On April 27 of this year, Air Force One rattled windows and shocked New Yorkers when it did a low flyover above New York Harbor. The flyover was deliberate. Government officials thought that it was time to update the pictures …
The musical symbol of the European Union is the work of a former Nazi Party member. How this happened and what it says about the new Europe is troubling. The European anthem is the instrumental melody of “Ode to Joy,” …
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon Anchor Books, 2009, 468 pp., $16.95 As the playwright and chronicler of twentieth-century African American life August Wilson recognized, …
Among the unpleasant surprises that awaited Barack Obama’s administration during the post-election turmoil in Iran, the unexpected role of the Internet must have been most rankling. A few government wonks might have expected Iranians to rebel, but who could predict …
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 …
