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 Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America, by Susan Schulten Book cover.

From Sea to Shining Sea

Review of Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America, by Susan Schulten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)
… Spend a few minutes browsing news websites or blogs and you will see a barrage of infographics and informational maps used to prop up tendentious … Olmstead and Edward Atkinson used mapping to critique the southern assertion that slavery was the best labor system …
Portrait of James Madison.

The Hidden Consequences of Campaign Finance Reform

… to get the Constitution ratified as the law of the land, he argued that competition among many interest groups … of slavery. Today, interest groups compete with Democratic and Republican parties to influence public policy. The … American institutions. But in the late 1850s, the mostly southern Democrats  supported slavery’s geographical …
"The Magnet Citizenship" March 1917 cartoon by Henry Mayer - Moving Picture Weekly (1915-1920)

U.S. Citizenship Is Based on Principles, Not Heritage

… on the basis of identity, with pride in their heritage and their history, and counter radical multiculturalism on campus."       – … the Naturalization Act of 1790 was made meaningless for African Americans by its reference to "free white persons." …
Cover of The Invisible Bridge by Rick Perlstein

There Are No Heroes Here: American Malaise in the Seventies

Review of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, by Rick Perlstein (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014)
… or the “New Right.” Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus , the first in … won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history, and The New York Times named the second book Nixonland: The … some ways, a similar messiah complex. The Democrat from the South mastered what Perlstein calls “the signature Carter …
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Oval Office in 2009.

Don’t Get Tough, Barack

… the NBA. Or the NFL. This is politics, where getting tough and acting tough matters not because it has to matter, but because people say it matters. But maybe it doesn’t. And maybe that’s the new politics that you are talking … Grossman is the author of 'Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration' (1989) and a writer …
Refugees eating lunch outside the barracks.

Waiting in Limbo: Life as a Refugee in Serbia

… 15 miles from the Hungarian border. He had a sunken face and dark circles under his eyes. “If you saw my picture on … told me. For three months he had been stuck in Serbia, and after nine failed attempts to enter Hungary, he was … border crossing, most refugees can be found 125 miles south in Belgrade. In February 2017, there were over 600 new …
Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger, by Bruce Kuklick book cover.

Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger

Review of Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger, by Bruce Kuklick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)
… there have been scores of foreign policy intellectuals and experts whose theories competed for the attention of … from a public faith in learned knowledge. To understand American foreign policy, according to Kuklick, requires … Kennedy in his criticism, because the president saw South Vietnam in terms of "abstract Communism" rather than …
Barack Obama in 2008

How Eloquence Has Paved the Way to the White House

… for being all word, no act. Yet that's wrong on the facts, and the implication is unfair. Obama's oratory has carried … of hope but a platitude." Yet throughout U.S. history candidates have excited constituents with their words and, … not simply because of his experience as governor of a small southern state. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic …
Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill Final Vote.

True Bipartisanship Is Not Love and Kisses

… the Thirteen Colonies, Montesquieu insisted, factionalism and self-interest would destroy any democratic system.   To … that harnessed factionalism to a system of checks and balances. That humans pursue their own selfish interests … Only when politicians violated the rule of law — as did Southern Democrats did when they seceded from the Union in …
A photograph of Viola Desmond

Remembering Viola Desmond

… Rights struggle. Her story reminds us not only of the past—and present—of anti-Black racism in Canada, but also of the heroism and dignity with which Black Canadians stood up to racial … millionaire who manufactured and sold beauty products to African Americans. Desmond often travelled for business. On …
A painting of the Rubicon scene from the mid-nineteenth century: Gustave Boulanger, Jules-César arrivé au Rubicon.

Julius Caesar Crosses the Rubicon

… One damp and chilly January night in northern Italy—in what was then … Cisalpine Gaul, or today’s Emilia Romagna—the statesman and accomplished general Julius Caesar crossed the little … of Pompey’s unpreparedness. As Caesar and his forces moved south, Pompey and much of the Senate fled Rome completely. …
A Sea Fight with Barbary Corsairs by Laureys a Castro, c. 1681

Hostage Taking in Algeria Is a 200-Year-Old Story

… including a small number of Americans. Dozens of militants and hostages, including at least one American, were killed during a series of attacks by the Algerian military. And you may very well have missed it; in most American news … helped to end (at least temporarily) the Algerian and North African practice of taking European and American captives.   …
Flag of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

NATO Expansion in Eastern Europe: For What and For Whom?

