Website of the Week

The Mindset Lists of American History was created at Beloit College in 1998 originally as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references. It quickly became an internationally monitored catalog of the changing worldview of each new college generation. Below are some interesting facts about this year’s entering college class of 2016, born in 1994:

• In these students’ lifetimes, with MP3 players and iPods, they seldom listen to the car radio. A quarter of the entering students already have suffered some hearing loss.
• Kurt Cobain, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Richard Nixon and John Wayne Gacy have always been dead.
• The Biblical sources of terms such as “Forbidden Fruit,” “The writing on the wall,” “Good Samaritan,” and “The Promised Land” are unknown to most of them.
• Bill Clinton is a senior statesman of whose presidency they have little knowledge.
• For most of their lives, maintaining relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world has been a woman’s job in the State Department.
• Women have always piloted war planes and space shuttles.

Review by Rachael Smithey, SWC Librarian