History Readings

We argue that writing contemporary history is different from the role historians might play as public intellectuals who draw on their expertise to comment on recent events in the media. Instead, the writing of recent history shifts the boundaries of what might be considered a legitimate topic of historical study. The very definition of “history” has hinged on the sense of a break between past and present that allows for critical perspective. The historians’ traditional task has been to bring a “dead,” absent past back into the present. However, those doing recent history recognize that their subject matter is not fully past, or as Renee Romano puts it in our edited collection about recent history, it’s “not dead yet.”

studying the recent past presents real methodological challenges. It untethers the academic historian from the aspects of our practice that give us all, regardless of field or political bent, a sense of common enterprise: objectivity, perspective, a defined archive, and a secondary literature that is there to be argued with, corrected and leaned upon.

Gillis sees the destruction brought by Sandy as the inevitable result of a pattern of development that disregards all that history tells us about the ocean and its role in daily human life. "We’ve built right up to the edge in the most foolish way," he says. "The whole coast is now an extended suburb."

"There is macro-engineering to be done," concedes Gillis, who thinks rebuilding and preserving wetlands would be a far more effective strategy than hard seawalls. He also cites pioneering Dutch innovations such as floating homes.

"The sensible long-term thing is to think in terms of retreat," he says. Only by regaining our respectful distance from the water’s edge, says Gillis, can we truly protect ourselves from the cost – both human and financial – of living on the margin where sea meets land.

The virtually unanimous view throughout the course of four decades of revised regulation was that the Republican Party and its candidates would be the major beneficiaries, and, so far, that has been true.

in 2010 — in the aftermath of deregulation — the balance skewed decisively to the right. In the current 2011-12 election cycle, it shifted overwhelmingly to the right:

The movement rightwards of almost half a billion dollars in this cycle alone — signified by the red bar on the graph representing Republican donations — is not, however, the pure gold that analysts on both sides expected.

"My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those people -- not all of them, but most of them -- who are still basing their positions on race. Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists, and the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and president, and everything to do with the color of his skin, and that's despicable," - Laurence Wilkerson, former chief-of-staff for Colin Powell.

51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey

When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election.

Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57 percent in the implicit test.

While I don’t know how Obamacare will turn out, I’m certain that my two favorite Obama initiatives will be transformative.

His Race to the Top program in education has already set off a nationwide wave of school reform, and his Race to the Top in vehicles — raising the mileage standards for American-made car and truck fleets from 27.5 miles per gallon to 54.5 m.p.g. between now and 2025 — is already spurring a wave of innovation in auto materials, engines and software.

they are the future of progressive politics in this age of austerity: government using its limited funds and steadily rising performance standards to stimulate states and businesses to innovate better economic, educational and environmental practices.

When the topic is growing income inequality, it’s hard to prettify an imbalance between the rich and everybody else, so instead conservatives try to argue that it doesn’t exist.

Anyway you slice it, income inequality has been growing rapidly. (Overall, the federal government effects about one-quarter less redistribution today through taxes and benefits than it did in 1979

Hassett and Mathur next point out that people’s earnings tend to rise over their working lifetimes, so “snapshot measures of income inequality can be misleading.” True, but when you correct for demographic factors (today’s population is older than it was 33 years ago, and divorce and single parenthood have made households smaller), you find that income inequality, though less extreme than shown by the standard measure, is also growing faster than shown by the standard measure.

Barzun's greatest influence was on the writing of cultural history; he helped invent it. As a student at Columbia he was among the first to integrate the narration of wars and government with the evolution of art, science, education and fashion.

Looking back, the key disagreement between Obama and Romney wasn’t over whether the auto industry should survive. It was over whether the government should act to make the industry's survival possible—whether, facing an instance of market breakdown, the government should intervene in order to protect hundreds of thousands, and maybe more than a million, people from losing their jobs.  

that’s really the same philosophical argument Obama and Romney are having when they debate other areas of policy.

the Detroit rescue reveals another difference between the two—one that is more about character than ideology

For a certain sort of conservative, tax cuts and smaller government are always the answer, no matter what the situation. For a certain sort of liberal, tax increases for the rich and more government programs are always the answer.

The moderate does not believe that there are policies that are permanently right.

Today, we face our own set of imbalances.

What kind of president would Mitt Romney be?

I'll draw on the work of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who has argued that presidents' fortunes depend on how they establish their political legitimacy in the particular circumstances under which which they assume power.

Our current political regime emerged in the wake of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, and it has continued even through the Democratic presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It is politically conservative and skeptical of government, at least in contrast to the New Deal/civil-rights regime that preceded it. And the Republicans have been the dominant party. Skowronek's key insight is that a president's ability to establish his political legitimacy depends on where he sits in "political time": Is he allied with the dominant regime or opposed to it, and is the regime itself powerful or in decline?

The big secret of the Obama administration’s approach to national security, which neither party has had a strong incentive to admit, is that the president’s first-term policies have mostly been a continuation of policies put in place during George W. Bush’s second term, when the Cheneyite maximalism of the immediate post-9/11 era was tempered by a dose of pragmatism.

the president has mostly governed – sometimes by choice, sometimes out of necessity – as a steward of the powers Bush successfully claimed and the war-on-terror architecture that he established. What’s more, in his presidency’s biggest decisions about the use of force abroad – the Afghan surge, the Libya intervention, the escalated drone campaign (and the “kill list” that accompanies it), the green light on the raid to get Bin Laden – Obama has almost always erred on the side of hawkishness and expanded executive authority.

