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The Economist’s 2014 Special Report on Iran

Contents of this special report

  • The revolution is over
  • Religion: Take it or leave it
  • Domestic politics: Rush to the centre
  • The hardliners: Goon squad
  • The economy: Melons for everyone
  • The Neighbors: Moving targets
  • Prospects: We shall overcome, maybe

Read and respond to the introduction to the Special Report then read and respond to the one other article assigned to you. Please remember to print the one article assigned to you and to bring your copy to class.

Here is the Special Report

Here are the reading questions

…and, as always, enjoy!

Oh My Lords!

On December 2nd, at what otherwise might have been a dull committee meeting, Sir Malcolm Jack was asked why the catering services of the House of Lords, the upper house, and the House of Commons could not have been merged to save money. He replied: “The lords feared that the quality of champagne would not be as good if they chose a joint service.” The astonished chair of the committee, Jack Straw, spoke for most of the nation as he gasped: “Did you make that up?” Sir Malcolm assured him he did not.
The national welfare budget has been cut and the number of people using free food banks has risen sharply in the past year. So the fact that the House of Lords has a champagne budget at all has caused some eye-rolling. According to The Guardian newspaper, the upper house has spent £265,770 on 17,000 bottles of the stuff since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government took office in 2010—enough for five bottles of bubbly per peer per year.

The Confederacy and Medicaid

Ten of the Eleven Former Confederate States Are Not Participating in the Expansion of Medicaid

Participating: Arkansas

Not Participating: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee (may reverse rejection), Texas and Virginia

Medicaid expansion plans (as of July 2013)
You likey the red herring?

It would be fun to give this article to students, watch them digest it hook, line, and sinker, then suss out the flimsy rhetoric and hyperbole, leaving nothing but the map for the argument to hang on.

(…then rebuild the argument on more firm grounds)

If I were a more creative teacher I would do this.

Putin’s Lessons from History

HA!

[Putin] explains that New Russia was created by “the victories of Potemkin and Catherine II […] with its center in Novorossiisk. Therefore [it is called] New Russia. Later, for various reasons, the territories vanished, but the [Russian] people remained there.”

It has been said that Catherine II could make four mistakes in a three-letter word, and here Putin managed to make a dozen in a single sentence. Kharkiv, the center of the Ukrainian Cossack regiment in the seventeenth century, never belonged to the short-lived “province of New Russia.” Since it was the first capital of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, founded in 1919, it could not have been transferred to Ukraine from Russia in the 1920s. “New Russia” could hardly be conquered from Novorossiisk because the town itself was founded only in the 1830s, when Catherine II and Potemkin were long dead, and, like Kharkiv, it was never part of the region once called “New Russia.” The regions listed by Putin did not belong to Ukraine during the “tsarist period” for the simple reason that there was no “Ukraine” either as a state or an administrative unit in the nineteenth century. Finally, the core of the original province of “New Russia” was the Ukrainian Cossack republic of Zaporizhia, which was destroyed by Russian troops in 1775.

“Putin’s historical illiteracy is nothing unusual in today’s world. He, however, believes that he knows history and is able to draw on “the lessons of history.” One history lesson that I am trying to convey to my students is that fantasies should be taken seriously when espoused by the leader of a large state. In the twentieth century the world community made the mistake of neglecting one leader’s fantasies and paid dearly for this political myopia. We should not step on the same rake again, and revanchist lunatics should not be treated as sensible and pragmatic politicians.”
Andriy Zayarnyuk is an associate professor of history at the University of Winnipeg this is his article, Putin’s Lessons from History, 2014.

5 Things About Slavery You Probably Didn’t Learn In Social Studies

Edward Baptist’s new book, “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery And The Making Of American Capitalism”, drew a lot of attention last month after the Economist said it was too hard on slave owners.

What you might not have taken away from the ensuing media storm is that “The Half Has Never Been Told” is quite a gripping read. Baptist weaves deftly between analysis of economic data and narrative prose to paint a picture of American slavery that is pretty different from what you may have learned in high school Social Studies class.

But for those of you who are strapped for time, or who want a peek into the book before committing to the full 420 pages, here are five of his key arguments.

Interview with Edward Baptist

Baptist, a professor of history at Cornell, just released “The Half Has Never Been Told,” laying  out a sweeping economic history of slavery. Baptist traces the flow of human capital from the Atlantic seaboard to the cotton fields of the deep South. He describes how slavers used whippings to extract more work from their property. He details how slave labor and loans secured with human collateral helped drive the industrial revolution.

