One of the very first pieces of formal writing advice I ever received in college was to avoid use of the infinitive verb “to be” in all its conjugations: is, am, are, were, was, etc. I didn’t quite understand why Professor Lynn banished “to be” from his assignments, so I carried out the orders dutifully. So accustomed was I to “is,” “was,” and “am” in my speech that I struggled to find ways to fix the offending passages. Only later did I come to understand. The problem, I would learn in graduate school, and then pass on to my own students, was with sentence construction that we call “passive.”

Whatever else can be said about the consequences for public health, the Trump administration's dismantling of institutions of scientific discovery such as the Centers for Disease Control or the National Institutes of Health, via executive decree or defunding, represents a clear assault on the civic infrastructure that has been a hallmark of twentieth century US public policy. The attacks on the CDC and the NIH represent but a portion of the administration's larger assault on US institutions of public education, scholarship, and research.

The public backing of knowledge enterprises in this country has a long history, going back at least as far as the land-grant universities of the 1860s. But beginning in the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration began to pour the express energies of the US government into scientific and educational advancement, a policy that enjoyed tremendous boosts during World War II and then the Cold War. In so doing the Roosevelt/Truman administrations made science itself an American public good, with results widely celebrated today.

Beginning next month I'll offer a 6-week online course into the history of the New Deal, paying particular attention to the public goods offered by the program, their benefits to American life, and the philosophy behind them. Check out the course catalog for more information. For now, after the break, a little primer on what public goods mean for American life:

​I’ve been discussing the wide variety of modules I offer on FractalPast. The other day I posted about some of the courses I had taken, as the foundation of my historical knowledge. I’ll be making another post next week about the many courses I taught in my more than twenty-year teaching career. But my research also provides another entrée point for expertise in a wide variety of historical fields and subfields. Though seemingly a narrow topic—US-Netherlands relations in the fifteen or so years after World War II—my book actually required that I familiarize myself with a host of distinct historical fields. Many of these overlap, of course, in some cases barely comprising a subfield. But every one of the following subject areas enjoys a robust literature, and the scrupulous researcher is obligated to engage with all of them:

If you scoot on over to the “Course Catalog” page of this website you can see all the modules I will be offering on rotation in the coming weeks and months. If you click on the “Course Description” button you’ll see a brief synopsis of what the course covers and what you can expect to encounter over the six weeks.
 
You might wonder how I come up with the offerings. Some of the modules may look familiar to you, offering conventional periodization and subject matter. Others may appear unfamiliar or peculiar. I conceive of the modules based on three subjective factors that I believe coalesce into something substantial:

​About a month ago ten individuals were shot or detained by Cuban authorities just off the northern coast of Cuba. Officials claimed the group was attempting to infiltrate Cuba, with unspecified “terrorist” aims in mind. Among the dead was a US citizen, one other US citizen was apprehended. Apparently the rest of the group were permanent US residents of one sort or another. There has been only sporadic follow-up reporting on what appears to be a highly unusual incident: a small party of armed Americans attempting to invade a sovereign foreign country inside the Western hemisphere.
 
For students of US diplomatic history, the affair is really not so unusual at all:

As I put the final pieces in place for the forthcoming FractalPast modules, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own coursework. Much, but not all, of my knowledge base has come from my own research and teaching career since I graduated with my PhD. But I was also very fortunate to have a very broad foundation laid for me before I ever became a practitioner myself. I enjoyed excellent teachers offering intellectual rigor mixed with compassion and care.

I do not imagine the history I produce here or elsewhere to function as a direct response to misinformation or propaganda. Such an approach is itself reactionary. But insofar as misinformation proliferates, and bad-faith policymakers continue to distort history, I do believe that historians maintain some duty to combat propaganda. The past several years have born witness to many officials directly or indirectly endeavoring to weaken the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a collective defense alliance that appears to have served the signatories well for over seventy years. I treat Dutch participation in NATO in various places in my book, most extensively in Chapter 5. I thought I’d share a couple relevant excerpts, after the break:

I’m pleased to announce the launch of a new venture: FractalPast online history courses. Editing services will continue, but it seems to me there is a need and a thirst for something new. We live in an age of AI slop, of aggressive propaganda, and stultifying algorithms that constrain the spirit and assault the mind. I think people are hungering for something real, something grounded, something that can help anchor us in unsettled times. And there is no better way to face the present and the future than to understand the past.