History Readings

back in America we haven’t had an official, declared policy of fiscal austerity — but we’ve nonetheless had plenty of austerity in practice, thanks to the federal sequester and sharp cuts by state and local governments. The good news is that we, too, seem to have stopped tightening the screws: Public spending isn’t surging, but at least it has stopped falling. And the economy is doing much better as a result. We are finally starting to see the kind of growth, in employment and G.D.P., that we should have been seeing all along — and the public’s mood is rapidly improving.

You know the spiel: that the U.S. economy is ailing because Obamacare is a job-killer and the president is a redistributionist, that Mr. Obama’s anti-business speeches (he hasn’t actually made any, but never mind) have hurt entrepreneurs’ feelings, inducing them to take their marbles and go home.

The truth is that the private sector has done surprisingly well under Mr. Obama, adding 6.7 million jobs since he took office, compared with just 3.1 million at this point under President George W. Bush. Corporate profits have soared, as have stock prices. What held us back was unprecedented public-sector austerity: At this point in the Bush years, government employment was up by 1.2 million, but under Mr. Obama it’s down by 600,000. Sure enough, now that this de facto austerity is easing, the economy is perking up.

this did not mean or even suggest a move away from his policies or a move away from the right's dominance of Israeli politics. It simply meant that Netanyahu himself had - perhaps - worn out his welcome with just too many people. But Lieberman's move suggests that the decline in Netanyahu's fortunes may be coinciding with or catalyzing a broader change

Today, more than ever, it is clear to everyone that Israel-U.S. relations are the foundation of any economic, security and diplomatic approach. It is our responsibility to strengthen those ties immediately."

The key with Oren - a very significant Netanyahu ally, though of a very different sort from Lieberman - is his rationale for joining Kahlon and how fundamentally similar it is to Lieberman's argument noted above. Call it the thinking man's version of the argument to what we might call Lieberman's grunting man's version. Still it is the same: Israel faces of crisis of diplomatic isolation.

it's Netanyahu's deteriorating fortunes which are clear. One of these problems is that to Netanyahu's right there is his former aide and now very uneasy ally Naftali Bennet of the Jewish Home party. Bennet doesn't pussy-foot around with notional support of two states. He says no two states and no to basically everything else. His solution is for Israel to annex all the land in the West Bank that has few or no Arabs and let the rest just exist forever as an 'autonomous' region under Israeli security control. For rightist nationalist and religious nationalist Israelis, Bennett is complete and coherent. He also comes off as more likable and cool, especially if you are extremely illiberal and fairly out of touch with reality. The most recent polls show his party getting 16 Knesset seats - the third highest after Labor and Likud. There's a non-trivial chance that a further deterioration of Netanyahu/Likud fortunes could have Bennett vaulting way ahead and becoming the major party of the right.

any governing body, democratic or tyrannical, peace-loving or expansionist, “was obliged to maintain at its heart an institution committed to treachery and violence,” and because “violence and coercion . . . lay at the heart of social existence.” The earliest states required force to maintain systems of agricultural production; mature ones found that the threat of violence — by police within their borders, by armies between them — was, sadly, the best way to keep the peace.

Third, citizens thus face the duty of confronting and trying to control violence carried out in their name by the state, without blaming religion for it or imagining that the solution lies in a cleaner separation of church and state.

This extends to understanding the roots of violence or terrorism directed against them: “As an inspiration for terrorism . . . nationalism has been far more productive than religion.”

In nearly all cases, she argues, violent impulses that originated elsewhere — with nationalism, struggles for territory, resentment at loss of power — may have presented themselves as “religious” disputes but really had little to do with faith.

Armstrong demonstrates again and again that the great spasms of cruelty and killing through history have had little or no religious overlay. In modern times Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all atheists, and the power behind the Holocaust, Armstrong says, was an ethnic rather than a religious hatred. An overemphasis on religion’s damage can blind people to the nonholy terrors that their states inflict.

