WHAT IS Marshall High School Sociology Mr. Cline Unit One- Slides A
* Who Was He? • James Stockdale was the highest ranking officer captured by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War • He became a prisoner of war for 7 ½ years. • As the senior officer, he organized prisoner resistance, and was tortured regularly by his captors • When told by his captors he was to be paraded in public for propaganda purposes, he slit his scalp with a razor so as to disfigure his face, and be unrecognizable. • When they covered his head with a hat, he took a stool that was in his cell and beat himself until his face was swollen beyond recognition. • When Stockdale was discovered with information that could implicate fellow prisoner’s resistance activities, he slit his wrists so that he could not be tortured into a confession. • He was released from the POW Camp in February of 1973. His shoulders had been wrenched from their sockets, his legs shattered by a torturer, and his back broken. • Debilitated by his captivity and mistreatment, Stockdale could not stand upright and could barely walk.
* Who Was He? • Through work on a charity for former POW’s, Presidential candidate Ross Perot and Stockdale came to know each other, and Ross Perot asked Stockdale to be his provisional Vice Presidential candidate in March of 1992. • By July of 1992, Ross Perot had dropped out of the Presidential race. His campaign was so popular though, that in September he reentered the race, with Stockdale as his Vice Presidential running mate. • Stockdale was not informed until a week before the debates that he would be participating, so had not time to prepare, and did not even get a chance to meet with Perot and come to some sort of consensus about what their political positions were. • As a result, Admiral Stockdale was forced to be purposefully vague, and not direct, and was ill prepared for debating. To the American public, who knew little about him, however, this appeared to be mere befuddlement and comical border line dementia. • So, despite who Admiral Stockdale really was, society, and social forces, made him out to be a sweet confused, old man.
* The Birth of Sociology • Apart from being a perfect example of what the field of Sociology examines, that being how social forces define us, it also presents the central question that Sociologists consider in the first words of Admiral Stockdale’s opening remark, “ Who am I ?” • To understand the field of Sociology, we have to go back to its beginnings as a social science that, like all social sciences, was born from the study of the field of History. • The seven social sciences born from History are; • Political Science: Studies concerned with the study of the state, nation and government, and the politics and policies of governments. • Economics: The study of the choice of allocation of scarce resources in conditions of unlimited demand for them. • Psychology: Study of why the individual chooses to act as it does, and the effects of individual personality and intelligence traits when taken as a whole, on human events and history. • Sociology: The study of the effects of social institutions and groups upon the development of people, and on human events and history.
* The Birth of Sociology • The seven social sciences born from History are; • Anthropology: The study of human beings and their ancestors through time in relation to physical character, environmental and social relations, and culture. • Archaeology: The study of human pre history and history through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts, and • Geography: The study of the physical features of the Earth and its atmosphere, and of human activity as it affects and is affected by these. • History has always been a contentious field of study. People will say that we make use of its study so as to learn from the past. • In order to learn from the past, we must assume that what we are being told about it is “the truth.” • However, what “the truth” is can be very subjective, and the study of History has reflected this uncertainty about truth through time.
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