Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White W. W. Norton and Company, 2011, 634 pp. FOR A generation now, historians have been reluctant to write about capitalism. Cultural history has been the rage, even as …
Is religion “special”? Taking this as a philosophical question, we might conclude that it is not, that religion is a specific instance within a more general category of belief or commitment. But a philosophical question is not the same as …
In January 2011, on our first night in Durzay, one of the last Taliban-held enclaves in Southern Helmand Province, we occupied a compound just outside the main villages. Captain Abdullah, the commander of the Afghan National Army (ANA) infantry unit …
When we took to the open road that leads from college to anywhere, my friend Kate and I worried about falling into tourism. The hope of every serious traveler is to become entangled in new surroundings, to be a little …
My plane landed in Krakow on a sunny July morning. I had come there to participate in a program of graduate coursework and cultural exchange organized by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at the New School in New York …
When I first heard that my college had formed ties with a prison and that some of our teaching assistants were already offering courses to inmates, I leapt to join on. Motive? Dare I say it? Boredom. Teaching well is …
A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Stephanie Coontz Basic Books, 2011, 248 pp. IN THE past few decades, the concept of “work-life balance” has assumed a prominent place in our …
This is a moment in American life that cries out for far-flung activism on behalf of a bold democratic agenda. Instead, the partisans of democracy are largely demobilized and defensive. Why? Progressives are apt to blame cynicism spawned by Barack …
As I sat in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, with over a thousand Haitians filling the rows, I first felt as if I were at a funeral, a …
The mantra of the current school reform movement in the United States is that high- quality teachers produce high-achieving students. As a result, we should hold teachers accountable for student outcomes, offering bonus pay to the most effective teachers and …
Rather than engage my argument, Marshall Ganz dismisses it out of hand. He says that I misunderstand his work, but he never says how. Instead, he expounds on his theory of “public narrative” and its ability to move people by …
At my grandparents’ house in Tehran, the day began as usual. Breakfast was a smorgasbord of sangak (a thin bread made in a stone oven, bought fresh and warm every day from a local baker), honey, feta cheese, yogurt, and …
The easiest Egyptian revolutionaries for a non-Arabic speaking American to find are the young bloggers, wielders of camera-phones, YouTube uploaders, and social-network activists—”shabab al-Facebook,” as they are sometimes known, the Facebook youth credited with the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. They …
A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America by Grace Elizabeth Hale Oxford University Press, 2011, 386 pp. CULTURAL REBELLION is at the center of American history and has intersected with …
A Nationalist Conservative revolution has triumphed in Budapest; its leaders are busy dismantling constitutionalism and the rule of law. How could this have happened? And can the Western Left do anything about it? There was a time when Hungary seemed …
