The notion of a flat Earth initially resurfaced in the s as a backlash to scientific progress, especially among those who wished to return to biblical literalism. Perhaps the most famous proponent was the British writer Samuel Rowbotham — The International Flat Earth Research Society, which was set up in by Samuel Shenton, a signwriter living in Dover, UK, was regarded by many people as merely a symbol of British eccentricity — amusing and of little consequence.
But in the early s, with the Internet now a well-established vehicle for off-beat views, the idea began to bubble up again, mostly in the US. Discussions sprouted in online forums, the Flat Earth Society was relaunched in October and the annual flat-Earth conference began in earnest. As with any fringe movement there are disagreements and several different flat-Earth models exist to choose from.
Others suggest our flat planet and its atmosphere are encased in a huge, hemispherical snow globe from which nothing can fall off the edges. To account for night and day, most flat-Earthers think the Sun moves in circles around the North Pole, with its light acting like a spotlight.
Physicists will scoff at these ideas, but the worrying thing is that they are spreading rapidly and gaining proponents outside America too. Such efforts are important. This shocking number has been attributed to a resurgent evangelical Christian church, but there are also signs that religious fundamentalism is spreading these ideas in Islamic countries too.
In the website Jeune-Afrique reported that a geology student in Tunisia was intending to submit a PhD defending her work on a flat-Earth model. It would be easy to dismiss flat-Earthers as simply being misguided due to a lack of education. Landrum thinks this conspiracy mentality is linked to science denial and a susceptibility to believing deceptive claims on social media Politics and the Life Sciences 38 Their lack of trust in authority includes not just scientists but scientific bodies such as NASA, all of whom they think are part of a massive conspiracy to prevent the flat-Earth truth being revealed.
McIntyre adds that the flat-Earthers he interacted with each believed a selection of conspiracy theories, including that governments control the weather and that chem-trails from aeroplanes consist of chemical or biological agents.
But the fact remains that the videos are still on its platform. After all, their ideas are all generally based on fallacies and misunderstanding of science. But even without the visual confirmation of pictures taken from space, many of the arguments used by flat-Earth proponents can be easily dismissed with trigonometry or basic physical laws.
Another phenomenon that proves the Earth is a spinning globe is the Coriolis force, which acts perpendicular to the direction of motion of a spinning mass. This force leads to cylones swirling clockwise in the southern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere; through the direction of winds, it also impacts ocean currents. Eight hundred kilometers times 50 is 40, kilometers: so that must be the circumference of the Earth.
This is the right answer. With them he deduced the circumference of the Earth with an error of only a few percent, a remarkable achievement for 2, years ago. He was the first person to accurately measure the size of the planet.
To help students frame this problem more sharply—as well as to begin revealing the core historiographic debate—students read selections from the work of two contemporary scholars, Daniel Boorstin and Stephen Jay Gould see Box If not, when did the story of the flat earth arise?
Who promoted that account? Why would people tell stories about the flat earth if the stories were not supported by evidence? What historical accounts explain European exploration of the Americas? How have historians changed those accounts over time? In thus problematizing the Columbian account and framing these questions, I sharpened the larger historiographic questions we were using to structure the entire course and the specific curricular objectives for the unit under study.
In investigating these questions and analyzing the shifting and competing interpretations of exploration and explorers, high school history students also worked toward mastering the key content objectives for this unit of history.
For example, while grappling with issues related to the nature of historical interpretation and knowledge, students had to study the context for and impact of European exploration from a number of perspectives. Historical knowledge—facts, concepts, and processes—shaped almost every feature of the unit, from the framing of the problem through the questions we employed during discussions. Students learned historical facts in the context of these large historical questions, and once they understood the questions, they saw they could not answer them without factual knowledge.
The old and false distinction between facts and interpretations or between content and process collapses here. How can students learn about the accounts of the past—the growth of the flat-earth story, for example—without studying the knowledge and ideas of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europeans, the features of the waning Middle Ages, the emerging renaissance, tensions between the orthodoxy of the church and new scientific ideas, or the new mercantile impulses that promulgated reasonable risks in the name of profit?
In trying to understand how. Learning historical content, though, was not the only factor that shaped the instruction. But by making visible what students thought, I was able to use their ideas to design subsequent instruction and thus encourage them to use historical evidence to question or support their ideas.
The activities discussed above asked students to juxtapose their understanding against historical evidence or established historical accounts. In establishing the unit problem, we created a place for students to consider the relationship among their own historical interpretations of the events, those of other historians, and historical evidence. Having formed historical problems and with sources now in hand, we might say that the students were doing history. However, we are cautioned by How People Learn and by scholarship on the challenges novices face in employing expert thinking to look beyond the trappings of the activity and consider the supports students may need to use the problems and resources effectively as they study history.
