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Roundup Top 10!

Obama's problem with history
by Leon Wieseltier

Obama’s surprisability about history, which is why he is always (as almost everyone now recognizes) “playing catch-up,” is owed to certain sanguine and unknowledgeable expectations that he brought with him to the presidency.

New Republic


The Color of His Presidency
by Jonathan Chait

Optimists hoped Obama would usher in a new age of racial harmony. Pessimists feared a surge in racial strife. Neither was right.

New York Magazine


The secret history of pot (it was made illegal in rapid response to Mexican immigrants smoking it)
by Stephen Siff

The speed with which Americans are now considering legalizing marijuana has taken everyone by surprise. But in the midst of this shift in public opinion and state law it is worth remembering the speed with which marijuana was made illegal.

Ohio State Department of History


Innovation: The Government Was Crucial After All
by Jeff Madrick

Fortunately, a new book, The Entrepreneurial State, by the Sussex University economist Mariana Mazzucato, forcefully documents just how wrong the conservative claims are that the government is inconsequential.

NY Review of Books


Why We’re in a New Gilded Age
by Paul Krugman

The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to 19th-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.

NY Review of Books


Cliven Bundy Wants to Tell You All About 'the Negro'
by Ta-Nehisi Coates

When people like Cliven Bundy assert the primacy of the past it is important that we do not recount it selectively. American enslavement is the destruction of the black body for profit.

Atlantic


Veterans and White Supremacy
by Kathleen Belew

The one factor that has fueled every surge in Ku Klux Klan membership in American history, from the 1860s to the present: war.

NYT


LBJ: Hero or Not ... A debate between David Greenberg and Michael Kazin

How do we deal with Vietnam?

New Republic


T-Shirts for historians
by Mike O'Malley

"You are caricaturing my argument."

The Aporetic (blog)


The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in the 21st Century
by Mark N. Katz

Various scholars have sought to identify what the objective criteria are for a state to become and remain a great power—especially a dominant great power or hyperpower.

KatzEyeView (Blog)