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What We Can Still Learn from the Whole Earth Catalog

by Andy Kirk

What can we learn from the Whole Earth Catalog phenomenon that will help us face the crisis of global warming?Recently one of America’s most insightful environmentalists, Bill McKibben, pointed out that it is “swell” that you bought a hybrid but now it’s time get some boots on the ground in the political arena because small-scale technology alone is not going to be enough to combat the looming catastrophe of global warming. McKibben is right, individual technol

The "Whatever" Presidency of George W. Bush

by Philip Rubio

 “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere. (Laughter and applause.)”  Recently I found the transcript online from the March 24, 2004 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, D.C. where President George W. Bush spoke those words.  The annual banquet is typically a light-hearted affair, a kind of Mardi Gras for politicians and the Washington Press Corps (delightfully disrupted this year by comedian Stephen Colbert), wher

Petition to Congress: A Vote Needs to Be Taken on War with Iraq

by Ellen Carol DuBois and Joyce Appleby

(Affiliations listed for identification purposes only.)Untitled Document Joyce Appleby, UCLA Ellen DuBois, UCLA Stanley Katz, Princeton University Jack Greene, Johns Hopkins University Daniel Horowitz, Smith College Alan Brinkley, Columbia University William Chafe, Duke University Jan Lewis, Rutgers University-Newark Diane Miller Sommervi

Why We Can Thank Judges for So Many of Our Rights

by Anthony Lewis

Until World War II it was a uniquely American practice to give courts, especially the Supreme Court, a significant role in the structure of governance. No o

When Women and Blacks Fight to Get First in Line They Both Suffer

by Stephanie Coontz

One of the recurring undercurrents in arguments over who deserves to win this historic Democratic Party primary race has been the question of which group needs advancement more – blacks or women. Gloria Steinem has argued that voting for a woman is critical, because sexism is still taken less seriously than racism. A female Obama supporter recently countered in Time that race must trump gender, because as long as African-Americans remain so disadvantaged in income, health care, a

Those "Undemocratic" Party Conventions Were More Democratic Than You Think

by Mark D. Nevin

With it looking more and more likely that the choice for the Democratic nominee for President this year will be made by a small group of party elites called superdelegates, and not by the party rank and file through popular primary elections, critics have been lining up to criticize the Democrats for the persistence of this patently antidemocratic element in their presidential selection process. To many critics the superdelegates are anathema to the ideals of representative government and d

What We Can Still Learn from the Whole Earth Catalog

by Andrew G. Kirk

Recently one of America’s most insightful environmentalists, Bill McKibben, pointed out that it is “swell” that you bought a hybrid but now it’s

Has Obama Found Himself Trapped by a Myth?

by Rick Shenkman

In 2004 John Edwards went around the country proclaiming the existence of two Americas. One reason his candidacy did not go further than it did was that his appeal often fell on the ears of people tired of divisiveness. After a generation of polarized politics Americans were eager for national unity--or at least a call for unity. Sensing this need, Barack Obama, in the speech that launched his national career, declaimed at the 2004 Democratic Convention: "there is not a black America and

The Cultural Roots of the Dismissive Argument that Obama Supporters Are “Obamamaniacs”

by B. E. Myers

"I remember the time (about 15 years ago) when the advocates for… Africans were treated as fanatics, and considered as the disturbers of the peace of society." --Dr. Benjamin Rush to Granville Sharp, 1783As an African American historian of mental illness in the 19th Century, I am compelled to comment on the frequent use of madness metaphors to explain the success of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Clinton and the media at large repeatedly

Can This Election Produce Another Hundred Days?

by Norman Markowitz

Seventy-five years ago this month, Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency amid mass unemployment, a collapsing bank system and rapidly escalating poverty. Over the next five years the New Deal came to be associated with major regulatory reforms, labor laws and social welfare legislation. This is well known. But less attention has been paid to the stagnation of the New Deal in the 1950s and its dismantling after 1980. With the watershed election of Ronald Reagan what can be called t

