|
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:
0 Comments
Throughout the 1920s Daisy continued to make herself a force in state-wide politics and the local community—crisscrossing the state helping to raise funds and drive membership for the State Federation of Negro Women’s Clubs, remaining active in the state Republican party, the Lucy Stone League, and the local Urban League. She would continue this work for the rest of her life. Beginning in 1929, however, she would leverage the relationships she had built into work of enduring national significance. She became an executive with the leading black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and a national official with the most important organization of black political influence, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  Daisy Lampkin, probably in the offices of the Pittsburgh Courier.  Despite the fact that at least one historian has described organizer, activist, and community builder Daisy Lampkin as “legendary,” not much is known about her. No full-scale biography has been published, though there have been two abortive attempts by contemporaries of Lampkin. Their unfinished manuscripts now lay untouched in archives. Several short biographical chapters have been published in various places, but these are often under sourced, elide large sections of her career, and get details wrong. I’ll be sharing elements of Lampkin’s life, along with my own research journey, here on this blog. I hope readers will become as fascinated by this admirable and endlessly energetic lady as I am.
 America's most successful and most notorious filibuster, William Walker (1824-1860). 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.
I'm not inclined to often post links to other long-form articles on this blog, and though I admit I have a vested interest in the survival (and thriving!) of non-fiction literature, this story seemed important enough to warrant a minor exception. Recommended:
Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever | The New Republic In 1893, at the famed World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a young historian from the University of Wisconsin offered what might still be the most influential history lecture ever given in America. Titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner laid out a compelling political and cultural anthropology of the frontier in American life and a lament for its apparent passing. Basing his analysis in the 1890 census, Turner argued that the frontier was now, for all intents and purposes, filled up. Sparse population in some regions there may be, but the tide of settlement had nevertheless run the continent, and all was being brought under the control of barbed wire and the telegraph. No more wilderness was left to be claimed and tamed. For Turner, this fact carried enormous implications for American society. An era had passed, and the capacity of the frontier to generate what was unique about the Americans had passed with it. What became known as Turner’s “frontier thesis” enthralled a generation of leading American opinion makers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who feared for the sake of the country’s future, and, in particular, for the fate of American manhood.  When I entered my PhD program, I was primarily interested in the history of the far left in American political life, notably the history of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), including the reactionary attempt to squash far left politics through vehicles such as the Smith Act, loyalty oaths, or McCarthyism. I had written my Master’s thesis on John Howard Lawson, a playwright who became a leading screenwriter in the 1930s and 40s, the doyen of the Stalinist left in Hollywood, and the ringleader of the group of screenwriters and producers who would in 1947 become infamous as the “Hollywood Ten.” Through Lawson I broadened my interests into Hollywood and American cinema history. At one point I even thought I might write a dissertation on the history of American drive-ins. But all that changed in a cemetery in the small town of Amersfoort, The Netherlands. In an instant one cold December afternoon I became a diplomatic historian.  |
AuthorI am an editor and historian of US history, diplomacy, and international relations. Archives
April 2026
Categories
All
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. |
RSS Feed