Before antibiotics, and with the new crowding and population explosion brought on by the Industrial Revolution, cholera, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis and typhoid were looming threats. And with no regulation of the advertising industry, manufacturers could claim pretty much anything.

the potato blight meant that huge numbers of English citizens were also starving. Goodman notes that the poor were markedly shorter than the wealthy, and several inches shorter than the average Londoner today. “It takes a lot of hunger to do that to people,” she adds. But even when money wasn’t an issue, self-abnegation was. In many homes children were sent to bed without dinner not as a punishmen

Here are the things you don’t think about when you’re watching something like “The Forsyte Saga.” The choking air pollution from all the coal fires. The atrophy of a woman’s stomach and chest muscles from years of relying on a corset for shape and posture. The fact that a country that saw its population almost triple within a few decades had no real sewage system, which meant that by 1858, the Thames was overflowing with human waste.

drugs that did nothing might have been preferable to the “tonics” that did work, which often contained laudanum or mercury. It was speculated that as much as a third of the infant mortality rate in Manchester had to do not with disease but with drugging children. Popular tonics like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup and Street’s Infant Quietness did indeed stop children from being pesky, as they were filled with opiates. Unfortunately they also stopped children from wanting to eat,

the logic of his larger narrative point — to help us see how deeply intertwined our scientific and social worlds really are, and how a broader appreciation for causes and effects (the growth of the Sun Belt, in this case, ultimately leading to Ronald Reagan’s sweeping victories) can arrange the noise of history into a more coherent tune.

Johnson has a handy phrase for what he’s seeking to examine with this kind of historical approach: hummingbird effects.

it’s the triggers that so successfully propel his narrative, which helps explain why his work on innovation, along with that of writers like Walter Isaacson, is now pushing technological history into the nonfiction mainstream

innovation is almost never the result of a lone genius experiencing a sudden voilà! moment; it’s a complex process involving a dizzying number of inputs, individuals, setbacks and (sometimes) accidents. Also, it’s hardly the exclusive domain of private-sector entrepreneurs. Important ideas are often driven by academics, governments and philanthropists.

technological histories like this help us reckon with how much we miss by focusing too exclusively on economic, cultural and political history. Not that any one domain is superior to another — only that Johnson proves you can’t explain one without the others.

technological history may have an advantage in one regard: It not only helps readers better see where we’ve been, but urges us to think harder about where we’re going. “We need to be able to predict and understand, as best as we can, the hummingbird effects that will transform other fields after each innovation takes root,”

what about the United States? Before the 1914 war, the great economic potential of the U.S. was suppressed by its ineffective political system, dysfunctional financial system, and uniquely violent racial and labor conflicts. “America was a byword for urban graft, mismanagement and greed-fuelled politics, as much as for growth, production, and profit,”

as World War I entered its third year—and the first year of Tooze’s story—the balance of power was visibly tilting from Europe to America. The belligerents could no longer sustain the costs of offensive war. Cut off from world trade, Germany hunkered into a defensive siege, concentrating its attacks on weak enemies like Romania. The Western allies, and especially Britain, outfitted their forces by placing larger and larger war orders with the United States

His Wilson is no dreamy idealist. The president’s animating idea was an American exceptionalism of a now-familiar but then-startling kind.

That staggering quantity of Allied purchases called forth something like a war mobilization in the United States. American factories switched from civilian to military production; American farmers planted food and fiber to feed and clothe the combatants of Europe

But unlike in 1940-41, the decision to commit so much to one side’s victory in a European war was not a political decision by the U.S. government. Quite the contrary: President Wilson wished to stay out of the war entirely. He famously preferred a “peace without victory.” The trouble was that by 1916, the U.S. commitment to Britain and France had grown—to borrow a phrase from the future—too big to fail.