… little attempt by to explain to Americans what NATO was and is all about. Perhaps history from the early cold war and before can be a guide. Established in 1949 as a military … became known in the 1950s as the “Third World,” the Asian, African, Latin American majority of the world’s people that …

Alawites and the Fate of Syria

… demonstrations that began in Tunisia in late 2010 and swept across Libya and Egypt—finally reached Syria, people from various … Alawite population who live between northern Lebanon and southern-central Turkey. While not doctrinally Shi'ite, …
Man at march holding sign that reads "Make America NATIVE Again"

Indigenous Peoples' Day: A Conversation

… Ohio State University experts Melissa Beard Jacob, Ph.D., and Associate Professor Daniel Rivers discuss Indigenous … to what we see happening in the two regions of the American Southeast, what is modern day, Tennessee, Mississippi, … where my Tribe and the Cherokee and others from the southeast already were. But there was deep resistance in the …
Anti-Christian sign in Federal Plaza Chicago 2008

Slavery, Gay Rights, and the Bible

… A growing plurality of Americans accepts gay unions, and approval is strongest among the young. So, changes in … on scripture should have a deeper cause for concern. Time and again, history has shown that people who cite the Bible … of the strongest resistance to gay marriage has come from African American ministers who quote scripture as literally …

Pandemics: Today and Yesterday

… of the role that disease-causing microbes such as bacteria and viruses have played across the long span of human … companions.” Poliovirus ( left ), Influenza ( center ), and COVID-19 ( right ). Our “deadly companions,” to use … into the Greek world from across the Mediterranean in North Africa. "Plague in an Ancient City" (1652-1654) by Michiel …

Savage Gladiators vs. Civilized Amateurs: Rome and Athens in American Sports Culture

… In a 1973 football game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Denver Broncos, a pass was intercepted by the … lucrative of college sports, football and basketball. The Southeastern Conference (SEC) was the first conference to … Atlantic Monthly , David Berri, professor of economics at Southern Utah University, offered some calculations for the …
The detonation of the Castle Bravo thermonuclear bomb

Top Ten Origins: Civil Defense, Nuclear War, and Duct Tape

… Saber-rattling between the current U.S. administration and the North Korean regime and an errant incoming missile alert in Hawaii have focused … develop a thermonuclear weapon, detonating a device in the South Pacific in November 1952. In March 1954, an improved, …

Humans Have Always Lived in a World of Many Worlds

… world of experience ruled by universal laws of science and nature. But the historical record suggests otherwise. If … racist “coloniality.” Thus, along with the descendants of African slaves all over the Americas, indigenous peoples … like the precolonial civilizations of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, even though the latter sustained many …
Omagh, Northern Ireland in 2001.

Taking the Guns Out of Irish Politics

… The decommissioning of weapons in Northern Ireland ought to be a simple enough affair. The parties which … of the political spectrum are now locked in dialogue and committed to principles of nonviolence. All but one of … of Independence, which led to the creation of Northern and Southern Ireland, the British Army handed weapons over for …
Cover of Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots by Thomas S. Kidd

Patriot or Pragmatist?

Review of Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots, by Thomas S. Kidd (New York: Basic Books, 2011)
… an imaginary dagger into his breast. The man had presence, and that's not debatable. The rest of his legacy, however, … surviving source was published four decades after the fact and based on witnesses' recollections. Yet a larger problem … Henry came of age as evangelical Protestantism awakened the southern colonies. He heard the sermons of influential …
In 2014, the debate about the underlying causes of "long, hot summers" remerged with the high-profile police killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and others.

Long Hot Summers and Separate Societies

Review of Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism, by Steven M. Gillon (New York: Basic Books, 2018)
… of structural racism or because of the breakdown of “law and order?” Is white, affluent society to blame for such … color or are they the “thin blue line” separating society and chaos? Fifty years ago, those urban riots resulted in … chapters, “conservative newspapers, Republicans, southern [white] Democrats, and disaffected whites” did not. …