|Filed Under:||History / US History|
|Posts on Regator:||730|
|Posts / Week:||2.8|
|Archived Since:||April 9, 2010|
Forthcoming in September, from Basic Books As readers of this blog know, Franklin Roosevelt declared he had taken the US off the gold standard on March 6, 1933, as the first substantial act of his presidency. But scholars have not been so quick to accept this date or, with firmness, any other. When Roosevelt first […]
Forthcoming in September, from Basic Books On this day in 1933, it was the first Friday of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, and the new president met reporters to talk to them about ending the bank holiday with which he had begun his term. The Federal Reserve Banks would open on Saturday so that member banks of […]
Leonard Nimoy’s Spock made the most powerful case for the value of emotional intelligence that I’ve ever seen. I’m also pretty sure that the Roanoke episode of “In Search Of…” made me the historian I am today. And, more important still, his life offscreen suggested that personal decency can far outstrip fame. RIP to a […]
As this article makes clear, I’m a plucky outsider who beat long odds!
Nothing brings me more joy than Edgar Allan Poe’s obituary.
I don’t know enough to know for sure, but this looks like potentially big news. Relatedly, I don’t remember where I was when the Challenger blew up, but I do have a flashbulb memory from when I learned that Magic Johnson had HIV.
Possibly the right response to Gordon Wood’s “History in Context” in The Weekly Standard – a “get off my lawn essay,” as one historian says – is parody. After all Wood does begin the essay by saying his mentor Bernard Bailyn is woefully under-appreciated, and then proceeds to mention that Bailyn has two Pulitzers.1 What […]
No, not my lovemaking, Battle Lines. Or so says Publishers Weekly. The full review, if you want to read it but fear of links, is below the fold. In 15 harrowing chapters, Fetter-Vorm (Trinity) and Ari Kelman’s (A Misplaced Massacre) graphic take on the Civil War brings home the shattering costs of America’s epochal conflict […]
My friend Phillip Barron has put together a flip book of sample pages from Battle Lines. If you’re interested, you can check it out here.
I recently re-watched Do the Right Thing and found the ending a little shocking. No, not the violent part – which has, sadly, only become more familiar in the quarter century since 1989 – but the actual last scene. The morning after the movie’s climax, the camera shifts up and away from the street while […]
Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members captures the absurdity of the present moment in the hallowed halls of academe: the beleaguered state of the humanities; the way a shrinking pie has left even tenured scholars, already an insecure subset of the species, more fragile than usual; the fraught relationship between faculty and their administrative paymasters. In […]
I write to record a position on a subject already treated in more specialist fora. I refer, of course, to a matter routinely, if implicitly, raised by the auditors of curricula, every time they ask for samples of a syllabus: if they request more than one, what do they say they want? Syllabi? Or syllabuses?1 […]
Battle Lines has its first review. From Kirkus (2/15/15): A graphic rendering of epic destruction and intimate despair, as the authors make Civil War scholarship come alive for readers young and old.The artistry of Fetter-Vorm (Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb, 2013) powerfully captures the devastation that the war wreaked on the […]
For my new book, I spent long hours trawling through the many, many reels of the microfilmed diaries of Henry Morgenthau, Jr. We didn’t have them at my university, so I had to order a few at a time from Interlibrary Loan, wait, and then seize upon them and go through them before they were […]
…does it take to create a spamnado? Earlier today, what seems like the entire profession received an automated e-mail from some organization whose servers are hosted by Cal Tech. The original message was spam of some sort, I’m guessing, though I didn’t pay any attention to it, so I can’t say for sure. What came […]
California’s measles outbreak has now reached more than 70 cases. 1 Populations especially at risk are those born after 1957 and vaccinated between 1963-1967 or not vaccinated. People born before 1957 would have been exposed to measles naturally and are ok; those not exposed to the virus in the wild will be vulnerable. People vaccinated […]
I still haven’t whittled that blog post down to size. In fact it’s now bigger. Meantime here’s another something on the web: a TLS essay I wrote on Martin Wolf’s The Shifts and the Shocks. There’s no paywall. Here’s a snippet, which provides the piece its rather nice illustration: In the 2011 film Margin Call, […]
I started writing a blog post yesterday but it’s now up to 1500 words and I don’t know what to do with is, so instead I’ll urge you: Plan your Saturday night now! Here’s a preview: In a world … Aww yeah, baby: C-SPAN 3.1 Saturday, January 24, at 8pm and midnight, Eastern time. Or […]
Here’s a post I wrote way back when. I think things have changed quite a bit in the past seven years, actually, whether because recent events have laid bare the emptiness of the rhetoric of a post-racial America, because the President of the United States is African American, because popular culture, including films like Selma, […]