An acknowledgment of consensus is always better than a bogus disagreement, and Romney’s decision to play up his areas of concord with the president didn’t just serve the cause of reassuring swing voters worried by his sometimes hyper-hawkish rhetoric: It served the cause of truth as well.

In most areas of the economy, free-market principles insure that products and services keep improving, and that consumers get better and better deals. But the free market, though it may be the best way of allocating new TVs and cars, falters when it comes to paying for bypass surgery or chemotherapy. The reasons for this were established nearly fifty years ago, by the economist Kenneth Arrow, in a classic article entitled “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” Arrow showed that health care is distinctive in ways that limit the power of the market. Because people don’t have the expertise to evaluate doctors, hospitals, or treatments, it’s hard for them to comparison-shop. Because they can’t pay for major care out of pocket, they must rely on insurance, thereby often losing the final say in what to buy or how much to spend. More fundamentally, markets work only when consumers have the power to say no if the price isn’t right. Yet it’s very hard for people to say no in the case of things like end-of-life care or brain surgery.

the truth is that, despite the rhetoric, Romney’s main concern isn’t to bring down over-all health-care costs. In fact, he has regularly attacked one of the Affordable Care Act’s most aggressive cost-cutting measures—the independent board that can make binding recommendations on how to cut Medicare spending. What he wants is just to have the government less involved in health care. Insofar as his plans would lower federal health-care spending, it’s not because of the power of the free market; it’s because a Romney Administration would simply have the government do less. Romney would eliminate the Obamacare subsidies for health insurance. He would turn Medicaid into a block grant to the states and trim its annual budget, with the result that its funding would lag behind the rise in health-care costs. And, if he adopts his running mate Paul Ryan’s premium-support plan for Medicare, he would make Medicare recipients pay higher premiums. With these changes, the government would spend less, but only because it would provide less, and Americans would get less. It’s like saving on defense by protecting only two-thirds of the country.

The real issue, come November 6th, isn’t about who has the best ideas for controlling health-care costs. It’s about who has the right idea of what government should do. ♦

Not only has France apologized for some past actions, it has also stopped boasting of others. in 2005, the government of Jacques Chirac quietly but firmly refused to mark in any but the most restrained way the bicentennial of the Battle of Austerlitz—arguably, the greatest French military victory of all time, carried out by Napoleon Bonaparte against Austria and Russia. Modern France, it was explained, had no business celebrating a bloodbath carried out by a repressive, undemocratic ruler as part of a campaign of naked imperial expansionism.

in the past quarter-century, conservatives have successfully cast any attempt to discuss the country’s historical record impartially in the political realm as a species of heresy—“blaming America first,” as Jeanne Kirkpatrick put it as far back as 1984. A turning point of sorts came in 1994, when the Smithsonian Institution planned an exhibit of the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, accompanied by material that highlighted the human toll of the bombing,  inviting debate on its morality.  The outcry from conservatives and veterans groups was deafening, and few politicians dared to defend the Smithsonian, which eventually canceled the exhibit.

It would be wrong to say that the French have moved away from sentiments of patriotism and national pride. But the country’s cultural and political elites now tend, overwhelmingly, to phrase their patriotism in terms of “ideals” and “values” to which, they readily admit, the country has often failed to live up.

One consequence of Schrems’s activism is the ease with which Facebook users can now download data the company has collected about them. It could not easily send CDs to each of the 40,000 people who requested their information as part of his campaign, so it created online tools available to users worldwide.

As I've written before, I'm one of those people who does NOT have a Facebook page - because placing your personal details online is a BAD idea.As a SF Fan, one of my favorite TV series is "The Prisoner" created by the late Patrick McGoohan, wherein a kidnapped spy is taken to a Village where the residents are monitored 24 hours a day and they want to know everything!Sound Familiar?At age 53, I'm old enough to remember the COINTELPRO program of the FBI during the Viet-Nam war to place anti-war protesters under surveillance.As a Historian, I have read of the infamous "Ford Research Department" where Henry Ford would spy on his employees for using alcohol or union activities!Any time that information is collected it will eventually be used for a purpose; and the naivete of the current generation is pitiful.Facebook is a really bad idea. Just wait till all these kids go for job interviews and their posts will be used against them.

The French proposal is half right. Broadening the tax base is a good idea. But the point is to allow for lower overall tax rates, not to confiscate wealth. We could do more to address inequality by making sure that all income is taxed, rather than increasing rates on the already burdened.

The third category is entrepreneurial income, like small-business income, founders’ stock and carried interest for fund managers. The income here is mostly a return on labor, not capital, but it is often lightly taxed as investment income. And this is where the debate tends to get heated.

We should start by plucking the low-hanging fruit. Carried interest is labor income, not investment income, and it’s not as mobile as financial capital. Few New York-based fund managers will give up United States citizenship and move permanently to Singapore just to avoid paying tax on carried interest.

we have grown so accustomed to this divide that we no longer flinch at the brazen political attacks on either side — even when the logic underlying these attacks is hard to fathom.

attack ads work, in large part, because we don’t understand them. Statements take advantage of a fact about human psychology called the “illusion of explanatory depth,” an idea developed by the Yale psychologist Frank Keil and his students. We typically feel that we understand how complex systems work even when our true understanding is superficial.

it is not until we are asked to explain how such a system works — whether it’s what’s involved in a trade deal with China or how a toilet flushes — that we realize how little we actually know.