Blog Profile / The Edge of the American West
| URL : | http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | History / US History | |
| Posts on Regator: | 570 | |
| Posts / Week: | 3.5 | |
| Archived Since: | April 9, 2010 | |
Blog Post Archive
Mmmm…Rotting Meat
A titan arum or “corpse plant” is about to bloom in a Cornell University green house: [The] bloom…has been recorded only 140 times in cultivation, and perhaps that’s for the best, as the plant smells like rotting meat when in bloom. The strong odor and deep purple color of the inner leaf attracts carrion flies [...]
“Germany of all places”.
John Demjanjuk has died. Reuters: “Former Nazi guard Demjanjuk dies in Germany aged 91” BBC: “Nazi camp guard Demjanjuk dies” Al Jazeera: “Nazi camp guard Demjanjuk dies in Germany” NYT: “John Demjanjuk, 91, Dogged by Charges of Atrocities as Nazi Camp Guard, Dies” NYT: Why so circuitous? Jerusalem Post editorial here. And, relatedly, a fascinating [...]
Please don’t eat the Daiseys.
(Well it had to be something like that.) I have three thoughts on This American Life‘s retraction of its episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” If you do not involve yourself with public radio, Apple, or the Internet, briefly: Mike Daisey likes Apple products but stories about how they were made in China concerned [...]
We could sell a lot of shirts.
Someday, perhaps someday soon, The Very Last Edited Collection of Essays will roll off a university press. For years historians have been told that There Will Be No More, because they don’t make money. When one goes to a small conference, the organizers always say, “we would like to get an edited collection out of [...]
(Poetic) justice for DSK.
Gerard Depardieu will play Dominique Strauss-Kahn because He is very French: arrogant, smug. He’s playable. I will do it, because I don’t like him. I think there’s a terrific Gallic vindictiveness in that last line.
Alterman on Gaddis on Kennan.
Eric Alterman has this to say about George Kennan and John Gaddis: Had Kennan not lived so long, Gaddis might have done a fair job as his biographer. But as Kennan, despite remaining an old-fashioned conservative in the tradition of Walter Lippmann and Hans Morgenthau, moved further and further to the dovish/diplomatic wing of foreign [...]
Kaldor and Keynes converse at war’s end.
In June of 1945, Nicholas Kaldor had a talk with John Maynard Keynes about the war. Assigned to the US Strategic Bombing Survey, Kaldor briefed Keynes on their findings. He said that at no time had our bombing seriously interfered with German manufacture…. There was in fact a gigantic increase in output between 1942 and [...]
Measuring Afghanistan
Repurposing a comment I made in this thread, I thought I would run a chart of American military fatalities in Afghanistan. I use American military fatalities “as a quick and dirty way to tell how things are going in a US counterinsurgency effort, figuring that killing an American soldier is always a valuable achievement for [...]
Why is tuition rising?
It troubled me when President Obama scoldingly said, “We’re putting colleges on notice: you can’t assume that you’ll just jack up tuition every single year”. The UC has raised tuition, but it hasn’t been on its own initiative; it’s been because the state has cut funding to higher education. Now Robert Frank riffs on Obama’s [...]
About the best scene in Casablanca.
Everybody knows Casablanca is a great work of art (and a great work of art generated by a Cornellian, at that). Everybody knows, too, that Casablanca was embedded in a particular historical moment, too – it served to vindicate the recent, necessarily wrenching American volte-face1 on the subject of Europeans and their war. History also [...]
Self-Aggrandizement, Part XLI
Arrived in the mail today:
Peter Novick.
Peter Novick, author of That Noble Dream and The Holocaust in American Life among other works, has died at the age of 77. I believe he was a great historian, and one who, in print, introduced me to the profession. For the last three years I have annually assigned and re-read That Noble Dream with [...]
On the Naming of Carriers
USS Bubba? Current American aircraft carriers are named for United States Presidents, living and dead, or political and naval leaders of some importance. In the former category, we have the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the USS Ronald Reagan (named when Reagan was still alive), the USS Harry S Truman, and others. In the latter, we have [...]
On the origin of Bretton Woods before the gold avalanche or the war.
The general line on the Bretton Woods system is that it originated as a result of the American desire to protect the massive gold holdings it accumulated during the 1930s, or that it was supposed to prevent the competitive devaluations of the 1930s, or that it was the product of the war. Still, it looks [...]
She’s like a rainbow.
Shasta Dam under construction, photographed in color by the FSA/OWI. The New Deal documented its accomplishments beautifully. And now the Library of Congress has them in an outstanding Flickr collection. The New Deal also beautifully documented the American people; here’s a photograph of African American workers at a Florida “juke joint”.
Historians and Wikipedia.
If you’ve ever wondered to yourself why I don’t edit, say, the Keynesian section on the New Deal on Wikipedia, you might want to look into the now much-covered story of Timothy Messer-Kruse’s valiant effort to get Haymarket treated properly. (We have previously drawn on Messer-Kruse’s excellent work here.) To be clear, this is, if [...]
Military History Carnival #30
is up at Cliopatria. Enjoy the best of reader-nominated military history from around the web.
American Defense Spending from 1792 to 2015
I was playing around with the data at USGovernmentSpending.com and decided to share: We are still living in the aftermath of World War II.
“Is today the day they’re going to shoot us?”
Anita Creamer’s article in the Sacramento Bee on Executive Order 9066 and the effect of internment on Japanese Americans. Today Japanese American educators and researchers say that the community’s third generation – the Sansei, most of them born after the war to parents who had been imprisoned – has inherited a complicated generational legacy that [...]
De mortuis.
David Frum speaks of the recently dead Andrew Breitbart. But to speak only “good” of Andrew Breitbart would be to miss the story and indeed to misunderstand the man…. The attack was everything, the details nothing. This indifference to detail suffused all of Breitbart’s work, and may indeed be his most important and lasting legacy. [...]