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We are several days out from Black History Month. Since it has been at least a hundred years, and perhaps more, since we've had a U.S. presidential administration signal such clear intent to discriminate on racial terms--even going so far as to bring actual Nazi sympathizers into its close orbit--I may be forgiven for a premature post. The Trump administration's attack on what it labels diversity initiatives, critical race theory, and "woke" is being advanced in the name of American meritocracy. But while the proponents of those initiatives are bad-faith actors who surely know better, I still have hope that much of the public support for the racist backlash they represent derives from ignorance rather than unalloyed malevolence. The anti-CRT/DEI/"woke" advocates claim to be defending American values against a stultifying intellectual dogma. In fact what they are railing against is American history itself. In my ongoing hopes to generate a greater level of intellectual and historical honesty among readers who may have only a passing grasp of the racism inherent in that history, I offer the following:
Several years ago I attempted to visualize for classroom use how racism and discrimination function in American life and throughout American history. It is of necessity a crude attempt to render such a complicated topic in a single visual format. But nevertheless I present for my readers’ consideration the following graphic:
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In a city overflowing with prime tourist attractions, the Anne Frank house may be Amsterdam's greatest. A visit to Amsterdam must include a stop to see the house, an extremely well run and highly affective museum. A new traveling exhibit recreates Anne Frank's secret annex for American visitors (Bringing Anne Frank’s Secret Annex to New York, and the World - The New York Times), and a new book (The Many Lives of Anne Frank) examines the construction and lasting influence of the world's most famous diary. After the break, a brief excerpt about Anne and her diary from my own forthcoming book:  The first diary bought as a present for Anne Frank by her parents. Courtesy of the Anne Frank House, Amsterdam. If you’ve never visited, you may be inclined to think of China’s Great Wall as a singular installation, as a very great wall, as perhaps the greatest of walls. In fact, the so-called “Great Wall of China” is a series of walls and fortifications built over centuries as the Chinese empire expanded northward. Walls were built for protection from marauding nomads outside of the empire, but new structures were extended northward and westward as the empire expanded. Grand as they were (and are), the walls did not demarcate the limit of the empire; instead, they ratcheted the empire ever further outward. “Build and move on was the principle,” historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper observe about these walls, “not setting up a fixed border for all time.” Protection was one function of the wall to be sure, but “the wall” was never intended strictly to demarcate the empire from non-empire. Rather, in their successive geographical march, the walls offered the ongoing contact with the outsider, non-imperial subjects–-“barbarians,” if you will--that is the hallmark of imperial frontiers.   And now for something completely different: In honor of the GOAT’s birthday, one day early, I present a list of the top fights in Muhammad Ali’s career, ranked. Highly subjective justifications follow. My criteria, such as they are, center on Ali’s greatness writ large, and not solely for his boxing acumen, significance as an activist, or humanitarian greatness. I remain inspired by the Greatest of All Time, no less in these trying days. Comments and counter-takes welcome!:
Any short list of my favorite diplomatic historians has to include Emily Rosenberg. Rosenberg is a pioneering scholar in multiple dimensions, including her Spreading the American Dream (Hill & Wang, 1982), one of the important early depictions of “Americanization” (more on that later); in her work on gender and diplomacy, helping to center gender even in-–especially in--the mighty halls of international power; and, most germane to one of our current conversations, her scholarship on the privatization of American power.  Historians of empire tend to stress political, social, and economic motivations, both at the metropole and in the periphery, as the mainsprings of empire. These are important considerations that will all receive treatment in due course. Rather newer to the historians' toolbox is the subject of ideology. Ideology seems to be a part of every empire, though its importance has undoubtedly intensified in the modern period as democratic mass society has emerged as an important authorizing context for imperial policy. Imperial ideology, of greater or lesser intensity, is characteristic of all empires and, while it may not constitute one of the purposes of empire as outlined by Professor Colás (expansion, hierarchy, order), it is nevertheless essential.
The Big Sleep is an outlier in the world of film noir. Like most good noir, there are Dark and Sinister goings-on, to include embezzlement, infidelity, gambling, and murder. It’s got it all, and then some: drugs and pornography also feature, somewhat rarer debaucheries than we’re accustomed to in the period. But there is also a lightness to the film, conveyed in part by Bogie’s irrepressible nonchalance. It is also, as has been frequently commented, a hash of a plot best consumed with giddy delight rather than forensic solemnity. We know the film is in effect two Raymond Chandler short stories cobbled together, filtered through a number of rewrites, including one at William Faulkner’s boozy hand. So The Big Sleep offers a pastiche-y, perpetual “What’s going on?” affect. It’s a beloved film, but a hard movie to take seriously, and in that sense a bit of a noir orphan. But I think there is something else going on as well, a critical gender confusion on which few have commented. Outlier in its genre it may have been, but it was rather more central to the broader culture of which it was a part.  |
AuthorI am an editor and historian of US history, diplomacy, and international relations. Archives
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Why empire?This blog presents new scholarship on American empire, places the American experience in a broader and global imperial context, explores imperial habits throughout American society and culture, uncovers the imperial connections between the foreign and the domestic, and develops “empire” as a critical perspective.
At least two features in the American experience are clarified through the lens of American empire: First, we better understand persistent social inequities in a nation professing a fundamental commitment to equality. Second, even a cursory glance at American history makes plain the chronic violence at the center of US foreign policy, which frequently mounts or supports bloody military conflict abroad. Empire helps us recognize how and why the United States seems to be constantly at war--including often with itself--with all the foreign and domestic consequences thereof. |
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