2014.
• Nardo, Don. Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Lucent Books, 2010.
• Rossabi, Morris. The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Saunders, J. J. The History of the Mongol Conquests. Routledge, 2023.