A historian's comments on current events, foreign and domestic.
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…
The flood of deeply disturbing news from Washington never stops rising, no matter how badly we wish that the president and his administration could declare victory on all fronts and let us have some peace. We had better face the facts: this is what we have to look forward to for at least the next 31 months. Chaos reflects the nature the president and his administration, and they will generate more…
I met the late Barney Frank in the spring of 1966, when my older brother Bob visited me near the end of my freshman year at Harvard. They had met at something called the National Student Congress, later the National Student Association, in 1961. My brother was then living in London and Barney was a grad student in government, writing his dissertation, as he told me, on the conservative coalition…
Our national political crisis has been going on for at least 26 years, in my opinion, and Donald Trump remains as much a symptom of it as a cause. Together my wife and I have just gone through my last book, States of the Union , and many problems within the Democratic Party emerge from my summaries of the state of the union addresses and other major speeches of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe…
Last fall, the historian Jill Lepore gave an interview to the Chronicle of Higher Education about her career as an historian that sheds a great deal of light about what has happened to history in the last hafl century or so. She described a key moment in her professional evolution. "My passion as a historian came out of that impetus to tell the stories of people who were left out of the accounts…
Last August, thanks to a column by Linda Greenhouse, I anticipated the voting rights decision that the Supreme Court just handed down, and said that I thought that it would in fact do some good--a rare, but not unheard of, position on the left side of the political fence. The decision has come down as expected. The logic of Justice Alito's opinion is at times quite depressing. The Supreme Court…
The crisis in higher education is much in the news. I have been too busy to write much myself for awhile, but anyone interested in this topic will benefit from reading the following two articles. The first, by the venerable Nicholas Lemann , deals with the Trump administration's confrontation with elite higher ed, and is well researched. The second, by an art professor at Purchase College , really…
Regarding the crisis in the Persian Gulf, nothing has happened in the last eleven days to alter the opinions that I expressed eleven days ago. The same drama continues in slow motion, and the result--a resounding declaration of an historic victory after the US has abandoned many of its proclaimed goals--seems to me as likely as ever. Cuba will be the next contestant on the reality show. Just a few…
Even relatively apolitical Americans, I think, inevitably think of the president of the United States as a father. In a sense this is true: any president has enormous responsibility for our well-being. It can therefore be quite traumatic to see a profane, irresponsible, erratic man in the White House--someone who proudly announces from time to time that he can do anything and get away with it.…
I hesitate to write about the ongoing war. It is very easy to speculate about how it will end in disaster, and very hard to know at this point how it will actually turn out. I have begun an unrelated post, but meanwhile, here is an excellent article by Anatole Lieven of the Quincy Project on what this war is doing to the standing of the United States in the world. It builds on what I said the week…
My uncle Henry Kaiser was born in 1911 and died in the late 1980s after a long career as a labor attorney. He was the third of his 9 siblings to be born in the United States, not Ukraine, and the second, I believe, to attend college. After graduating from Brooklyn College he attended the University of Wisconsin Law School--joining my father in Madison during his undergraduate degrees--even though…
In January 1917, two months after his re-election and three months before the United States entered the First World War, Woodrow Wilson gave a remarkable speech calling for peace. Addressing the European powers, he warned prophetically that an imposed peace "forced upon the loser" would rest "as only upon quicksand." The world needed "not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized…
This story from 60 Minutes found its way onto my youtube feed this morning It may be the most important story they have ever done. It is about Havana Syndrome, the mysterious neurological ailment that has struck a number of Americans working for the government both overseas and at home. Don't miss it. History Unfolding
We awakened this morning to find that the United States has begun an unlimited war against the Iranian regime. I use "unlimited" in the sense that I learned to use it in the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College: a war, in Clausewitz's words, "to overthrow the enemy --to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to accept any peace we please."…
It was about five years ago, I think, that I discovered Coleman Hughes, a very heterodox Columbia graduate who was then podcasting independently. In 2023 I was at one point booked to appear on his show to talk about States of the Union , but he apparently decided to take a break from podcasting and that never happened. Coleman, who I believe will turn 29 or 30 this year, isn't afraid of anyone,…
My book American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000) had two endings, a narrative ending and a much more reflective epilogue. The narrative concluded with LBJ's press conference of July 28, 1965, in which he announced the beginning of increasing ground troop deployments to South Vietnam. I then wrote these last paragraphs. "In the same press conference, Johnson…