Billy Joel's History Lesson

Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom Brando, The King and 1, and The Catcher in the Rye Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye Adler aside, Joel's cultural syntax does have a kind of logic, insofar as the song's references, with some predictability, include both important historical developments, often political and scientific, and also significant popular cultural emergences (television, Brando, "Rock around the Clock," Disneyland). In review, the assignment entailed this process: first, students were guided through a tour of the university library (a nice melding of standard first-year English classes), followed by one class hour devoted to bibliographical research methods, both in hard-bound and computer indexes. [...]those who chose Challenger often describe it in personal, emotional terms.) In addition, their comments about these events were almost uniformly foreboding or gloomy. [...]I found nothing about the project's content or its implementation in the public schools.