History Readings

While the political Lincoln may be difficult for us to acknowledge at a time when politics and partisan commitments are widely denigrated, Lincoln’s presidency demonstrates that partisanship and political ruthlessness can be used to advance the highest ideals. And there were no clearer cases than during his 1864 battle for reelection (without which the slave-owning South would almost certainly have triumphed) and subsequent effort to pass the 13th Amendment, which at long last purged slavery from the Constitution. In the end, Lincoln became the master of events because he was the master of politics.

Is Romney really a job creator? Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, takes a scalpel to the claims.

Bain Capital is a product of the Great Deformation. It has garnered fabulous winnings through leveraged speculation in financial markets that have been perverted and deformed by decades of money printing and Wall Street coddling by the Fed. So Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise.

Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital, from 1984 through early 1999. According to the campaign’s narrative, it was then that he became immersed in the toils of business enterprise, learning along the way the true secrets of how to grow the economy and create jobs. The fact that Bain’s returns reputedly averaged more than 50 percent annually during this period is purportedly proof of the case

It will not take much to involve Britons in the centenary of the First World War – fascination with the war has never been greater

There are sociological reasons for the continuing memory of the First World War that go beyond the overwhelming sadness at so many lives cut short. The war marked the beginning of the modern age; and its shock waves are still being felt today in our social and political structures, our economy and our technology.

Much of the poignancy of the First World War comes from the transformation of mood over its four years

Strategists affiliated with the Obama and Romney campaigns say they have access to information about the personal lives of voters at a scale never before imagined. And they are using that data to try to influence voting habits — in effect, to train voters to go to the polls through subtle cues, rewards and threats in a manner akin to the marketing efforts of credit card companies and big-box retailers.

In the weeks before Election Day, millions of voters will hear from callers with surprisingly detailed knowledge of their lives. These callers — friends of friends or long-lost work colleagues — will identify themselves as volunteers for the campaigns or independent political groups. The callers will be guided by scripts and call lists compiled by people — or computers — with access to details like whether voters may have visited pornography Web sites, have homes in foreclosure, are more prone to drink Michelob Ultra than Corona or have gay friends or enjoy expensive vacations.

“You don’t want your analytical efforts to be obvious because voters get creeped out,” said a Romney campaign official who was not authorized to speak to a reporter. “A lot of what we’re doing is behind the scenes.”

Within five days of each other, the English speaking world's two greatest historians to have emerged from the Marxist tradition have died: Eugene Genovese, on September 26, and Eric Hobsbawm

I esteemed their formality of manners and dress, and their contempt for what is in fact an apolitical lifestyle progressivism. This form of progressivism, as they keenly understood, amounts to an embrace of the unlimited autonomy of individual desire, and as such is a product of -- and serves the interest of -- an unrestrained and socially corrosive capitalism.

Genovese has doggedly pursued the truth for as long as necessary and regardless of its ramifications. His ultimate ambition has been to write the definitive study of southern slaveholders

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive.

Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends

one small super PAC has been generating impressive amounts of attention by focusing almost exclusively on online videos.

Their most recent video features the aforementioned Jackson urging a family of 2008 Obama supporters via storybook rhyme to “wake the f*** up!” and volunteer again. It’s garnered 1.5 million views on YouTube and likely much more via an embedded Yahoo version where it first debuted.

Written by the bestselling author of Go the F*** to Sleep, Adam Mansbach, and directed by Boaz Yakin (Remember The Titans), the short film contains all the hallmarks of JCER’s viral formula. Well known actor + obscenity + progressive message = Internet hit.

For the first time since researchers began tracking the religious identity of Americans, fewer than half said they were Protestants, a steep decline from 40 years ago when Protestant churches claimed the loyalty of more than two-thirds of the population.

it was not just liberal mainline Protestants, like Methodists or Episcopalians, who abandoned their faith, but also more conservative evangelical and “born again” Protestants. The losses were among white Protestants

When they leave, instead of switching churches, they join the growing ranks who do not identify with any religion. Nearly one in five Americans say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.”

“The written Constitution cannot work as intended without something outside of it — America’s unwritten Constitution — to fill its gaps and stabilize its meaning.” The meaning of the “inside” — the text’s literal words—cannot be specified independently of the “outside” — the set of assumptions and values that hangs over the enterprise and gives the deeds and words that occur within it shape and point. The text may not enumerate those assumptions and values, but, explains Amar, they “go without saying,” and because they go without saying the words that are said receive their meaning from them. “The unwritten Constitution … helps make sense of the text,” a sense that would not be available if an interpreter were confined to a “clause-bound literalism.”