In emphasizing the need to en-. Instead the leaders of orthodox Christendom built a grand barrier against the progress of knowledge about the earth. Christian geographers in the Middle Ages spent their energies embroidering a neat, theologically appealing picture of what was already known, or what was supposed to be known…. It is easier to recount what happened than to explain satisfactorily how it happened or why.
Then we observe a Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia, which afflicted the continent from A. During those centuries Christian faith and dogma suppressed the useful image of the world that had been so slowly, so painfully, and so scrupulously drawn by ancient geographers….
We have no lack of evidence of what the medieval Christian geographers thought. More than six hundred mappae mundi, maps of the world, survive from the Middle Ages…. What was surprising was the Great Interruption. All people have wanted to believe themselves at the center. But after the accumulated advances of classical geography, it required amnesiac effort to ignore the growing mass of knowledge and retreat into a world of faith and caricature….
The Great Interruption of geography we are about to describe was a … remarkable act of retreat. Christian geography had become a cosmic enterprise, more interested in everyplace than in anyplace, more concerned with faith than with facts. Cosmos-makers confirmed Scripture with their graphics, but these were no use to a sea captain delivering a cargo of olive oil from Naples to Alexandria…. History teachers, curriculum designers, and assessment architects need to be cautious when attempting to transplant activities from a community of history experts to a body of student novices.
Historical tasks embedded. Dramatic to be sure, but entirely fictitious. This commission, composed of both clerical and lay advisers, did meet, at Salamanca among other places. Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas affirmed roundness via Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, as did the greatest scientists of later medieval times, including John Buriden and Nicholas Oresme Experts differ from novices, as How People Learn explains, and this is an important point for history teachers to bear in mind.
They think differently about text, sources, argument, significance, and the structure of historical knowledge. Initially, students typically resist the transplanted activity, or the culture of. Take, for example, the reading of primary sources—an intellectual activity that now appears to be synonymous with historical thinking in U.
Using primary sources as historians do involves more than just finding information in sources; it requires that students pay attention to features within and outside of the text, such as who wrote the source, when was it created, in what circumstances and context, with what language, and for what reasons.
Working with these questions in mind is challenging for high school students, a challenge not met merely by giving them the chance to use primary sources in grappling with a historical question. Though the students and I had established a good historiographic problem using competing sources, the students still needed support in doing more sophisticated reading and thinking.
Believing, as Bruner 17 argues, that teachers can teach any subject to anybody at any age in some form that is honest, I found, even as a veteran history teacher, that putting historical work into honest and appropriate form for my students was an ongoing challenge. History teachers regularly face the dilemma of reducing the challenge of the historical tasks they ask students to tackle or simply moving on, leaving behind or frustrating a number of students.
Instead of making such a choice, teachers can keep the intellectual work challenging for all their students by paying careful attention to the design and use of history-specific cognitive tools to help students work beyond their level of competence. The underlying idea is that with history-specific social assistance, history students can exhibit many more competencies than they could independently, and through history-specific.
What do I mean by history-specific tools and social assistance? Here I refer to visual prompts, linguistic devices, discourse, and conceptual strategies that help students learn content, analyze sources, frame historical problems, corroborate evidence, determine significance, or build historical arguments. In short, these cognitive tools help students engage in sophisticated historical thinking. I demonstrated an example of a history-specific cognitive tool earlier in this chapter in my discussion of opening activities that helped students distinguish between history-as-event and history-as-account.
Later work on the flat-earth question revealed that students did not fully understand and were not regularly applying these distinctions on their own. In other words, they had not internalized these differences. However, the linguistic supports and my repeated reminders continued to help students use these distinctions in their studies. With continued use, students began to employ the differences between the past and stories about the past more effectively and without prompting.
Eventually, our need to refer to the constructed terms, H ev and H ac , declined. Typically by the end of the first semester, though still regularly using the ideas behind the terms, we were using the terms only occasionally. Reading of primary sources was another area in which specially created history-specific tools helped students engage in more sophisticated thinking.
Here I established a group reading procedure to assist students in analyzing, contextualizing, sourcing, and corroborating historical material. By modifying reciprocal teaching procedures 20 to reflect the strategies historians use when reading primary sources, I established reading procedures that enabled a group of students to read and question sources together in ways they did not on their own.
Some students posed questions reflected in general reading strategies and asked classmates to identify confusing language, define difficult words, or summarize key points. Thus, having equipped each student with a particular set of questions to ask classmates, we reread the accounts of Columbus and the flat earth Box :. Does anyone have any questions for their classmates about these sources? Who wants to begin? Do you want someone to summarize all the stories, all the excerpts?
