On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on the German Empire. For Americans, that was the beginning of World War I, even though the war had been going on for years in Europe. That set up a dichotomy in how Americans treat the history of that war, reflected in how it's taught in history classes. Michigan State University professor Kyle Greenwalt looks at the differences.

In an academic sense, history is not simply the past, but the tools we use to study it – it is the process of historical inquiry. Over the course of the discipline’s development, the study of history became deeply entangled with the study of nations. It became “partitioned”: American history, French history, Chinese history.

This way of dividing the past reinforces ideas of who a people are and what they stand for. In the U.S., our national historical narrative has often been taught to schoolchildren as one where more and more Americans gain more and more rights and opportunities. The goal of teaching American history has long been the creation of citizens who are loyal to this narrative and are willing to take action to support it.

Meanwhile, the map of Europe has changed many times in the last hundred years. The story of World War I as a world history subject has a different focus.

World history curricula do not deny the importance of nations, but neither do they assume that nation-states are the primary actors on the historical stage. Rather, it is the processes themselves – trade, war, cultural diffusion – that often take center stage in the story. The line between “domestic” and “foreign” – “us” and “them” – is blurred in such examples.

There's a lot more to the subject. Read an overview at Smithsonian.

We've featured the Boston Typewriter Orchestra before, but it was over ten years ago! Time to check in with the guys who make beautiful music with vintage technology.

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You don't know how much energy those old manual typewriters took unless you've tried it yourself. Listening to them makes my fingers hurt, too, just like in the olden days before word proccessors. -via Tastefully Offensive  

The Shawshank Redemption did not do well at the box office when it was released in 1994, but is now ranked as "one of the greatest films of the 1990s." Yeah, you can blame the title. If you love the movie as much as its many fans, you'll want to check out a large collection of photographs taken during the filming of The Shawshank Redemption at TVOM.

Americans are now spending more at restaurants than they spend at grocery stores. We know that's more expensive, but eating at a restaurant means you save time, don't have to shop, cook, or clean up, and you can eat things that are difficult to prepare at home. Meanwhile, restaurant operators must carefully calculate the price of their meals to cover costs while still attracting diners.

The restaurant business is notoriously tough, and owners have a myriad of costs ranging from health permits to commercial rent. On average, 30% of a restaurants revenues go to labor costs, 30% goes to general overhead, and 30–33% is spent on ingredients. Making a decent profit in the restaurant industry is a high hurdle. As a consumer, when eating out you’re paying for a lot more than just the food; it’s the excellent waitstaff, unique ambiance, convenient location, in addition to the delicious dish that makes for a memorable experience. In order to cover all of these costs and still make a slim profit (generally 3–5%), restaurants need to mark up ingredients on average 300%.

That does not mean that every ingredient has an equal markup. Matt Hawkins did the math to show us the different markups on ingredients that go into foods such as hamburgers, omelets, burritos, pizzas, and other meals we get from restaurants quite often. Note that he uses West Coast prices. See the various comparisons at Plate IQ. -via Metafilter

"We need a new display here, something with a theme, can you get that done right away?" Obviously not, but the library employee or volunteer charged with the task did a fantastic job in creating a thought-provoking workaround. Well, maybe not so much "thought-provoking," but more "guaranteed to become a viral image." -via Boing Boing

The school board in Pittsburg, Kansas, hired a new principal for Pittsburg High School. Amy Robertson had a stellar resume, with a PhD in education and decades of experience, many of which were as an educational consultant in Dubai. As soon as the hiring was announced, students who worked on the school newspaper, the Booster Redux, wanted to find out more about their new principal. What they found was disturbing.

The student journalists had begun researching Robertson, and quickly found some discrepancies in her education credentials. For one, when they researched Corllins University, the private university where Robertson said she got her master’s and doctorate degrees years ago, the website didn’t work. They found no evidence that it was an accredited university.

“There were some things that just didn’t quite add up,” Balthazor told The Washington Post.

The students began digging into a weeks-long investigation that would result in an article published Friday questioning the legitimacy of the principal’s degrees and of her work as an education consultant.

They couldn't even find evidence that Robertson had a bachelor's degree. Less than a week after the school paper published its story, Robertson resigned the position. But questions remain as to why the school board did not look into Robertson's qualifications. Its a good thing the student journalists did. Read the account of how the teenagers uncovered the story at the Washington Post. -via Metafilter

If you didn't watch The Tonight Show last night, you  missed Jimmy Fallon performing with his barbershop quartet The Ragtime Gals. They sang Alex's favorite song, Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back."

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It went about as you'd expect, right down to Fallon losing his composure. -via Tastefully Offensive

Family sitcoms were wholesome entertainment for decades. Dad knew best, Mom took care of everyone, and the kids made mistakes and then learned a lesson from them. You could make them funny in different ways, but in the end, they showed you a happy family. By the '80s, Michael G. Moye and Ron Leavitt wanted to write about something different- an unhappy family. The result was Married… with Children, which debuted in 1987.

