Suchergebnisse

Historians in Trouble is investigative journalist and historian Jon Wiener's "incisive and entertaining" (New Statesman, UK) account of several of the most notorious history scandals of the last few years. Focusing on a dozen key controversies ranging across the political spectrum and representing a wide array of charges, Wiener seeks to understand why some cases make the headlines and end careers, while others do not. He looks at the well publicized cases of Michael Bellesiles, the historian of gun culture accused of research fraud; accused plagiarists and "celebrity historians" Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin; Pulitzer Prize–winner Joseph J. Ellis, who lied in his classroom at Mount Holyoke about having fought in Vietnam; and the allegations of misconduct by Harvard's Stephan Thernstrom and Emory's Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who nevertheless were appointed by George W. Bush to the National Council on the Humanities. As the Bancroft Prize–winning historian Linda Gordon wrote in Dissent, Wiener's "very readable book . . . reveal[s] not only scholarly misdeeds but also recent increases in threats to free debate and intellectual integrity.".

From High Noon to The Ten Commandments, from low-budget horror films like Them! to noir melodramas like Panic in the Streets, Hollywood was a key arena for the giant U-turn in American politics that took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Long-time Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman offers his new book as a "chronicle of American politics" from 1946 to 1956, "filtered through the prism of Hollywood movies—their scenarios, backstories, and reception." Hoberman's focus is not on the biggest movies, or the best, but rather on the "movies that best crystallize, address, symptomize, or exploit their historical moment." With a nod to Horkheimer and Adorno, he considers the people who made movies to have been "politically aware culture workers." During the Second World War, Hollywood had joined the Left's fight against fascism, the fight for democracy and equality. Then, with the coming of the Cold War, "Hollywood accepted a new mission and assigned itself a role. . . in the new war—both in terms of movies made and careers unmade."

Newsweek recently proclaimed that Barack Obama's budget means, "We're all socialists now," and conservative erstwhile presidential contender Mike Huckabee declared that "a Union of American Socialist Republics is being born." For them, "socialism" means something like "big government." But when Eugene Victor Debs ran for president from 1912 to 1920, "socialism" had a different meaning: the end of capitalist exploitation. Today Debs's belief in the imminent birth of a classless society makes him seem "deeply deluded" about "the political and social reality in front of his face," as Ernest Freeberg suggests in Democracy's Prisoner. But if Debs was hopelessly naïve about the coming of socialism, he left a legacy for the country in another area: Eric Foner called it "the birth of civil liberties." Before the 1920s, Americans had no legally enforceable right to free speech. The First Amendment was not considered fundamental. The transformation in our definition of "freedom" came in response to what Foner calls "the most intense repression of civil liberties the nation had ever known"—the wartime policy of Woodrow Wilson, that Democrat and former Princeton professor of history who jailed Debs, and thousands of others, for opposing the Great War.

A review essay on a book by Ernest Freeberg Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent Harvard U Press. Adapted from the source document.

The National Book Award nomination in October for Eat the Document, a novel about the Weather Underground by Dana Spiotta, came at a time when several other strong novels addressed similar themes. Russell Banks's The Darling, Susan Choi's American Woman, and Neil Gordon's The Company You Keep, alongside Eat the Document, suggest a renewed interest in imagining what we might call "the Weatherman temptation." It arises when young activists are drawn toward violent tactics, out of despair for democracy—especially in the early seventies, when the Vietnam War seemed endless—and maybe again today, when the Iraq War and the war on terror also seem endless.

When Barrington Moore, Jr., died October 16 at age ninety-two, I remembered the mandatory meetings for coffee he scheduled with students at the place he called "the greasy spoon down the block" in Harvard Square. At the time—1966 and 1967—I had enrolled in his graduate seminars in the Harvard Government Department. He was tall and gaunt, and looked stern and humorless; we were all deeply intimidated by his knowledge of the history of pretty much everything. His new book, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, dealt with the histories of the United States, England, France, Russia, China, and India—displaying a breadth and depth that inspired awe.

Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream is about her experience of white-collar unemployment—at a time when 20 percent of the unemployed are white-collar professionals—1.6 million people. This is another first-person story about Barbara going underground into the world of work and taking notes. For this project, Ehrenreich made some rules for herself: she needed a new identity, so that potential employers wouldn't be able to Google her. (When I searched for "Barbara Ehrenreich" I got 2,750,000 results.) So she changed legally back to her birth name, Barbara Alexander, and got a Social Security card that matched. Then she had to come up with a plausible set of skills. Because she's a writer and public speaker, she decided to market herself in the field of "public relations"—she calls it "journalism's evil twin." Her rules decreed that she would "do everything possible to land a job," that she would "go anywhere for a job or even an interview," and that she would "take the first job I was offered that met my requirements as to income and benefits." She planned to devote ten months and five thousand dollars for travel and expenses to the job search. The plan was that, once she got a job, she would work at it for a while before quitting and writing about it.