Or, maybe an aspect of the stories? What do all of these stories say about the kind of person Columbus was? Do they have [some] agreement … with each other about him? The journal writing gave students time to work out an answer informally on paper before publicly talking about their ideas. After a few minutes of writing time, the students had worked out more-detailed pictures of Columbus as represented in the accounts. For example, Ellen wrote:.
In these stories, Columbus appears to be smart. He is a real individual and pretty brave. Everyone else was just following the ideas of the day and he was a protester, a rebel against everyone else. These glorify him. Does anyone notice the years that these were written? About how old are these accounts? They were written in and So some of them are about years old and others are about years old.
Actually, I was wondering if something was happening then that made Columbus and this story popular. Did historians discover something new about Columbus in the s? Yeah, but Washington Irving wrote about the headless horseman. Was he a historian? And he wrote stories for kids. Were these taken from books for young kids? Maybe that is why they tell such stories about Columbus, like he was some big hero? As they asked questions, classmates returned to the documents, made journal entries, and discussed their answers.
And students raised a number of questions that could not be. They offered conjectures and speculations that we would explore through later resources, including primary sources, secondary sources, textbooks, and lectures. This reading activity was initially awkward and time-consuming with its role assignments, complex questioning, journaling, and discussion. In this example, the division of labor occurred along the lines of thinking needed to read and analyze a historical text.
I used this structured reading and discussion activity because I did not initially expect individual students to be capable of performing a complete, complex historical analysis of a document or a document set. Paradoxically, however, from the beginning students needed to do such analysis to work on the historical and instructional tasks I assigned.
Rather than lower disciplinary standards or allow novices merely to mimic experts, we used this reading strategy to enable students—as a group—to participate in this complex, disciplinary activity. Initially, the designed cognitive tools e. In a sense, teachers work to build a history-specific culture that, through its patterns of interactions, instructional tasks, and artifacts, assists students in thinking historically for more examples see Bain, In designing this environment, teachers try to make the key features of expert historical thought accessible for students to use as needed—during class discussion or while working in groups, at home, or on exams.
Once able to get around without them, people cast the crutches aside. So it has been with the history-specific tools in my classroom. When that happens, students. On the other hand, the supports remain available when students need assistance. In such an environment, the lecture and textbook acquire new meaning.
Given our focus on historical accounts, students start to use and see lectures and textbooks as examples of historical accounts. Students can apply the same sets of questions to the textbook and to my lectures that they do to other historical accounts and sources.
What else corroborates this account? What shaped it? Also, we can reconsider texts and lectures as possible suports—history-specific cognitive tools—to help students think historically, and not just as vehicles to transmit information. Teachers can design and use lectures and textbooks strategically to help students frame or reframe historiographic problems; situate their work in larger contexts; see interpretations that might support, extend, or contest their emerging views; work more efficiently with contradictions within and among sources; and encounter explanations and sources that, because of time, availability, or skill, students would not be able to use.
For example, consider again the problem my students confronted once they began to allow the possibility that fifteenth-century Europeans might not have thought the earth was flat or that people had not always told that historical story. The students raised deep, rich, and complex historical questions:.
Have the stories about Columbus changed since ? If so, in what ways did they change? What factors explain the shifting views about Columbus? Why did the story change? Does it matter which view or interpretation people hold about the story? The pride and excitement I derived from their questions was tempered by a recognition of how limited were our time and resources.
Realistically, where would my students go to flesh out the contours of this historical problem and find the details to give it meaning?
Would their textbook give the evidence needed to move forward? Had the primary sources I provided given students the material necessary to paint the larger historical picture, resolve their confusions, or answer their questions? The students needed help organizing their ideas, putting sources and evidence within a larger temporal context, understanding discrepant sources, and expanding both the facts and interpretations at hand.
If my students were going to do more than ask powerful questions, they needed some assistance. Therefore, I designed a lecture specifically to help students consider temporal shifts in the way people have regarded the Columbian story, questions that emerged after students had encountered discrepant accounts of the story. I began the lecture by asking students to write five dates in their journals—, , , , and —and then to predict how people living in the colonies and later in the United States marked the th, th, th, th, and th anniversary of the Columbian voyages.
After the students had written their predictions in their journals and spent a few minutes talking about what they expected and why, I provided them with historical information about the changing and shifting nature of the Columbian story over the past years. For example, in and , the European colonists and Native Americans made almost no acknowledgment of the centennial and bicentennial of the Columbian voyages. Columbia as a symbol took shape during this era, and people across the continent used one form of Columbus or another to name new cities and capitals.