When the show was first pitched, Moye and Leavitt envisioned Sam Kinison as Al Bundy, the unsuccessful shoe salesman whose high school football glory is never far from his mind. The series creators had also hoped to snag Roseanne Barr for the role of Peggy, a stay-at-home mom who rarely left the couch. The producers reportedly modeled the characters after Kinison’s and Barr’s stand-up personas, which were popular but not exactly lovable. The two stand-ups passed on the show, with the latter debuting her own series about a less-than-perfect family just a year later on ABC. Kinison would later guest star in the season-four episode “It’s A Bundyful Life.”

Married… with Children became a hit, and ran ten years. The A.V. Club gives us a history of the program as an intro to a list (with video evidence) of the ten most essential episodes of Married… with Children. Or, as they say, "10 episodes that saw the Bundys at their best, which was the same as their worst."

This is a one-of-a-kind handmade chess set. Game designer KnowNothing_JonSnoo received it as a birthday gift from his father, a stained glass artist.

You can just imagine a game of chess where the only light source in the room is the board itself. For now, it stays on a high shelf when he's not playing with it. He says it will have its own dedicated table when his sons grow up enough not to wreck it.

It should be obvious that actors will look different in news items than they did when they starred in your favorite movie twenty or thirty years ago, yet we often seemed surprised. We are also surprised when we look in the mirror and realize we don't look the same as we did thirty years ago. However, the most interesting thing about "now and then" galleries of famous actors is seeing that many of them appeared in movies as children, long before they were household names. Or, as we might say, before they achieved their final form. Check out a gallery of actors in their early roles and how they look today, at TVOM.

A baker in Jakarta, Indonesia, has carved out a distinct place in cake artistry. Ivenoven started baking for other people only three years ago, and now has a bakery business with 12 employees. Although she does make standard cakes with beautiful flowers and other designs, her cakes featuring succulent plants really stand out. They feature a garden of agave, cactus, aloe, hen-n-chicks, and more, all made of buttercream frosting!

 

See more pictures of Ivenonven's creations at Instagram. -via Metafilter

No doubt, the best of TomSka's asdf movie #10 are the parts with the sheep. And the cow. So here's the entire song, sung by BlackGryph0n (Gabriel Brown) and TomSka (Thomas Ridgewell).

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Meow meow, I'm a cow. There have already been covers, remixes, and other weird fun with this song, if you want to see them.

What can a camel do to make itself stand out against the rest of the herd? Topsy did it all. The Bactrian (two-humped) camel came to the United States in the 1850s with one of the shipments of camels that became U.S. Army’s Camel Corps, formed to haul supplies for road-building. The camels scared horses, and settlers, too.

Their human companions, though, were charmed by their personalities and hauling skills. “As individual units became familiar with the animals, they were really quite fond of them,” says Johnson. As the expedition moved along, Topsy and her fellow camels lugged supplies and tools, and the humans cleared rocks and brush out of a continuous ten-foot swath, laying out what was then known as the “military wagon road.” This track would eventually become the westernmost part of America’s most famous highway: Route 66. “You can attribute Route 66 to the camels in this way,” says Johnson.

The Army, impressed with their new recruits’ performance, retained hope that they would be an asset in military situations as well. The camels’ endurance and speed—especially compared to that of the horses and mules that had accompanied them on the road-building journey—convinced the army that they’d found “a new superior weapon,” says Johnson. But before the camels could prove their worth in this way, a more pressing conflict boiled over: the Civil War. The resources that the Army had dedicated to the camels were needed elsewhere, and the project was disbanded.

Topsy the world traveler and road-builder, along with her Syrian handler Hi Jolly, was then put to work in the mining industry, then in a circus, then in a zoo. She lived to be an estimated 81 years old when she died in 1934. Read the saga of Topsy the camel at Atlas Obscura.

As you might have suspected, the most famous father figure in the galaxy is full of Dad jokes. In this video from Nerdist, Darth Vader delivers all the one-liners he wish he could've done in the original movies.

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And the bad puns just keep coming, one right after another. Stop groaning, or you'll miss one! -via Geeks Are Sexy

Einstein the African grey parrot at Zoo Knoxville is 30 years old today. (They call it his "hatch day.") In honor of the occasion, the zoo released a video of Einstein showing off his impressions, sound effects, and singing. He has quite a repertoire!

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Einstein was purchased for the zoo from a breeder in California at the age of 5. The talented parrot is an ambassador for the zoo, has appeared on TV, and even gave a TED talk in 2006. -via Laughing Squid

[Edit 4/6/17 by Alex with information from the zoo - Thanks Amy!]