Category Archives: History

Awareness vs. Action: Two Modes of Protest in American History

Tags:By The People, Community, Culture, History

A “Family Temperance Pledge” from 1887. Group pledges such as these were central to the success of the temperance movement. Source: Library of Congress. “An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera.” 2004. In the comment thread of the post “Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood: Three Centuries of American Political Culture” a […]

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Why Was There No “May Fourth Movement” in India?

Tags:Bharat, Culture, History, Narrative, The Middle Kingdom

“Concentrate on Charkha and Swadeshi,” bazaar art, 1930’s  Image Source. The ever interesting Omar Ali, who blogs and tweets about Islam, genetics, and all things Desi, forwarded an interesting essay to me the other day. It is a long piece by Brooklyn philosopher Samir Chopra on a growing movement in Indian academia led by Rajiv […]

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Shakespeare in American Politics

Tags:Books and Literature, Culture, History, The Legislature, To My Countrymen

I was delighted to receive Marjorie Garber‘s Shakespeare After All in the mail this morning. Garber’s book is a thousand page review of everything Shakespeare ever wrote, with each play claiming its own chapter length analysis. The introduction of Shakespeare After All is a fascinating tour of Shakespeare’s reputation though the centuries, describing how Shakespeare’s […]

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Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood: A Tour Through Three Centuries of American Political Culture

Tags:By The People, Community, Culture, Family Structure, History

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.(1929 – 1968) stands in front of a bus at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott.   Montgomery, Alabama December 26, 1956 Image Source Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist who penned The Righteous Mind, wrote an important blog post a few days ago responding to a paper by sociologists Bradley Campbell […]

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Notes From All Over (3/09/15): Chinese Media, Ancient War, and Strategic Theory

Tags:Complex Systems, Dogs of War, Domestic Politics, Education, Entangling Alliances, Geopolitics, History, Near East, Notes From All Over, Political Theory, Religion, Strategy, The Middle Kingdom, Wealth

A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. TOP BILLING  “Down With the Nihilists!” and “Love Thy Country““T.J. Ma.” Chublic Opinion. (31 & 6 August 2015). I was led to this blog by the recommendation of Kaiser Kuo and instantly knew that it needed to be on the blog roll. “T.J. Ma” writes […]

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The OODA Loop, Ancient China Style

Tags:History, Political Theory, The Middle Kingdom

The theories of John Boyd are an interesting example of a general historical principle: medium changes message. The physical medium used to communicate information changes the way information is organized and understood. For example, historians often credit the short, clipped and rhyming phrases of texts like Sunzi’s Art of War, The Analects or the Dao […]

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What History Should An American Know?

Tags:By The People, Education, History, Narrative

A Serbian Gypsy Family at Ellis Island.  “Gitanos Augustus” by Augustus Sherman (1917), displayed at Statue of Liberty National Park.  Image Credit: Wikimedia. What history should an educated American be expected to know?The most recent issue of Democracy Journal includes a long essay by Eric Liu on “cultural literacy,” a term coined by E.D. Hersh […]

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There Is No “Right Side” of History

Tags:By The People, History, Narrative

I read with interest Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent historical essay for The Atlantic, “What This Cruel War Was Over.” The article is worth reading. It consists mostly of quotations pulled from Southerner declarations, debates, and editorials from the Civil War and late antebellum eras, all on the theme of slavery and the desperate need to preserve […]

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Newsflash: The Chinese Play Chess Too

Tags:Cognition, History, Strategy, The Middle Kingdom

Japanese geisha playing weiqi (go) c. 1800. Image Source: Wikimedia This post should be considered an extended footnote of my series on what has been written in English about the history of Chinese strategic thought. [1] As I sifted through the materials I needed for that review,  I came across one trope about Chinese culture […]

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