A historian's comments on current events, foreign and domestic.
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It's an irony of my life that while I wanted as much or more than anything to belong to some kind of larger institution that shared my values, I have instead become more of an intellectual lone wolf every decade. So it is what while I have for the last 12 years subscribed to the same newspapers that I did through the 1970s, I continually find myself taking issue both with their opinion pages and…
Several weeks ago I commented favorably on Texas's new K-12 reading curriculum. Here is a similar comment by a well-informed commentator on the subject. History Unfolding
Our educational establishment, it seems, has catastrophically failed the nation's public schools over the last few decades. Despite the bipartisan No Child Left Behind bill from the George W. Bush Administration and the national testing frenzy that it mandated, basic skills of reading and math appear to have been declining, not advancing, a trend accelerated by the pandemic. One big reason was the…
The Boston Globe ran a piece recently about a controversy in the Cambridge Public Schools. The issue is not unique to Cambridge, and its resolution, I think, illustrates the hopeless situation that the convergence of racial and economic issues has gotten us into. In 1960-1, I was among the first children in the US to do Algebra I in 8th grade. The idea of giving Algebra I to exceptional students…
While I do grieve the world I grew up in, I also feel a compulsion to try to understand the one we are living in now. Thus I took the trouble to read and summarize here the recent biography of Elon Musk and the remarkable book Careless People that described the inner workings of Facebook. This week I took time between World Cup games to read How to Rule the World, by Theo Baker, who just graduated…
The American experiment is not going well. Our civic culture is at an all-time low, we have given up our great achievements of the twentieth century, and it isn't clear where effective new leadership is going to come from. I am pessimistic in the short and medium term, but optimistic in the long run, even though I may not live to see things change. Still, on the eve of the Fourth, it's time to…
I spent the summer of 1974 researching my dissertation in London, and a lifelong love affair began. The World Cup started in Germany shortly after I arrived, and I saw at least half of the games. The great Dutch team led by my exact contemporary Johann Cruyff captivated the world on the way to the final, only to lose 2-1 to the host country Germans, despite going ahead 1-0 in literally the first…
I spent my last term as a college undergraduate in the spring of 1969. For many of my classmates, that was above all the time of the occupation of University Hall, a student strike, the end, for decades, of ROTC programs on the Harvard campus, and the creation of a black studies department. I watched all t hose events as an observer, because I had just handed in my senior these on George…
One of my sons asked a leading AI program, Claude, for its analysis of History Unfolding. Here is the result: "Let me read a few more posts to get a fuller range across time.David Kaiser is a genuine article: a trained diplomatic and military historian (the book list—origins of WWII, the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination, Sacco and Vanzetti—is a real scholarly career, not a hobbyist's) who has…
The election of 2016 might have taught both parties something, but one of them didn't get the message. On the Republican side, Donald Trump, a man with a highly checkered past as a businessman and a man, swept a bevy of establishment Republican candidates aside to take the nomination--an episode without precedent in American politics. On the Democratic side, an unknown professed socialist, Bernie…