His Republican opponents—men like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root—wished to see America take its place among the powers of the earth. They wanted a navy, an army, a central bank, and all the other instrumentalities of power possessed by Britain, France, and Germany. These political rivals are commonly derided as “isolationists” because they mistrusted the Wilson’s League of Nations project. That’s a big mistake. They doubted the League because they feared it would encroach on American sovereignty.

Grant presents this story as a laissez-faire triumph. Wartime inflation was halted. Borrowing and spending gave way to saving and investing. Recovery then occurred naturally, without any need for government stimulus. “The hero of my narrative is the price mechanism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand,

It was Wilson who wished to remain aloof from the Entente, who feared that too close an association with Britain and France would limit American options.

Wilson was guided by a different vision: Rather than join the struggle of imperial rivalries, the United States could use its emerging power to suppress those rivalries altogether. Wilson was the first American statesman to perceive that the United States had grown, in Tooze’s words, into “a power unlike any other. It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state,’ exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world.”

Wilson hoped to deploy this emerging super-power to enforce an enduring peace. His own mistakes and those of his successors doomed the project,

What went wrong? “When all is said and done,” Tooze writes, “the answer must be sought in the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans and the Japanese [leaders of the early 1920s] to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security. … Given the violence they had already experienced and the risk of even greater future devastation, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain could all see this. But what was no less obvious was that only the US could anchor such a new order.”

And that was what Americans of the 1920s and 1930s declined to do—because doing so implied too much change at home for them: “At the hub of the rapidly evolving, American-centered world system there was a polity wedded to a conservative vision of its own future.”

The Forgotten Depression is a polemic embedded within a narrative, an argument against the Obama stimulus joined to an account of the depression of 1920-21. As Grant correctly observes, that depression was one of the sharpest and most painful in American history.

Then, after 18 months of extremely hard times, the economy lurched into recovery. By 1923, the U.S. had returned to full employment.

“By the end of 1916, American investors had wagered two billion dollars on an Entente victory,” computes Tooze (relative to America’s estimated GDP of $50 billion in 1916, the equivalent of $560 billion in today’s money).

the central assumption of his version of events is the same one captured in Rothbard’s title half a century ago: that America’s economic history constitutes a story unto itself.

Americans, meanwhile, were preoccupied with the problem of German recovery. How could Germany achieve political stability if it had to pay so much to France and Belgium? The Americans pressed the French to relent when it came to Germany, but insisted that their own claims be paid in full by both France and Britain.

Germany, for its part, could only pay if it could export, and especially to the world’s biggest and richest consumer market, the United States. The depression of 1920 killed those export hopes. Most immediately, the economic crisis sliced American consumer demand precisely when Europe needed it most.

But the gravest harm done by the depression to postwar recovery lasted long past 1921. To appreciate that, you have to understand the reasons why U.S. monetary authorities plunged the country into depression in 1920.

Monetary authorities, worried that inflation would revive and accelerate, made the fateful decision to slam the credit brakes, hard. Unlike the 1918 recession, that of 1920 was deliberately engineered. There was nothing invisible about it. Nor did the depression “cure itself.” U.S. officials cut interest rates and relaxed credit, and the economy predictably recovered

But 1920-21 was an inflation-stopper with a difference. In post-World War II America, anti-inflationists have been content to stop prices from rising. In 1920-21, monetary authorities actually sought to drive prices back to their pre-war levels

James Grant hails this accomplishment. Adam Tooze forces us to reckon with its consequences for the rest of the planet.

When the U.S. opted for massive deflation, it thrust upon every country that wished to return to the gold standard (and what respectable country would not?) an agonizing dilemma. Return to gold at 1913 values, and you would have to match U.S. deflation with an even steeper deflation of your own, accepting increased unemployment along the way. Alternatively, you could re-peg your currency to gold at a diminished rate. But that amounted to an admission that your money had permanently lost value—and that your own people, who had trusted their government with loans in local money, would receive a weaker return on their bonds than American creditors who had lent in dollars.

