: About Me

Ever since I was little, I've had a fascination with history and its power to affect the present and future. In my meandering years through college, I found that what fascinated me most was how people came to learn about the world around them, namely the media. So much power in so few hands, and few bother to consider just how much the media creates our understanding of the world. Sure, we hear about the "liberal media," "mainstream media," "talk radio" and so on, all of which hints at bias and, if nothing else, a questionable allegiance to facts. Yet media remains virtually our only source to understand current events. With the advent of the World Wide Web, there are plenty of news sources out there, but it is harder and harder to tell opinion from fact-or fantasy.

So, with my (media) history PhD in hand, I'm out in search of new adventures in the scariest of places, the real world, hoping to put my knowledge to work understanding how we as individuals and social beings understand our world. With some publishing and teaching credentials to my name, I'm hoping to use Helium to keep myself writing in slow times, get my ideas out there, and learn more from other authors about their attitudes towards media, history and the public's search for knowledge.

Politics, News & Issues > Political & Economic Theory Should the government dictate what is written in school history books?

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"Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." Amendment I, United States Constitution (1791) In 1798, the US Government tried to circumvent the right to free speech in passing the Alien and Sedition Acts. One of these acts gave the government right to imprison a person for uttering anything "false, scandalous, and malicious" against an administration official. The law was designed to quell political dissent, and it nearly fractured the tenuous base of the new nation in the process. In the intervening two centuries, there have been a variety of sedition ...

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