These observations aren’t new. Baptist’s real achievement is to ground these financial abstractions in the lives of ordinary people. In vivid passages, he describes the sights, smells and suffering of slavery. He writes about individual families torn apart by global markets. Above all, Baptist sets out to show how America’s rise to power is inextricable from the suffering of black slaves.

Naturally, this makes some people rather uncomfortable. Reviewing Baptist’s book last month, the Economist huffed that “all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.” A few days later, the magazine took the rare step of withdrawing the review, pointing out that slavery was “an evil system.”

Here is the interview in Salon

How the Understanding of U.S. History Changes

See how the mystic chords of memory have changed Americans’ perspectives on the Mexican-American War…

In 1849, there was just no question. Mexico started this. So in 1849, the argument is we have to go in and defend Texas from being reconquered by Mexicans.

In a textbook from 1880, it’s an inevitable conflict between the races. What happens in your next textbook from 1911?

In 1966, it’s the first time you start to really see the historians – or the people who are putting the textbooks together – are going to start to question how this war started. And you also start getting the names of certain individuals who at that time actually questioned the war. And probably the most significant one is going to be a young congressman from Illinois by the name of Abraham Lincoln.

Putin and the Berlin Wall

The Russian Federation’s current president, Vladimir Putin, was a KGB officer in East Germany during its final days, and it’s been reported that even he—no nascent democrat—was appalled at the totalitarianism of its state apparatus. Yet the sudden implosion of his homeland’s empire, and the laying open of its borders to Western businessmen and TV shows, clearly left him traumatized. His current policies can be seen as a reaction to those embittering days.

Four myths about slavery in the US

People think they know everything about slavery in the United States, but they don’t. They think the majority of African slaves came to the American colonies, but they didn’t. They talk about 400 hundred years of slavery, but it wasn’t. They claim all Southerners owned slaves, but they didn’t. Some argue it was a long time ago, but it wasn’t.

Daina Ramey Berry from the University of Texas dispels four myths (listed above)

Is Vladimir Putin trying to build a new Orthodox empire?

The vast majority of Russians now identify as Orthodox—a stark change from the immediate post-Soviet period. Recent years have seen a flurry of church construction throughout the country. And perhaps most important of all, there’s a committed believer—Vladimir Putin—in the Kremlin, a man who surrounds himself with other influential people of faith and regularly invokes God in his public statements. Yet all is not as rosy for the Orthodox Church as it appears on the surface. The blurring of the line between church and state in Russia, what critics call an attempt to turn religion into a branch of the government, has alienated many former believers. The recent crisis in Ukraine has also exposed a potentially dangerous split in the millennium-old institution.

David Cameron reignites English votes row

David Cameron is risking a fresh constitutional clash with Labour and the Liberal Democrats after he announced that the Tories want to bar Scottish MPs from voting on some tax decisions at Westminster that relate only to England.

Amid signs of an English backlash at Westminster, after a historic all-party deal in Scotland to give Holyrood direct control over £14bn worth of tax and welfare policy, Downing Street said that the principle of “English votes for English laws” would apply to some tax matters.

What Did Gettysburg Smell Like?

Smith’s book forces us to set aside our lofty notions about the war and regard it from a human perspective. “This war was a war about some of the greatest and most noble ideals in American history,” Smith told me in an interview. “This was about freedom, questions of national identity, questions of sovereignty, questions of personal liberty. And I’m not denying all of that. What I am saying is that we have to be very careful not to elevate those noble questions so much that they cloud or occlude our understanding of war.” Sensory history, Smith said, is one way to help us understand how it would have felt to be there

History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

History of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, president of the United States, by the House of representatives, and his trial by the Senate, for high crimes and misdemeanors in office, 1868.

By Edmund G. Ross! (Ross was the Senator who cast the ballot that kept Johnson in office.)

Edmund G. Ross is one of eight U.S. Senators featured in Profiles in Courage, the 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning history co-written by then-Senator John F. Kennedy and Theodore Sorensen in commemoration of past acts of political courage in Congress.

Linclon's Letter to Albert G. Hodges

This letter is a summary of a conversation which President Abraham Lincoln had with three Kentuckians: Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, Albert Hodges, and Archibald Dixon. Hodges was the editor of the Frankfort Commonwealth and Dixon served in the U.S. Senate from 1852 to 1855. Bramlette had protested the recruiting of black regiments in Kentucky.

The letter offers an excellent glimpse into Lincoln’s thinking about his constitutional responsibility and why he changed his inaugural position of non-interference with slavery to one of emancipation. He said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

Lincoln closed with a reference to slavery that is reminiscent of his second inaugural address of 1865: “If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”