Britain chose the former course; pretty much everybody else chose the latter.

The consequences of these choices fill much of the second half of The Deluge. For Europeans, they were uniformly grim, and worse.

But one important effect ultimately rebounded on Americans. America’s determination to restore a dollar “as good as gold” not only imposed terrible hardship on war-ravaged Europe, it also threatened to flood American markets with low-cost European imports. The flip side of the Lost Generation enjoying cheap European travel with their strong dollars was German steelmakers and shipyards underpricing their American competitors with weak marks.

American leaders of the 1920s weren’t willing to accept this outcome. In 1921 and 1923, they raised tariffs, terminating a brief experiment with freer trade undertaken after the election of 1912. The world owed the United States billions of dollars, but the world was going to have to find another way of earning that money than selling goods to the United States.

Between 1924 and 1930, world financial flows could be simplified into a daisy chain of debt. Germans borrowed from Americans, and used the proceeds to pay reparations to the Belgians and French. The French and Belgians, in turn, repaid war debts to the British and Americans. The British then used their French and Italian debt payments to repay the United States, who set the whole crazy contraption in motion again. Everybody could see the system was crazy. Only the United States could fix it. It never did.

The reckless desperation of Hitler’s war provides context for the horrific crimes of his regime. Hitler’s empire could not feed itself, so his invasion plan for the Soviet Union contemplated the death by starvation of 20 to 30 million Soviet urban dwellers after the invaders stole all foodstuffs for their own use. Germany lacked workers, so it plundered the labor of its conquered peoples. By 1944, foreigners constituted 20 percent of the German workforce and 33 percent of armaments workers

“If man accumulates enough combustible material, God will provide the spark.” So it happened in 1929. The Deluge that had inundated the rest of the developed world roared back upon the United States.

From the start, the United States was Hitler’s ultimate target. “In seeking to explain the urgency of Hitler’s aggression, historians have underestimated his acute awareness of the threat posed to Germany, along with the rest of the European powers, by the emergence of the United States as the dominant global superpower,” Tooze writes. “The originality of National Socialism was that, rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilize the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order.”

Germany was a weaker and poorer country in 1939 than it had been in 1914. Compared with Britain, let alone the United States, it lacked the basic elements of modernity: There were just 486,000 automobiles in Germany in 1932, and one-quarter of all Germans still worked as farmers as of 1925. Yet this backward land, with an income per capita comparable to contemporary “South Africa, Iran and Tunisia,” wagered on a second world war even more audacious than the first.

That way was found: more debt, especially more German debt. The 1923 hyper-inflation that wiped out Germany’s savers also tidied up the country’s balance sheet. Post-inflation Germany looked like a very creditworthy borrower.

On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed. The Hitlerian vision of a united German-led Eurasia equaling the Anglo-American bloc proved a crazed and genocidal fantasy.

The foundation of this order was America’s rise to unique economic predominance a century ago. That predominance is now coming to an end as China does what the Soviet Union and Imperial Germany never could: rise toward economic parity with the United States.

t is coming, and when it does, the fundamental basis of world-power politics over the past 100 years will have been removed. Just how big and dangerous a change that will be is the deepest theme of Adam Tooze's profound and brilliant grand narrative

If Putin admits his Ukraine adventure was a mistake, he will look incredibly foolish and the long knives will be out for him in the Kremlin. If he doesn’t back down, Russians will pay a huge price. Either way, that system will be stressed with unpredictable spillovers on the global economy. Remember: Russia’s 1998 economic collapse — also triggered by low oil prices and the moratorium it declared on payments to foreign debtors — helped to sink the giant American hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, sparking a near meltdown on Wall Street.

in an age when machines and software are ensuring that average is over for workers in developed countries, and everyone needs to be upgrading their skills, what happens to the developing Arab states and Iran, who have used oil money to mask their deficits in knowledge, education and women’s empowerment? Egypt’s military-led government is highly in need of Arab oil money to get through its crisis. A bit of good news: The Islamic State, which depends on oil smuggling, will fail at governing even faster than it already has.