His Bravest Moment: Obama's Refusal to Scapegoat His Pastor

by Jeremy Cameron Young

In her short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," Ursula K. LeGuin writes of a fictional utopia whose perfection is made possible by a terrible secret: the imprisonment of a child in the most horrifying conditions imaginable. When the residents of Omelas learn of this devil’s bargain, they face a stark choice: accept a lifetime of guilt-ridden pleasure, or leave the city, never to return. Some choose to stay in Omelas, trading their moral compasses for personal happines

“God Damn America” in Black and White

by Edward J. Blum

Barack Obama and Reverend Jeremiah Wright are in hot water. Newspapers and news stations across the world have been reporting on Wright’s “inflammatory rhetoric” (as Obama’s campaign is calling it) in 2003 when he called upon his Chicago congregation to reject the hymn “God Bless America” and instead shout “God Damn America.” Wright denounced the United States for historically advocating terrorism for its own purposes, for refusing to offer help

Enough Already with McClinton

by James Livingston

What are the differences between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama, after all?  A lot of pundits have said it’s personal, not political.  They say their programs and policies are an inch apart.  Hell, I’ve said it.  But will the articulation of these differences disable the Democratic Party in the general election?The personal is political, as we all know.  That’s why a “dream ticket” of the Senator from New York and the Senator fr

The Right to Bear Arms? What History Tells Us.

by Nathan Kozuskanich

Few cases in recent memory have been as contentious as the upcoming Second Amendment case, District of Columbia v. Heller. Seldom has history been so central to the arguments made by both sides. Yet, given the centrality of history it is amazing how little attention has been devoted to evaluating the truth of the rival historical claims being made by both Heller and the District of Columbia. As the two sides prepare to argue in court over the constitutionality of D.C.’s ban on

Superdelegates: An Obstacle on the Road to Democratic Elections

by Nancy C. Unger

Hillary Clinton's wins in Texas and Ohio have revitalized the possibility that in the tight race for the Democratic nomination, the deciding votes could be cast by the party's superdelegates. That's bad for the Democratic party. Why's that? Because the Democratic convention in Denver has the potential to showcase democracy at its best. But if superdelegates choose the candidate without regard to the voters, it will highlight democratic abuses at their worst. No matter whi

Rich Guys in Politics

by Thomas Fleming

With New York’s Governor Eliot Spitzer in his political grave, what are we to think? The revelation that this self-advertised reformer was paying tens of thousands of laundered dollars to a prostitution ring surely tells us something about the current political scene. beyond banal psychologizing or arguing that it was a “victimless crime,” as several letter writers to the New York Times and other newspapers maintain. I suggest we look on Mr. Spitzer as a new pheno

This Won't Be the Last Political Sex Scandal

by Thomas A. Foster

Another political sex scandal is in the news. It's hard to keep up with the growing list of those caught in them. Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Jim McGreevey: they all blur together. Gary Hart's derailed 1987 presidential bid seems like ancient history. And now New York's governor, Eliot Spitzer, had to resign after his involvement in a prostitution ring became public. But this headline news will be eclipsed by the next scandal before too long. If we're becoming a more liberal society,

Clinton Ad Distorts Reality

by Michael H. Creswell

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent attack ad has struck a chord. The ad depicts a 3 am phone call to the White House, presumably informing the president of a crisis. An announcer intones with great solemnity, “Something is happening in the world.” We next see refreshed Clinton wearing a brown pants suit and talking calmly on the phone.Super Tuesday exit polling showed that voters who made up their mind in the last two days before the

Is Obama Channeling Marcus Garvey?

by Colin Grant

‘His words were compassionate,’ recalled Virginia Collins, ‘he spoke from his soul, and you had this feeling that you were there, that you [were] he, too, that you felt the same thing he was speaking of.’

A Historian Reflects on the Rural-Urban Divide and Election '08

by Daniel Herman

While recently driving from Washington state to Texas--it takes three days, by the way, if you drive all night on day three--I was again trying to explain to my wife why academic history isn't boring. We had been reading aloud to one another from a memoir by our neighbor, an aging beat writer who washes windows for a living and writes hearty, cynical, entertaining stuff for boring-but-liberal people like us to read.Yes, I admitted to my wife, history isn't as fun to read as John's book,