By , the celebration of Columbianism was in full swing. Things had changed quite significantly by In crafting this lecture, I also selected supporting documents and texts as handouts. We treated the lecture as a secondary source, as a historical account constructed by the history teacher that other historians—i. When my high school students began to study history, they tended to view the subject as a fixed entity, a body of facts that historians retrieved and placed in textbooks or in the minds of history teachers for students to memorize.
The purpose of history, if it had one, was to somehow inoculate students from repeating past errors. The process of learning history was straightforward and, while not always exciting, relatively simple. Ironically, when I first entered a school to become a history teacher over 30 years ago, I held a similar view, often supported by my education and history courses—that teaching history was relatively straightforward and, while not always exciting, relatively simple.
I no longer hold such innocent and naive views of learning or teaching history, and I try to disabuse my students of these views as well. As this chapter has shown, learning and teaching history demands complex thinking by both teachers and students. It centers around interesting, generative, and organizing problems; critical weighing of evidence and accounts; suspension of our views to understand those of others; use of facts, concepts, and interpretations to make judgments; development of warrants for those judgments; and later, if the evidence persuades, changes in our views and judgments.
Helping students develop such historical literacy requires that history teachers expand their understanding of history learning, a task supported by the ideas found in How People Learn and the emerging scholarship on historical thinking. This view of learning avoids the false dichotomies that have defined and hindered so many past attempts to improve history instruction.
It helps teachers go beyond facile either—or choices to show that traditional methods, such as lectures, can be. And of the 40 people they asked, 39 of them said, I saw it recommended to me on YouTube. And the faulty of said, my son saw it, recommended to him on YouTube and pass it along to me. So it's what's appearing in that right-hand bar of up next on YouTube. So I think when there were people who were looking for moon landing denial videos, YouTube, once these Flat earth videos started getting out there and started having a sensationalist kind of style, so it'd have a sensationalist title, uh, there'd be people, people would come and watch it because they believed it.
Some people watch it cause they thought it was silly. Some people watched it because they wanted to scrutinize it on a point by point basis and watch it five times in a row to really get to the grips of every single argument.
So they could write an article about how wrong it is. YouTube at the time said that it didn't say there's three distinct audiences with three distinct agendas.
It says there's one audience of three times the size. So this is a pretty good video because loads of people are watching this all the way to the end. And so once YouTube saw that it started recommending it to people.
So you'd be watching a video about moon landing denial and YouTube would say, I think someone who's a bit into moon landing denial might also be into the flat earth theory and it would float it there as a suggestion. And if people clicked it, that solidified that link a little bit and the more people clicked it, the more that became solidified. And I think that's how a lot of people find their way in. And then it's because it became such a solid link.
I think it even went beyond people who are already looking for conspiracy theory, uh, ideas. Um, you had people who'd be looking for videos of the, of the earth from space and they might see this video and then then they might watch it. And then that kind of strengthens those relationships.
So YouTube had this kind of arguably accidental, I don't think they were deliberately doing it, but had this algorithm that was recommending sensationalist and extreme ideas regularly to people who were searching for things that weren't necessarily about that. And I think that did serve as a, as a recruitment tool and those two videos and the responses to those, those two videos and video series from Mark Sergeant, Eric Dubay, that really ignited a movement because I think they came around with just the right time or the wrong time in our perspective, uh, that it captured, uh, that YouTube algorithm in full flow.
Uh, so what do just, I'm interested specifically in the videos you say of, uh, the earth from space or the moon. What's the response? Those are all faked? Yeah, pretty much. So, uh, I, I've, I've had lots of conversation with flat earthers and when you bring up those visual pieces of evidence, they'll say, well come on, you can't trust visual evidence. And they say photographs for example, you show me a photograph from of the, of the earth from space.
I'll show you a composite job, I'll show you a Photoshop job, I'll show you a hoax. And they'll say that NASA even admits that those four photographs are composites, is that, will they are composites. But even if they are, composites, they're composites of what their comes into photos taken from space. It's just they're taken with a camera that isn't far enough away to get the entire earth and in one goal.
But you're going to see snapshots of the earth and then you come, you compose those together because you've got a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object. You're going to have to sort of stitch those together a little bit, but just cause it's a composite, it's gotta be it composed of something you're saying.
It's a composite doesn't throw out the fact that this is actually a genuine photo as well. Um, and so they will talk a lot about how, uh, we can't trust NASA. That's a big, big part of it. Really, really fun. Um, and I went there not to tell them they're wrong and not to be superior, but to really understand what brings people to that movement.