Explicitness, it turns out, is not a possible human achievement, which is no big deal because communication and understanding do not require it.What they do require is a grasp of the enterprise within which a particular utterance or writing is encountered.

The unwritten principles that preside over constitutional interpretation should not be thought of as items in a list; they are, rather, part and parcel of a general project — the implementation of American-style democracy — that is not defined and limited by the implications and considerations it gives rise to.

For most of his presidency, the unemployment rate has been held up as the biggest piece of evidence that President Obama is a failure. When the news came today that it's finally dropped below the level the it was at when he took office, it only took minutes for the doubters to assume the entire enterprise is nothing but a lie.

It seems that there is a certain brand of conservatives that is so determined to deny the president the credit for any good news, that they no longer believe good news is even possible. Rather than argue that the change in unemployment might be in spite of, not because of, the president's policies—a perfectly defensible stance—they insist that the change is not even happening. From there, it's not a huge leap to believing that the news is not just wrong, but a deliberate fabrication.

this inherent distrust seems to premeate every corner of the Obama record. Rather then argue that the President is out of touch with most Americans, some must go further and insist that he is not an American at all. Increased Democratic turnout sways the election? Voter fraud. Miscounting the size of a crowds at public events? The media is bending over backwards for their favorite liberal. Convention events canceled due to the weather? The National Weather Service does what they're told. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court decides a tough case in the President's favor? He was blackmailed.

a relatively new discipline known as the digital humanities — in which long-lost civilizations can be recreated as virtual interfaces, and personal testimony from wars, disasters and revolutions can come together in interactive databases.

“Suddenly we went from using the computer as a powerful tool to the rise of the Web as a public space, which brought with it the possibility of creating new media, and new forms of scholarly practice,”

the explosion of technological change has transformed the nature of scholarship — and of universities — in ways we are only beginning to understand. “An archive is no longer a bunch of things; it’s a place where we can do things,” he said.

The president was stammering and hesitant, and frequently looked out of his depth. Romney's performance wasn't brilliant, just good, but that made it brilliant relative to expectations. The greater shock, amplifying Romney's success, was that Obama was so bad.

Again and again, he missed open goals. He let Romney say that he, Romney, would take better care of entitlements than Obama would. Incredible. He watched as his attack on Romney's tax proposal kept bouncing off, until he looked feeble for repeating it. Why on earth didn't he force Romney to say which deductions would be removed to pay for the lower rates? He let Romney boast about his Massachusetts health care plan and in the same breath denounce Obamacare (to all intents and purposes, the same policy). Romney's argument about letting states be laboratories is tactically clever, and there's something to it, but surely Obama could have asked why Romney doesn't at least advocate Romneycare to the rest of the country. The president remembered to criticize insurance companies but (unless I missed it) forgot to mention that Obamacare is mainly about covering 50 million people who, you know, don't have health insurance. He let Romney attack him for failing to cut deals with the GOP, as though Republicans would have compromised if only they'd been talked to politely. In response, Obama meekly referred to Republican intransigence, but threw the comment away. That was a chance to lay the blame for paralysis in Washington on Romney's party, where it mostly belongs. And what about the 47 percent--about moochers, dependents, people whom Romney won't ever convince to be responsible, this nation of parasites? Hardly worth mentioning, I suppose.

All debates should be moderated this way. Step back and let the candidates argue with each other. It's revealing, much as Obama on this occasion may regret it.

As the recent riots at a Foxconn factory in northern China demonstrate, growth alone, even at sustained, spectacular rates, has not produced the kind of life satisfaction crucial to a stable society — an experience that shows how critically important good jobs and a strong social safety net are to people’s happiness.

Starting in 1990, as China moved to a free-market economy, real per-capita consumption and gross domestic product doubled, then doubled again. Most households now have at least one color TV. Refrigerators and washing machines — rare before 1990 — are common in cities.

What explains the “U” at a time of unprecedented economic growth?

exceptionalism, a concept that is not sui generis, not very old, and not even American in conception, has come to serve as code for the American Civil Religion that dare not speak its name.

far from believing their nation to be an exception to the rules of nature governing other men and nations, they both hoped their example would transform the whole world and feared that a lack of republican virtue would doom their experiment. In neither case would Americans stand apart from the rest of the human race.

the principal reason to banish the term from historical discourse is that the icky, polysyllabic, Latinate moniker did not even exist until the mid-20th century! No Puritan colonist, no founding Patriot, no Civil War statesman, no 19th century poet, pastor, or propagandist employed the word.

the Spanish are not inherently idle; the labour market in Spain does not sufficiently reward talent and hard work. The Spanish disease that both these young men said they had fled was "amiguismo" –"friendism" – a system where one gets ahead by who one knows.

