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Lectures: The Politics of the Gilded Age

After the calamity of the Civil War, the United States was a nation in transition– from a rural to an urban society, from the fourth among the industrial nations of the world to the first. While many Americans welcomed the changes as progress to a new era, others worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week to earn a salary that was insufficient to feed, clothe, and house their families.  The term “The Gilded Age” comes from a novel of the same name published in 1873 by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, which, though fictional, is a critical examination of politics and corruption in the United States during the nineteenth century.

Perhaps we shall call it the “Era of Good Stealings”

Lecture The Gilded Age and Politics of Corruption

Inventions, RxR and Business Methods in the Gilded Age

Steven Pinker on the Language of Swearing (TED)

Pinker’s deep studies of language have led him to insights into the way that humans form thoughts and engage our world. He argues that humans have evolved to share a faculty for language, the same way a spider evolved to spin a web.

In 2003, Harvard recruited Pinker for its psychology department from MIT. Time magazine named Pinker one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004.

Watch this video (there are 2 parts, 10 minutes each…here is part two) take notes and respond to these questions:

  • Describe our physiological reaction to swears
  • List the five “Contents of Swears” and explain the emotions that these types of words elicit
  • What are the five reasons that people swear? Are any of these reasons unreasonable? Are there other reasons?
  • Why do we need dysphemisms? What are the functions and dysfunctions of dysphemisms?
  • What are the functions of idiomatic swearing?
  • How and why are swears culturally specific?
  • In conclusion, why do we swear? Oh, and why do authorities try to cease our swearing?

Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce (TED)

In this video, Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce — and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

  • Why is Moskowitz’s assertion “enormously” important?
  • What does the Grey Poupon story suggest?
  • How does Moskowitz battle with Plato?  (hint: absolutism)
  • What conclusion does Gladwell draw from his studies of Moskowitz? To what extent and in what ways do you agree with Gladwell’s conclusion?

BTW, here is Gladwell on The Ketchup Conundrum from the New Yorker. Awesome.

Steven Pinker on Language and Thought (TED)

In an exclusive preview of his book The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds — and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize.

In watching this video (18 minutes) take notes. In doing so, consider the following questions:

  • What is the relationship between language and thought?
  • What is the relationship between language and human interaction?
  • How and why do we “veil” our speech?
  • How would the human experience (both personal and political) be different if language only had literal/direct connotations?
  • What is Pinker’s thesis and what is philosophical about it?

Bring your notes and your responses to these questions to our next session.

The Revenge of Karl Marx

Marx is so embedded in our Western cast of thought that few people are even aware of their debt to him. Everybody I know now believes that their attitudes are to an extent a creation of their material circumstances … “that, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness”, as Marx wrote—and that changes in the way things are produced profoundly affect the affairs of humanity even outside the workshop or factory.

Read Hitchens’ piece (from The Nation, 2009)

One World Under God?

For all the advances and wonders of our global era, Christians, Jews, and Muslims seem ever more locked in mortal combat. But history suggests a happier outcome for the Peoples of the Book. As technological evolution has brought communities, nations, and faiths into closer contact, it is the prophets of tolerance and love that have prospered, along with the religions they represent. Is globalization, in fact, God’s will?

Read on from The Nation

Show Trials in Iran

In the grotesque pageant of Iran’s show trials, former high officials—hollow-eyed, dressed in prison pajamas, and flanked by guards in uniform—sit in rows, listening to one another’s self-denunciations. Since the disputed Presidential elections of June 12th, about a hundred reformist politicians, journalists, student activists, and other dissidents have been accused of colluding with Western powers to overthrow the Islamic Republic. This month, a number of the accused have made videotaped confessions.

Laura Secor on Iranian Show Trials (2009, 2 pages)

Democracy, China and the Communist Party

Attempts to democratise the Communist Party have failed. Again
“INNER-PARTY democracy is the life of the party,” enthused China’s former president, Jiang Zemin, as he prepared to hand over to Hu Jintao seven years ago. It could, he said, promote democracy in the country as a whole. But Mr Hu’s cautious experiments with reform inside the party appear to have fizzled. So too, it seems, has his own commitment to the idea.

A 2 page summary of democracy in Communist China

The Economist on Immigration to the US

Because America is so big and diverse, immigrants have an incredible array of choices. The proportion of Americans who are foreign-born, at 13%, is higher than the rich-country average of 8.4%. In absolute terms, the gulf is much wider. America’s foreign-born population of 38m is nearly four times larger than those of Russia or Germany, the nearest contenders. It dwarfs the number of migrants in Japan (below 2m) or China (under 1m). The recession has dramatically slowed the influx of immigrants and prompted quite a few to move back to Mexico. But the economy will eventually recover and the influx will resume.

The Economist on immigration to the US. Very interesting.

