Update: I have added links to several other good blog posts addressing the NAS report at the bottom of my post. The past few months have witnessed pundits of all persuasions declaring that the culture war is over. Conservative commentator Matt Lewis recently wrote in The Week that conservatives lost, and Ann Friedman’s sub-title in [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2013/01/history-and-the-culture-wars/
The past few years have witnessed a resurgence in the popularity of counterinsurgency. Since the Iraq War Surge of 2006, every field commander, armchair general, and think tank analyst has managed to employ the term if not openly embrace the tactic. Although the Iraq results were ambiguous, Barack Obama committed to a counterinsurgency program in [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2013/01/petraeus-coin-and-the-ghilzani/
te Heesen, Anke. The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. Translated by Ann M. Hentschel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Anke te Heesen chooses an obscure artifact as the subject of her 2002 monograph, The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. te Heesen, currently [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/11/review-the-world-in-a-box/
For those of you in Chicago on October 13, 2012, please stop by the University of Illinois – Chicago to see my presentation titled, Power Projection and United States Imperialism: United Fruit and the 1954 Guatemala Coup. You can read the full paper here on my blog.
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/09/windy-city-graduate-student-history-conference/
But America is more than just a place … it’s an idea. It’s the only country founded on an idea. Our rights come from nature and God, not government. We promise equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. After Paul Ryan’s remarks on Saturday following his selection as the vice-presidential candidate on the GOP ticket, journalist Chris [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/08/the-nation-as-an-idea/
The following was a research paper I recently wrote for my U.S. – Latin America Relations seminar. I know this is “too long” for a blog, but if you enjoy this kind of thing you won’t mind, and if you don’t then I recommend you bounce down to some of the other posts. If the [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/06/power-projection-and-united-states-imperialism/
I am currently reading Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (a review will follow.) I want to share the following quote, because it illustrates a beautiful symmetry that compels me to study history. It is a symmetry willfully overlooked in politics. Postwar foreign policy derived its legitimacy from a widely [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/06/a-thing-of-beauty/
I am frequently engaged in conversation with people who believe that the poor deserve their lot, because they are indolent, stupid, drug-addled or simply the victims of government support programs that have rotted their fortitude. This attitude dates back at least two centuries, and has been echoed throughout different periods by those adhering to a [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/06/considering-the-new-poor-law/