I recently asked a boss at a well-known Spanish company what percentage of the 300 or so middle-class staff under him did their jobs to the best of their abilities. Despondent, he replied: "The number is low." The deeper sin lies in an institutionalised Spanish system where both the financial and moral incentives to work well are undercut by the perception that if you do not know the right people there is little point in giving the best of yourself at work.

Where does all this come from?

there is a reason President Obama is leading on national security, and it was apparent in his U.N. speech last week, which showed a president who understands that we really do live in a more complex world today — and that saying so is not a cop-out. It’s a road map

Rather than really thinking afresh about the world, Romney has chosen instead to go with the same old G.O.P. bacon and eggs — that the Democrats are toothless wimps who won’t stand up to our foes or for our values, that the Republicans are tough and that it is 1989 all over again. That is, America stands astride the globe with unrivaled power to bend the world our way, and the only thing missing is a president with “will.” The only thing missing is a president who is ready to simultaneously confront Russia, bash China, tell Iraqis we’re not leaving their country, snub the Muslim world by outsourcing our Arab-Israel policy to the prime minister of Israel, green light Israel to bomb Iran — and raise the defense budget while cutting taxes and eliminating the deficit. It’s all “attitude” — without a hint at how we could possibly do all these contradictory things at once, or the simplest acknowledgment that two wars and a giant tax cut under George W. Bush has limited our ability to do even half of them.

Add it all up and it’s a world in which America will have greater responsibility (because our European and Japanese allies are now economically enfeebled) and fewer resources (because we have to cut the defense budget) to manage a more complex set of actors (because so many of the states we have to deal with now are new democracies with power emanating from their people not just one man — like Egypt — or failing states like Pakistan) where our leverage on other major powers is limited (because Russia’s massive oil and gas income gives it great independence and any war we’d want to fight in Asia we’d have to borrow the money from China).

the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colorado, announced that the Arctic sea ice had reached a new low. The sea ice shrinks in the summer and grows again during winter’s long polar night. It usually reaches its minimum extent in mid-September. On September 16, 2012, the N.S.I.D.C. reported, the sea ice covered 1.3 million square miles. This was just half of its average extent during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and nearly twenty per cent less than its extent in 2007, the previous record-low year.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this development. We are now seeing changes occur in a matter of years that, in the normal geological scheme of things, should take thousands, even millions of times longer than that. On the basis of the 2012 melt season, one of the world’s leading experts on the Arctic ice cap, Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, has predicted that the Arctic Ocean will be entirely ice-free in summer by 2016. Since open water absorbs sunlight, while ice tends to reflect it, this will accelerate global warming. Meanwhile, recent research suggests that the melting of the Arctic ice cap will have, and indeed is probably already having, a profound effect on the U.S. and Europe, making extreme weather events much more likely. As Jennifer Francis, a scientist at Rutgers, observed recently in a conference call with reporters, the loss of sea ice changes the dynamics of the entire system: “It’s like having a new energy source for the atmosphere.”

You might have thought that with the Arctic melting, the U.S. in the midst of what will almost certainly be the warmest year on record, and more than sixty per cent of the lower forty-eight states experiencing “moderate to exceptional” drought, at least one of the candidates would feel compelled to speak out about the issue. If that’s the case, though, you probably live in a different country.

President Obama’s support among Catholic voters has surged since June, according to a new poll, despite a summer that included the Catholic bishops’ religious freedom campaign and the naming of Rep. Paul Ryan, a Catholic, as the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate.

On June 17, Obama held a slight edge over Mitt Romney among Catholics (49-47 percent), according to the Pew Research Center. Since then, Obama has surged ahead, and now leads 54-39 percent, according to a Pew poll conducted on Sept. 16.

a nationwide opinion survey just released as a report (Foreign Policy in the New Millennium) by the highly-respected Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Conducted in late May and early June 2012, the survey resulted in some striking findings.

most Americans are quite disillusioned with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the past decade. Asked about these conflicts, 67 percent of respondents said they had not been worth fighting. Indeed, 69 percent said that, despite the war in Afghanistan, the United States was no safer from terrorism.

Eighty-two percent of those surveyed favored bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan by 2014 or by an earlier date. Majorities also opposed maintaining long-term military bases in either country. And 71 percent agreed that “the experience of the Iraq war should make nations more cautious about using military force to deal with rogue states.”