Laura Secor on Iran Elections

Journalist Laura Secor details the recent suppression of the post-election Mousavi opposition in Iran and the intellectual roots of the detention, torture, and forced confessions hoisted upon civil leaders over the preceding decades.

View the video from the American Academy in Berlin

The Intersection of 'Emergence', 'Philosophy of Knowledge' & Government Responsibility

There has been quite the hullabaloo these days about implications of the financial troubles of newspapers  in the West. For some time, I feared that the newsroom cutbacks in all newspapers and the outright bankruptcy and closing of others, would have a profoundly negative impact on American society. I was convinced by the assertions of David Simon, Steve Coll and Bob Garfield. However, I recently came around on this issue and decided that I have no valid reason to mourn the death of newspapers in America. Instead, I found myself as angry at newspapers as ever.

Then I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, On the Media (you should give a listen to their weekly, one-hour meta-gab ) where the host, Bob Garfield, invited listeners to email him with a eulogy (he seemed to be looking for nostalgia) for the dead American newspaper industry.

Here is my response to Bob Garfield’s call for eulogies

Now read a compelling argument to the contrary that is probably more convincing (and certainly more well-written) than mine: David Simon’s testimony to the Senate Hearing on the Future of Journalism. You can also watch him deliver this speech in the Senate

During our next seminar, we will discuss:

  • Do the newspapers’ failures account for their insolvency? Or did modern technologies destroy the newspapers (or both)?
  • Do we need newspapers in their current incarnation?
  • Can we trust that a superior mechanism of digging up and delivering news will emerge in the place of newspapers?
  • Can we rely on ‘democratic’ or ‘citizen’ journalists? (think ‘Emergence’)
  • What should the role of the government be in saving newspapers (for instance, the French government bailed out Le Monde)?

Come to our next session with some well-reasoned, written responses to the above questions.

 

Radiolab: Memory and Forgetting

What is a memory? Science writer Jonah Lehrer tells us is it’s a physical thing in the brain… not some ephemeral flash. It’s a concrete thing made of matter. And NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux, who studies fear memories in rats, tells us how with a one shock, one tone, and one drug injection, you can bust up this piece of matter, and prevent a rat from every making a memory. LeDoux’s research goes sci-fi, when he and his colleague Karim Nader start trying to erase memories. And Nader applies this research to humans suffering from PTSD.

According to the latest research, remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process. It’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7 second memory.

Listen to this piece from WNYC’s “Radiolab”

1st Amendment: The Supreme Court mauls the law banning animal-cruelty videos

Witness the American deputy solicitor general in his natural habitat—the Supreme Court. As Neal Katyal roams softly across the cool marble chamber, he has no idea what awaits him. He is here to protect his tribe—the U.S. government—which, in 1999, passed a statute making it a crime to create, sell, or possess “any visual or auditory depiction” of “animal cruelty” if the act of cruelty is itself illegal under either federal law or the law of the state in which the depiction occurred.

Read on from Slate

The high court looks again at religious symbols on public lands

There’s just one person at oral argument in Salazar v. Buono this morning who really wants to talk about whether a 5-foot cross on federal government land in the Mojave National Preserve violates the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. But Justice Antonin Scalia really, really wants to talk about it. He looks particularly queasy when Peter Eliasberg—the ACLU lawyer whose client objects to crosses on government land—suggests partway through the morning that perhaps a less controversial World War I memorial might consist of “a statue of a soldier which would honor all of the people who fought for America in World War I and not just the Christians.”

Read on from Slate

Video – Eric Foner: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World

Eric Foner, contributor and editor of Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, lectures about the sixteenth presidents of the United States.

In 1876 the abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed, ‘No man can say anything that is new of Abraham Lincoln.’ Undeterred, the contributors to Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World believe it is possible even now, especially if the starting point is the interaction between the life and the times.

Several of these original essays focus on Lincoln’s leadership as president and commander in chief. James M. McPherson examines Lincoln’s deft navigation of the crosscurrents of politics and wartime strategy. Sean Wilentz assesses Lincoln’s evolving position in the context of party politics. On slavery and race, Eric Foner writes of Lincoln and the movement to colonize emancipated slaves outside the United States. James Oakes considers Lincoln’s views on race and citizenship. There are also essays on Lincoln’s literary style, religious beliefs, and family life. The Lincoln who emerges is a man of his time, yet able to transcend and transform it a reasonable measure of greatness.

Watch Foner here

Video–Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East

Kingmakers is the story of how the modern Middle East came to be, told through the lives of the Britons and Americans who shaped it. Some are famous (Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell); others infamous (Harry St. John Philby, father of Kim); some forgotten (Sir Mark Sykes, Israel’s godfather, and A. T. Wilson, the territorial creator of Iraq); some controversial (the CIA’s Miles Copeland and the Pentagon’s Paul Wolfowitz).

All helped enthrone rulers in a region whose very name is an Anglo-American invention. Co-authors Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac elaborate on these ideas and take questions on their book.

Watch it here (70 minutes)