Turkey now “needs more than $200 billion of foreign financing a year, more than a quarter of gross domestic product, to maintain its current level of growth.” There will be less Arab and Russian oil money for that and, last week, with Erdogan being criticized by the European Union (a big source of investment income) for arresting his opponents, the Turkish lira hit a low against the dollar.

But with the web, “all of the sudden we began moving to a market where first mover advantage became enormous,” he said. Connection speeds were growing faster, Americans were starting to shop online, and multiplying e-commerce sites fought gladiatorial battles to control most every area of spending.

If the dawn of the start-up era meant that consumer-oriented ideas were becoming more important than proprietary technology, he asked himself aloud, shouldn’t more women have flooded in?

“The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong,” he added. “The more diverse the early group, the harder it is for people to find common ground.”

David Sacks, on the other hand, was unmarried and unencumbered, and in 1999 he left politics, his law degree and a job at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company to join his Stanford Review friends at a technology start-up, because of “the desire to live on the edge, to fight an epic battle, to experience in a very diluted way what previous generations must have felt as they prepared to go to war,” he wrote at the time. For his generation, he wrote, “instead of violence, unbridled capitalism has become the preferred vehicle for channeling their energy, intellect and aggression.”

his lack of social grace became an asset, according to Mr. Thiel and other former colleagues. He did not waste time on meetings that seemed pointless, and he bluntly insisted that the engineers whittle an eight-page PayPal registration process down to one.

But those debates did a great deal for Mr. Sacks. After graduation, he and Mr. Thiel published “The Diversity Myth,” a book-length critique of Stanford’s efforts. Within a few more years, he, Mr. Thiel, Mr. Rabois and others had transformed themselves into a close-knit network of technology entrepreneurs — innovators who created billion-dollar business after billion-dollar business, using the ideas, ethos and group bonds they had honed at The Stanford Review.

he and Mr. Thiel now had a setting in which to try out their ideas about diversity and meritocracy. “In the start-up crucible, performing is all that matters,” Mr. Sacks wrote about that time. He wanted to give all job applicants tests of cognitive ability, according to his colleague Keith Rabois, and when the company searched for a new chief executive, one of the requirements was an I.Q. of 160 — genius level.

intentionally or not, he stated something many people quietly believed: The same thing that made Silicon Valley phenomenally successful also kept it homogeneous, and start-ups had an almost inevitable like-with-like quality.

The kind of common ground shared by the early PayPal leaders “is always the critical ingredient on the founding teams,” Mr. Thiel said in an interview. “You have these great friendships that were built over some period of time. Silicon Valley flows out of deep relationships that people have built. That’s the structural reality.”

Another woman from the class of 1994 was quoted in the Fortune article: Trae Vassallo, who was Traci Neist when she built the taco-eating machine all those years ago, attended Stanford Business School with Ms. Herrin and Ms. Bianchini, co-founded a mobile device company, and then joined Kleiner Perkins, a premier venture capital firm.

The success of the struggle to create PayPal, and its eventual sale price, gave the men a new power: the knowledge to create new companies and the ability to fund their own and one another’s. Billion-dollar start-ups had been rare. But in the next few years, the so-called PayPal Mafia went on to found seven companies that reached blockbuster scale, including YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp and a business-messaging service called Yammer, founded by Mr. Sacks and sold a few years later to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.

Since 1999, the number of female partners in venture capital has declined by nearly half, from 10 percent to 6 percent, according to a recent Babson College study.

in early 2014, Ms. Vassallo was quietly let go. The firm was downsizing over all, especially in green technology, one of Ms. Vassallo’s specialties, and men were shown the exit as well. But in interviews, several former colleagues said it was far from an easy environment for women, with all-male outings and fierce internal competition for who got which board seat — meaning internal credit — for each company, not to mention a sexual discrimination lawsuit filed by a female junior partner, scheduled for trial in early 2015.

They also said that Ms. Vassallo, earnest and so technical that she started a robotics program at a local girls’ school, had not been as forceful, or as adept a politician, as some of her male peers.

Less than 10 years after graduation, he and Mr. Thiel had been transformed from outcasts into favorites with a reputation for seeing the future. Far from the only libertarians in Silicon Valley, they had finally found an environment that meshed perfectly with their desire for unfettered competition and freedom from constraints. The money they made seemed like vindication of their ideas.

As classmates started conversations with greetings like “How’s your fund?” some of those who did not work in technology joked that they felt like chumps. The Stanford campus had gone computer science crazy, with the majority of students taking programming courses. A career in technology didn’t feel like a risk anymore — it felt like a wise bet, said Jennifer Widom, a programming professor turned engineering dean. Computer science “is a degree that guarantees you a future, regardless of what form you decide to take it in,” she said.

The nature of start-ups was shifting again, too, this time largely in women’s favor. From servers onward, many components could be inexpensively licensed instead of custom-built. Founders could turn to a multiplying array of investment sources, meaning they no longer had to be supplicants at a handful of male-run venture firms. The promise that the Internet would be a leveler was finally becoming a bit more fulfilled.

The frenzy had an unlikely effect on the some members of the Stanford Review group: They were becoming cheerleaders for women in technology, not for ideological reasons, but for market-based ones.

Like many others, he was finding that the biggest obstacle to starting new companies was a dearth of technical talent so severe they worried it would hinder innovation.

The real surprise of the reunion weekend, however, was that more of the women in the class of ’94 were finally becoming entrepreneurs, later and on a smaller scale than many of the men, but founders nonetheless.

The rhythms of their lives and the technology industry were finally clicking: Companies were becoming easier to start just as their children were becoming more self-sufficient, and they did not want to miss another chance.

In an effort to counter the Common Core push for detextualized skill-based instruction and assessment that has further marginalized social studies education, the NCSS is promoting what it calls “College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework,”

through its choice of partners, its rigid adherence to Common Core lesson guidelines, and the sample material it is promoting, the NCSS has virtually abandoned not just meaningful social studies education, but education for democracy and citizenship as well.

My biggest problem with the C3 Framework as presented in this new document on instruction is its attempt to adopt a fundamentally flawed Common Core approach to social studies and history based on the close reading of text without exploring historical context

how Common Core as it is being implemented will mean the end of history.

In the C3 Framework inquiry approach, students start in Dimension 1 by “developing questions and planning inquiries,” however the inquiry is really already “planned” because material they use is pre-selected. It is also not clear what their questions will be based on since they do not necessarily have any background on the subject. In Dimension 3 students evaluate sources using evidence, but again, devoid of historical context. Dimension 4 is supposed to be C3’s chief addition to Common Core. In Dimension 4 students are supposed to plan activities and become involved in civic life, although of course their options have again already been pre-prescribed.

In Dimension 2, as they read the text, which sixth graders and many eighth graders will find difficult, students discuss “How was citizenship revolutionary in 1776?” The question requires them to assume that colonists had already formulated a concept of citizenship, which I do not believe they had, a concept of nation, which they definitely did not, and an understanding that somehow what they were doing was “revolutionary,” which was still being debated.

Some of the organizations involved in writing the C3 Frameworks have positions so politically skewed to the right that NCSS should be embarrassed about including them in the project. In this category I include Gilder Lehrman, The Bill of Rights Institute, and The Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship (CEEE).

Conspicuously missing from the group of contributors is the Zinn Education Project which would have provided a radically different point of view.

What we have in the C3 Framework is standard teaching at best but a lot of poor teaching and propaganda as well.

