Beware the historical analogy. When Barack Obama took office, pundits compared the economic crisis he faced to the Great Depression. Naturally, the new liberal president would become another FDR; one magazine even portrayed him waving confidently from an open car, …
When the Berlin Wall cracked on November 9, 1989, the clock struck thirteen in the Soviet bloc, and its hands halted. History went on. Rotting dictatorships in eastern and central Europe, long sustained by and for Moscow, had been crumpling …
Unemployment is now the most critical issue of the current recession, whose depth and duration remain unpredictable despite the federal stimulus program. New sources of economic growth sufficiently vigorous and labor-intensive to absorb the growing pool of redundant workers, domestically …
The Future of Liberalism by Alan Wolfe Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, 337 pp., $30.00 Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America by Doug Rossinow University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, 323 pp., $39.95 This should be the liberal hour. American …
Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror by Mahmood Mamdani Pantheon, 2009 416 pp., $26.95 The Darfur Genocide has the perverse distinction of being the longest and most fully chronicled genocide of the last century. Our contemporaneous …
Last winter, as Barack Obama’s transition team developed a stimulus package to jump-start the U.S economy, feminist economists and historians organized petitions, e-mails, and meetings to call attention to women’s needs. Their activism was unprecedented; I have not seen the …
Next year, welfare as we now know it is slated to come before Congress for reauthorization. By “welfare” I mean federally financed cash assistance to low-income mothers (and occasionally fathers) with children. Welfare as we used to know it was …
What Are Intellectuals Good For? by George Scialabba Pressed Wafer, 2009, 252 pp., $15, paper [contentblock id=20 img=gcb.png] I made my first acquaintance with George Scialabba’s work under unfortunate circumstances. It was the fall of 1995, and a colleague e-mailed …
The start of the twenty-first century finds America in a perilous state that many consider to be a turning point in our history, one that could lead to a painful decline in living standards. According to recent polls, a majority …
In 1973—the same year that the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion, the U.S. House of Representatives accepted its first female page, and AT&T settled a major lawsuit by agreeing to end pay discrimination against women—Holt, Rinehart and …
On the blogs, in the newspapers, in restaurants, there has been so much discussion of the New Deal lately that the chatter could seem like that at a historians’ convention. Conservatives express panic about socialism and argue that the New …
The sorry state of Israel’s Labor Party is all the more striking against the background of its unique role in the country’s past. Mapai, as it was once called (a Hebrew acronym for The Party of the Workers of the …
As the unemployment numbers rise in the current economic troubles, it’s hard not to think of the flotsam of the Great Depression years, the men and boys and whole families who went on the road or lost their homes. We …
Quarterlies are often late to cover the politics of the moment, but sometimes we anticipate arguments to come. We carried important articles on torture in the Summer 2003 issue, and we have come back to it again and again in …
Not every actor who gets a role that defines him is lucky. Ronald Reagan had to wait until the very end of his acting career for his defining role, mob boss Browning in Don Siegel’s 1964 The Killers, and he …
