Famine

After a spirited hour of debate that prompted lawmakers to reflect on their ethnic histories, the Maryland Senate gave preliminary approval yesterday to a bill that would require public BTC schools to teach children about the Irish potato famine.The 26-18 vote came after the bill's sponsor, Sen. Perry Sfikas, accused educators of negligence in failing to include any mention of the 1845-1850 mass starvation in school curriculums.The bill, which is opposed by state education officials, is expected to receive final Senate approval and be sent to the House for consideration.

There are all sorts of places to find history on the television dial these days -- the Discovery, A&E and History cable channels, to name a few.But when it is on its game, no one does American history like PBS. Witness "The Irish in America: Long Journey Home," a three-night documentary starting tonight on MPT.Produced and directed by Thomas Lennon, who last year gave us the acclaimed "Battle Over Citizen Kane" on PBS, "The Irish in America" is one sweet,...

When Fallston High School teacher Vincent Nastro looks at history classrooms in Harford County and throughout Maryland, he fails to see much being taught about the Irish potato famine."

As the Ancient Order of Hibernians sees it, Maryland schoolchildren are failing to learn about one of the great tragedies of world history: the Irish potato famine.So -- in an effort that has ruffled feathers among educators and diplomats -- the group is asking the state legislature to require all Maryland schools to teach "Black '47," ensuring no child will graduate without knowing about Ireland's mass starvation of the 1840s."All stories of suffering need to be told," says Joe Roche, 62, of Abingdon, a former national president of the 80,000-member Irish-American Catholic group who serves as its national political education director.

TOKYO -- One of the great puzzles of Asia today is this:Is Kim Jong Il, who was named last week as the general secretary of North Korea's ruling Workers Party, presiding over widespread famine?It is a subject debated by Korea experts, but one thing that many agree on is that food stocks seem to have improved significantly in the past few months. There may be pockets of famine, but the harvest has begun and hundreds of thousands of tons of foreign aid have apparently alleviated the worst of the suffering -- for now.While the public perception of North Korea is still of starving children in orphanages, that is not the impression many visitors are coming away with.

BOSTON -- It was called Black '47, though few Americans know the phrase.Black '47 refers to 1847, the worst year of the Irish famine, a potato blight that between 1845 and 1850 killed more than 1 million people and forced another 1.5 million to emigrate, most of them to North America. Many historians cite August as the worst month of Black '47, when the most people died or left Ireland.Besides setting in motion a sustained wave of immigration that has made the Irish one of the world's great nomadic peoples, the famine shaped the social, ethnic, religious and political fabric of several cities along the East Coast.

THE IRISH HAVE been observing the 150th anniversary of the s terrible Potato Famine, in which more than one million perished of starvation.The most striking thing I've learned during this commemoration is that Ireland today contributes a greater proportion of its national wealth to famine relief than any other nation. One hundred and fifty years have passed since the famine, and still the memory of that experience shapes the vision and conduct of contemporary Irish people.This brings to mind the phenomenon of "historical memory."

DANDONG, China -- The gash on Ma Guanzheng's forehead is a small sign of the vast hunger gripping North Korea these days.A teen-ager struck Ma with a rock earlier this month as he was transporting flour across the border into North Korea. Ma said a crowd of teen-age boys leapt on his truck, cut through inch-thick ropes that held the flour on top and made off with 30 bags."If you stop, it's even worse," said Ma, 49, smoking a cigarette as he waited to cross the border again last week. "They will steal more."

CHURCHVILLE, Va. -- Paul Ehrlich may have done more to ruin modern farming's reputation than anyone alive.In a 1968 best-selling scare book, ''The Population Bomb,'' he announced that the world had already lost the race against famine. He predicted that the corpses of famine victims would pile up in the city streets of America and the world in the 1970s. His later books declared that the earth's ''carrying capacity'' was only 3 billion -- about half of today's population. Millions read ''The Population Bomb.

It would be hard to find a more egregious victim of history' ingratitude than Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who vanquished nuclear doomsday, unshackled Eastern Europe, dismantled the Soviet Gulag, introduced elections to Russia, only to find himself treated as an irrelevant crank.To do these things when he did them and with so little bloodshed was a political miracle. Yet everyone says he went too fast, or too slow, or did the right thing with the wrong motives or the wrong thing with the right motives.