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Was World War I the outcome of elite machinations?

What caused Europe to immolate itself? World War I, after all, was neither an avalanche nor a tempest but a ghastly man-made disaster. The question of responsibility has preoccupied Europe, and its historians, since the war began, and the identification of culprits has also varied over time, running the gamut from German militarism to reckless diplomacy, the faceless forces of imperialism and nationalism, and ideologies like social Darwinism. The debate has never been purely academic…

Not surprisingly, the approaching centenary of the fateful summer of 1914 has elicited new reflections on the war’s causes. While the current crop of books on the outbreak of the war offer a range of perspectives, they tend, on balance, to find blood primarily on the hands of Europe’s “Great Men,” a small cabal of diplomats, kings, military leaders and their advisers. In her highly readable The War That Ended Peace, Margaret MacMillan concludes that “the decisions that took Europe into that war—or failed to prevent it—were made by a surprisingly small number, and those men—few women played a role—came largely but not entirely from the upper classes, whether the landed aristocracy or the urban plutocracy.” 

The significance of the Gettysburg Address

IN THE AFTERMATH of the Battle of Gettysburg, both sides, leaving fifty thousand dead or wounded or missing behind them, had reason to maintain a large pattern of pretense—Lee pretending that he was not taking back to the South a broken cause, Meade that he would not let the broken pieces fall through his fingers. It would have been hard to predict that Gettysburg, out of all this muddle, these missed chances, all the senseless deaths, would become a symbol of national purpose, pride, and ideals. Abraham Lincoln transformed the ugly reality into something rich and strange—and he did it with 272 words. The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration.
Historian Garry Wills explores The significance of the Gettysburg Address

The first world war: Look back with angst

A century on, there are uncomfortable parallels with the era that led to the outbreak of the first world war…

Yet the parallels remain troubling. The United States is Britain, the superpower on the wane, unable to guarantee global security. Its main trading partner, China, plays the part of Germany, a new economic power bristling with nationalist indignation and building up its armed forces rapidly. Modern Japan is France, an ally of the retreating hegemon and a declining regional power. The parallels are not exact—China lacks the Kaiser’s territorial ambitions and America’s defence budget is far more impressive than imperial Britain’s—but they are close enough for the world to be on its guard. Which, by and large, it is not.

The Economist draws the parallel on the even of the centenary

The FBI files on being and nothingness

The irony that emerges from the FBI files on Camus and Sartre, spanning several decades is that the G-men, initially so anti-philosophical, find themselves reluctantly philosophizing. They become (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philosophical policemen.
Hoover needed to know if Existentialism and Absurdism were some kind of front for Communism. To him, everything was potentially a coded re-write of the Communist Manifesto. That was the thing about the Manifesto—it was not manifest: more often it was, as Freud would say, latent. Thus FBI agents were forced to become psychoanalysts and hermeneuts…Thus we find intelligence agents studying scholarly works and attending lectures.

But the FBI were “philosophical policemen” in a second sense: in tracking Camus and Sartre (surveillance, eavesdropping, wiretapping, theft) they give expression to their own brand of philosophical investigations. In particular, the FBI philosophy files reveal how the agency became so dogmatically anti-conspiratorial.

The Case Against High-School Sports

“In these communities, the dominant argument is usually that sports lure students into school and keep them out of trouble—the same argument American educators have made for more than a century. And it remains relevant, without a doubt, for some small portion of students.

But at this moment in history, now that more than 20 countries are pulling off better high-school-graduation rates than we are, with mostly nominal athletic offerings, using sports to tempt kids into getting an education feels dangerously old-fashioned. America has not found a way to dramatically improve its children’s academic performance over the past 50 years, but other countries have—and they are starting to reap the economic benefits…

Imagine, for a moment, if Americans transferred our obsessive intensity about high-school sports—the rankings, the trophies, the ceremonies, the pride—to high-school academics.”

Amanda Ripley makes a compelling case against the American obsession in Slate.

Stop Multitasking: You're not good at it

“Evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and remember less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new contexts.”

“I don’t care if a kid wants to tweet while she’s watching American Idol, or have music on while he plays a video game. But when students are doing serious work with their minds, they have to have focus.”

“Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio. That’s fine. But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being on Facebook—each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses the same area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.”

Read the evidence from the Slate. AND STOP IT!

Greed Is Good: A 300-Year History of a Dangerous Idea

“But for the most part, I don’t think we don’t say very much about greed, not comfortably at least. Perhaps that is the inevitable price of an economic system that relies on the vigor of self-interested pursuits, that it instills a kind of moral quietism in the face of avarice, for whether out of a desire to appear non-judgmental or for reasons of moral expediency, unless some action verges on the criminal, we hesitate to call it greed, much less evidence of someone greedy. We don’t deny the existence of such individuals, but like Bigfoot, they tend to be more rumored than seen.

Moral revolutions come about in different ways. If we reject some conduct but rarely admit an example, we enjoy the benefit of being high-minded without the burden of moral restraint. We also embolden that behavior, which proceeds with a presumptive blessing. As a matter of public discourse and polite conversation, “Greed” is unlikely to be “Good” anytime soon, but a vice need not become a virtue for the end result to look the same.”

Writing in the Atlantic, John Paul Rollert walks us through the history of the concept of greed.

