#PandemicLife
“I’m a Short Afternoon Walk and You’re Putting Way Too Much Pressure on Me” by Emily Delaney at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
“I’m a Short Afternoon Walk and You’re Putting Way Too Much Pressure on Me” by Emily Delaney at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
Via JSTOR Daily, which describes an 1840 pamphlet “[advocating] a four-pronged approach to public healthcare that sounds remarkably like our own.”
“Trump’s authoritarian style is remaking America” by Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post
My latest editorial project: Migrant Knowledge, a blog with Andrea Westermann and Swen Steinberg for the German Historical Institute Washington.
As a historian who sometimes teaches about Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have to give Trump credit for one thing: His constant upending of the broad political consensus that emerged after World War II and the Cold War means that basic historical terms are constantly making it into the news and national discourse as quasi new problems, new questions. As upsetting as these times are, as abhorrent as Trump is, it is hard to deny the value of Ron Elving’s reaction to the president’s recent statement about… Read more The Changing Faces of Nationalism →
Sometimes disseminating the results of experiments, demonstrations, or other research can yield widely accepted knowledge built on questionable foundations through a kind of distorted translation. This seems to have happened… Read more Lost in Translation: The Stanford Prison Experiment →
If you have the stomach for more on relating to a filmmaker’s work who you now know (but perhaps tried to forget) is a child molester, this piece from May 2016 by Matt Zoller Seitz is worth considering: “I Believe Dylan Farrow.” Such is the kind of reading I sometimes find myself doing these days when I least expect it. I’ll try to escape the everyday with a comedy, but then I’ll dig around the web to learn more about its makers or players. If this effort lands me back… Read more Monsters in the News →
Jeet Heer’s provocative commentary in the New Republic is worth a read: “America Has Always Been Angry and Violent”. The historical rhetoric he offers is startling. I definitely need to read more U.S. history.
In a blog post earlier this month, “From Cultural History to the History of Knowledge”, Johan Östling and David Larsson Heidenblad examine the attraction and potential utility of the history of knowledge as an historiographical approach. Particularly helpful is their attempt to tease out its relationship to cultural history.
Blogged on History of Knowledge in honor of May Day: “Sources: Child Labor in the United States”
This is an older critique, and I agree there has been much improvement. Still, negative examples abound, making this short piece as worthwhile as ever.
I had fun putting together a variety of old photographs for the History of Knowledge blog. You can view them in a high-resolution slide show here: “Photographs: Organizing, Teaching, Storing,… Read more Old Photographs →
No really, Laurel Leff wants to know. This isn’t a poltical-rhetorical question but something bigger. What are we to make of the president’s recent nod to Holocaust denial? We need to consider the matter in an open, fearless, and dispassionate way, but how? “For those of us who teach and research the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, the Trump administration’s refusal to mention Jews in a statement commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day has been both horrifying and confusing.” Read Leff’s whole piece, and if you haven’t read Deborah Lipstadt on why “Holocaust… Read more What’s Going On? →
Interesting comment today by Cameron Blevins:
History and its Limits under Trump
“But Hitler was a fixated ideologue with a strong party organization, while Trump is an opportunistic narcissist driven above all by the need for adulation. Hitler was the ‘little corporal,’ the man of the people, who feigned austerity, while Trump is a billionaire who flaunts his wealth and luxurious life-style. Ultimately, Trump seems far more a hybrid of Berlusconi and Putin, potentially merging kleptocracy and autocracy, than the reincarnation of an ideologically driven, war-mongering, and genocidal dictator.” “I would suggest that a major source of our unease — beyond Trump’s… Read more From the historian who brought us ‘Ordinary Men’ →
Here is my report on the 2014 Archival Summer Seminar in Germany. Besides saying what we did, it discusses why, and it considers the various specialties of those who attended.
At Portal Militärgeschichte, Markus Pöhlmann reports that a joint German-Russian digitization project has made available a substantial number of World War One–era German military documents at the Russian defense ministry’s… Read more Digitized Resources for World War I Research →
The report for the 2013 GHI archival summer seminar is finally available. Stay tuned for information about applying for the 2014 trip.
I am excited to have the opportunity to lead this year’s summer archival seminar in Germany, which will bring me to Speyer, Cologne, Coblenz, and Munich. Here’s a report from the 2012 seminar, which was led by the same colleague who organized the 2013 version. And here’s a description of the program and application process.
I recently reviewed an interesting anthropological study by Milena Veenis entitled Material Fantasies: Expectations of the Western Consumer World among East Germans (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press in cooperation with the Foundation for the History of Technology, 2012) for the Dutch Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis (Journal of Social and Economic History). The two-page review is in English and is openly available on the web at https://www.tseg.nl/articles/abstract/10.18352/tseg.301/.