The economic model of post-industrial America has produced the kinds of organization and disorganization, and mobilization and demobilization, that have led to profoundly antidemocratic politics.
The Biden administration hopes to score political points by making the meat industry more competitive and lowering prices. This is ignoring the horrible costs of cheap meat.
Think it's ridiculous that the likes of "QAnon Shaman" could be venerated and memorialized in 75 years? Think about Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. The "judgment of history" depends on action today.
Violence in the Capitol a year ago called to mind events like Preston Brooks's brutal caning of Charles Sumner. But a closer look shows that, like today, antebellum politics were disrupted and made volatile by revolutions in communciation technology.
The January 6 attack on the Capitol and the election results was not a one-off coup attempt; it was a recruitment event for the militant far right which increasingly threatens democracy.
Faculty who are advising potential graduate students need to have a plan beyond hoping that the abysmal job market will make a sudden U-turn. Here's one radical package of solutions.
"During the antebellum period, newspapers and magazines featured poems that advanced a wide range of causes, including women’s rights, peace, and temperance" – and abolition.
"The decision to pardon Plessy and finally clear his record are the culmination of efforts by Keith Plessy, the great-great-grandson of Homer Plessy’s cousin, and Phoebe Ferguson, the great-great-granddaughter of John H. Ferguson, the Louisiana judge who upheld the state's Separate Car Act."
The use of the naval base at Guantanamo bay for the detention of both suspected terrorists and refugees and migrants reflects the place's status as outside both Cuban and U.S. law. Since the end of the Spanish-American war, Cuban workers have understood the threat of abuse this status enables.
"When I first visited Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, as a young and deeply closeted queer college student, I found myself wondering if the museum possessed ancient Greek vases decorated with anything other than sex scenes."
The militarization of the border increases the likelihood that undocumented migrants will be exploited and abused by smugglers, traffickers, and employers.
The psychologization of stress and fatigue under the term "burnout" has blunted consideration of how and why modern society makes people stressed and fatigued. The term's history shows the critical turns not taken.
The impulse to heal the mentally ill has long battled the impulse to lock them up as a threat to the society. Eric Adams is trying to do the latter while claiming to do the former.
"It may be that only now, in the winter of 2022, when Americans are exhausted with these mitigation methods, that a comparison to the 1918 pandemic is most apt."