NASA is a tool of the government, a tool of the Illuminati, a tool of the new world order. Um, they rely on their budgets so they need to keep that money rolling in, which is why they keep churning out material that suggest the world is round. Uh, and they have all sorts of convoluted uh, explanations as to why that is.
Uh, one of my favorite explanations was one of the speakers at the flat earth convention an Argentinian conspiracy theorist who said, we know for a fact that the UN is a front for the one world order because if you look at the Spanish name for the UN, it is the O N U and if you read that backwards it's U N O which is Spanish for one.
And therefore we know for a fact the UN is a, a front for the one world order because the reverse name of it in Spanish is Spanish for one. And my friend I was at the convention with leftover and said does he realize that UN is already French for one?
MM: It is. And so they'll see that and they'll say, well, look at the, uh, look at the image, the logo of the U N and you have the flat earth, you have the Arctic circle in the middle, you have all the continents around it. And so let's say, why would the UN have the flat earth as their local?
If it isn't true that the world is flat? And I had this conversation with the flat earther and I said, well, what else would you want the UN's logo to be? And it's, well you could, if the earth is really round, you'd show it from the side. Okay, but then which countries are you not putting on? Do you want to show America and not Europe?
Do you want to show the Northern hemisphere and not show Australia? And so he said, well, okay, fine. So you show up from the top. But if that's the case, why isn't that Antarctica on the UN's logo, it's missing. And his idea for that is because Antarctica is either the disk around the edge or it's where the dome that surrounds the world is.
And I said, well, Antarctica isn't a nation. This is the United nations. It isn't a nation. You know, there's good reasons. If you, if you sort of sense check these ideas, but if you're presented them in a way that says the U N is a front for the Illuminati and the one world order, and here's proof, look at their logo, therefore flat and you're not, then encouraged to sense check your ideas to uh, to look for ways to doubt yourself, to look for ways to disprove your theories rather than looking for evidence that proves them.
You end up in a place where all you're doing is confirming your ideas further and further and further. And this is what we see. We see it in our lives all the time and we're guilty of it all the time.
But I think we're guilty of this. This is a movement that's specifically guilty of it. SM: Does Heliocentrism hold and the other planets are flat disks or something as well or are they?
MM: yeah, it depends on who you talk. So it's not just that there's the disk version and the infinite plane version. There's actually lots of, there's a myriad of different versions of the, the flat earth and the universe beyond it.
So some will believe that we're flat. But the universe around it is pretty much as is, that's quite a niche belief in the flat earth world. Um, some believe that, uh, many believe the sun isn't very far away, so it's very hard to, to uh, justify the solar system as conventional science would have it with a flat earth belief, especially a flat earth belief that may be rooted in creationism and therefore has this kind of earth as the center of everything kind of way.
And you know, the sun was created on, on one of the days after the earth, it was already created. And so some of that belief that instead of the sun being millions and millions of miles away, it's actually quite nearby and much smaller. And that's how they account for time differences across, uh, across the world. How you account for seasons, it's just that you're further away from the sun at that point. Um, others believe that the world is a disk, but it's under a dome.
In a YouTube video of the exchange , Thompson, founder of the Official Flat Earth and Globe Discussion page, shouted that he had proof the Earth is flat — apparently saying an astronaut drowning was that proof — and that NASA is "lying.
Earth's day and night cycle is explained by positing that the sun and moon are spheres measuring 32 miles 51 kilometers that move in circles 3, miles 4, km above the plane of the Earth. Stars, they say, move in a plane 3, miles up. Like spotlights, these celestial spheres illuminate different portions of the planet in a hour cycle.
Flat-earthers believe there must also be an invisible "antimoon" that obscures the moon during lunar eclipses. Furthermore, Earth's gravity is an illusion, they say. Objects do not accelerate downward; instead, the disc of Earth accelerates upward at 32 feet per second squared 9. Currently, there is disagreement among flat-Earthers about whether or not Einstein's theory of relativity permits Earth to accelerate upward indefinitely without the planet eventually surpassing the speed of light.
Einstein's laws apparently still hold in this alternate version of reality. As for what lies underneath the disc of Earth, this is unknown, but most flat-earthers believe it is composed of "rocks.
Then, there's the conspiracy theory: Flat-earthers believe photos of the globe are photoshopped; GPS devices are rigged to make airplane pilots think they are flying in straight lines around a sphere when they are actually flying in circles above a disc. The motive for world governments' concealment of the true shape of the Earth has not been ascertained, but flat-earthers believe it is probably financial.
Flat-earth believers are not relegated to the hidden corners of the universe: Plenty of celebs have been quite vocal with their beliefs. For instance, on Jan.
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