George Washington: The Reluctant President

“Any student of Washington’s life might have predicted that he would acknowledge his election in a short, self-effacing speech full of disclaimers. “While I realize the arduous nature of the task which is conferred on me and feel my inability to perform it,” he replied to Thomson, “I wish there may not be reason for regretting the choice. All I can promise is only that which can be accomplished by an honest zeal.” This sentiment of modesty jibed so perfectly with Washington’s private letters that it could not have been feigned: he wondered whether he was fit for the post” – From Ron Chernow in the Smithsonian Magazine

Five Myths About the Cold War

Mark Kramer is director of Cold War Studies and a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Davis Center. More than 20 years since the U.S.S.R. disappeared, Russia’s incursion into Ukraine is renewing old rivalries and sparking talk of a new Cold War, with former KGB officer Vladimir Putin serving as the West’s latest foil in Moscow. But how apt is the comparison?

Let’s examine some myths that endure about the East-West stalemate.

Gladwell on Suburban Malls

Gladwell delivers on this sociological and intellectual view of the American shopping mall.

“Postwar America was an intellectually insecure place, and there was something intoxicating about Gruen’s sophistication and confidence. That was what took him, so dramatically, from standing at New York Harbor with eight dollars in his pocket to Broadway, to Fifth Avenue, and to the heights of Northland and Southdale. He was a European intellectual, an émigré, and, in the popular mind, the European émigré represented vision, the gift of seeing something grand in the banality of postwar American life. When the European visionary confronted a drab and congested urban landscape, he didn’t tinker and equivocate; he levelled warehouses and buried roadways and came up with a thrilling plan for making things right. “The chief means of travel will be walking,” Gruen said, of his reimagined metropolis. “Nothing like walking for peace of mind.” At Northland, he said, thousands of people would show up, even when the stores were closed, just to walk around. It was exactly like Sunday on the Ringstrasse. With the building of the mall, Old World Europe had come to suburban Detroit.”

Coates' Case for Reparations

This journalistic tour de force is the best piece I’ve read this year. Coates puts the question squarely into the reader’s face and, in so doing, changes the dialogue about reparations.

Chapters

I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
V. The Quiet Plunder
VI. Making The Second Ghetto
VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
IX. Toward A New Country
X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”

Read the Case for Reparations

Answer these questions 

You might also be interested in Coates’ evolving thoughts on reparations.

Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True

Despite public assurances that everything was fully under control, in the winter of 1964, while “Dr. Strangelove” was playing in theatres and being condemned as Soviet propaganda, there was nothing toprevent an American bomber crew or missile launch crew from using their weapons against the Soviets.Kubrick had researched the subject for years, consulted experts, and worked closely with a former R.A.F.pilot, Peter George, on the screenplay of the film. George’s novel about the risk of accidental nuclear war,“Red Alert,” was the source for most of “Strangelove” ’s plot.

Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, atop official at the Department of Defense had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. At the Pentagon, the book was taken seriously as a cautionary tale about what might go wrong. Even Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara privately worried that an accident, a mistake, or a rogue American officer could start a nuclear war.”

This New Yorker article explores the film as fact.,

All in the Name: Goodluck Jonathan

“I called him Goodluck because although life was hard for me when he was born, I had this feeling that this boy would bring me good luck,” his late father Lawrence Jonathan was quoted as saying in a recent biography of the president.

His mother Eunice said although she had a history of lengthy labour in childbirth stretching for several days, Goodluck was born in record time – the very day she went into labour.

But the plot thickens. The 53-year-old leader has benefited from a series of events that have advanced his career by default.
He became governor of his native Bayelsa state in 2005. He had been deputy governor and took over the office after his predecessor was impeached on money laundering charges.

A couple years later, he was selected to run as vice president under Umaru Yar’Adua, a northerner who needed to balance his ticket.

Yar’Adua dies in office after months of illness, and Jonathan is sworn in to replace him.

And then April 2011: The power of incumbency behind him, Jonathan easily wins the presidential election.

The case for reparations: a narrative bibliography

“As I’ve said before, the idea of reparations precedes this month’s cover of The Atlantic, and the work around it—among scholars, activists, and writers—has been ongoing, even if the interest of the broader world is fickle. Following up on the autopsy of an idea, I thought I’d give some larger sense of how something like this came to be. My hope is to give people who are interested some entrée into further reading, and also to credit the antecedents to my own thinking. Perhaps most importantly, I wish to return to one of the original features of blogging—the documentation of public thinking. I would suggest that more writers, more academics, and more journalists do this, and do so honestly. It have come to believe that arguing with the self is as important as arguing with the broader world.”

The Case For Tammany Hall Being On The Right Side Of History

Historian Terry Golway has written a colorful history of Tammany Hall, which takes a more sympathetic view of the organization than many historians. He says the Tammany machine, while often corrupt, gave impoverished immigrants critically needed social services and a road to assimilation. According to Golway, Tammany was responsible for progressive state legislation that foreshadowed the New Deal. He writes that some of Tammany’s harshest critics, including cartoonist Thomas Nast, openly exhibited a raw anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice.

Machine Made

In this interview, Golway tells Fresh Air‘s Dave Davies, “What I’m trying to do in this book is present this other side of Tammany Hall. … Every history of Tammany Hall is told as a true-crime novel, and what I’m trying to suggest is that there’s this other side. I’m arguing, yes, the benefits that Tammany Hall brought to New York and to the United States [do] outweigh the corruption with which it is associated. I’m simply trying to complicate that story… Tammany Hall was there for the poor immigrant who was otherwise friendless in New York.”

Golway is the director of the Kean University Center for History, Politics and Policy. His book is called Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics.