Year: 2007
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Historical scholarship can be as much the result of accident as planning. How on earth did I come to write a dissertation on Wilhelm Groener? I thought I liked doing social history, not biography. If I studied the army, I was more apt to find common soldiers interesting, not a…
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The Cold War Museum does not yet have a permanent home, but you can visit it on the web. While I welcome this resource, I am disappointed that it focuses almost exclusively on the military side of this conflict. What about the Cold War’s broader impact on culture, politics, and…
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Meet Wilhelm Groener, an unassuming Swabian of modest social provenance who rose to the number two position in the Imperial German army by the end of the First World War. Here he is in about 1920, soon after his retirement from the army in the young Weimar Republic. Groener, the…
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History can be used to justify all manner of circumstances in the present. Want to justify an authoritarian regime in Russia? Referring to Russia’s present conditions can help, but even more effective can be skillful tradition-building that shows Russia’s long line of great authoritarian rulers. And what better place to…
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Brief analysis of the stories that two World War I stereoptic cards tell. The first shows dashing military formations, mounted and on foot. The second shows human remains in a muddy trench.
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The following post originally appeared on my old history blog, Clio and Me, on this date. When I went to the student coffee shop on Friday, the student at the cash register guessed my order before I could tell him what I wanted. I remarked that I had had similar…
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This following post originally appeared on my old history blog, Clio and Me, on this date. I was looking through Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, a play I have used a few times in a survey course on modern Europe. In the back of the English translation by James Kirkup are…
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The following piece first appeared on my former teaching blog, History Survey, on this date, then moved to Clio and Me, before landing here. Do partisan politics have a place in the classroom? No. On the other hand, in a history class it is hard, even impossible to discuss many…
