The High Line, the elevated train track built in the 1930s to service the warehouses on Manhattan’s West Side, should by rights have been torn down in the 1980s, when trains stopped using it. But instead, a small miracle happened. …
This past April, the U.S. Department of Defense released an inauspicious two-page “Fact Sheet” outlining the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a comprehensive examination of the U.S. military’s strategic posture. Such a document rarely raises eyebrows outside the cloistered world …
Let the people speak! Words enshrined in American political life since we were but a collection of colonies and the issues of the day were aired and decided at the Town Hall Meetings that defined the political culture of the …
The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue Fordham University Press, 2008, 172 pp., $22.00 How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation by Marc Bousquet NYU Press, 2008, 304 pp., …
On June 4, 2009, Poland celebrated the twenty-year mark since the first (partially) free elections in the Soviet bloc, the result of the roundtables where communist and Solidarity leaders negotiated what we now recognize as the beginning of the end …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