Instead of challenging Common Core, the NCSS begs to be included. Instead of presenting multiple perspectives, it sells advertising in the form of lessons to its corporate and foundation sponsors. But worst in their own terms, in a time of mass protest against police brutality by high school and college students across the United States, active citizenship in a democratic society is stripped of meaning and becomes little more than idle discussion and telling student to vote when they are eighteen.

The German invasion of Belgium was unleashed on the morning of Tuesday 4 August. Britain declared war upon Germany later that evening, the very instant her short ultimatum expired. London waited least. In this sense, the German invasion was the occasion of Britain’s intervention – but not the cause. It arrived as a gift from Mars for British politicians and propagandists. It provided political cover for a prior commitment to war. It squeezed Russia, and the invasion of Eastern Europe, out of the national consciousness and made war much easier to sell to the British public.

In the Cabinet, as in the Liberal Party, the call for neutrality undoubtedly had the support of the majority. Beyond the ranks of Liberals, neutralism was strong among a wide circle of internationalists and socialists. 20,000 people filled Trafalgar Square on Sunday 2 August demanding neutrality and peace. Had a credible active neutral diplomacy been pursued single-mindedly during the crisis, it might have averted war. Most importantly, the defeat of the peace activists in 1914 testifies not to the hopelessness of their cause but to the rapidity of the crisis. 

At some point, it simply comes down to what people believe, and yes, how they feel.

politically, these biases were greatest among the moderately conservative and weakest among the strongly libera

The data showed that whites and East Asians had the strongest pro-white/anti-black biases. These biases were also strongest among those 65 and older, although those 18 to 24 ranked second among the age groups

It is into this morass of feeling that we must step when discussing race. That is why interpersonal race discussions can feel so strange, messy and uncomfortable — we must confront the amorphousness and the mythologies. We must value the questions even when we cannot answer them. We must allow ourselves to empathize with other people’s feelings.

“It’s one thing for me to be mistaken for a waiter at a gala. It’s another thing for my son to be mistaken for a robber and to be handcuffed, or worse, if he happens to be walking down the street and is dressed the way teenagers dress.”

This gets at another subtlety of race discussions: graduations of severity.

“just 40 percent of Americans believe race relations in the U.S. are good — the lowest share registered by the poll since 1995.”

I look at it optimistically. I see the result of vociferous truth-telling and justice-calling, in the face of which fairy tale obliviousness is reduced to ashes. We are being confronted and afflicted by the realities that though racial progress has been made on many measures, that progress isn’t permanent or perfect

And we can no longer dismiss racial discussions as victimhood affinity. Decrying systemic victimization is not synonymous with embracing the identity of the eternally victimized. On the contrary, identifying, condemning and relentlessly fighting oppression is part of the path to liberation.

“Our previous Cuba policy was clearly an irritant and a drag on our policy in the region,”

Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan president and former Sandinista rebel, was chastising Mr. Obama just days ago, saying the United States deserved the top spot in a new list of state sponsors of terrorism. Then, on Wednesday, he saluted the “brave decisions” of the American president.

“We have to recognize the gesture of President Barack Obama, a brave gesture and historically necessary, perhaps the most important step of his presidency,” Mr. Maduro said.

“It removes an excuse for blaming the United States for things,”

“In the last Summit of the Americas, instead of talking about things we wanted to focus on — exports, counternarcotics — we spent a lot of time talking about U.S.-Cuba policy,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “A key factor with any bilateral meeting is, ‘When are you going to change your Cuba policy?’

But while sharp differences persist on many issues, other major Washington policy shifts have recently been applauded in the region, including Mr. Obama’s immigration plan and the resettlement in Uruguay of six detainees from Guantánamo Bay.

“There will be radical and fundamental change,” said Andrés Pastrana, a former president of Colombia. “I think that to a large extent the anti-imperialist discourse that we have had in the region has ended. The Cold War is over.”