How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics

An Excerpt from Laura Briggs’ latest book

The Subprime Trump’s presidency has sometimes been portrayed as a historical earthquake, radically discontinuous from what came before. Who could have predicted that at a time of rising employment rates, white U.S. Americans would vote in economic resentment of the Democratic Party? How could one foresee a hostile takeover of the ...
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How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics

The New-Old Terror Wave in Europe (Part 1)

A Comparison of European Terrorism Cycles

Terrorism, understood as non-state political violence that inflicts physical harm on people and property outside of combat or occupied regions with the aim to frighten society and force a state to enact or change certain policies[1], is far from being a new phenomenon in Europe. In fact, it has been ...
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Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence

An excerpt from Rachel Sherman’s new book

Scott told me he had been self-conscious about his wealth since he was a child. He recalled feeling sensitive to comments classmates and others would make about the size of his family’s house. He said, “I just felt like, ‘Yeah, this is kind of different. And, it’s something to hide.’” ...
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Witnesses to History

Past Present Celebrates Its 100th Broadcast

A little more than two years ago, three historians were frustrated with the lack of historical analysis in the 24-hour news cycle. We decided to stop yelling at the TV and to learn to speak evenly and with fewer profanities, into a foam-covered microphone. And so the history podcast Past ...
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Witnesses to History

After 9/11 — What?

A Historian Contemplates the Future of Memory

My editorial colleague Jeff Goldfarb told me yesterday that he was going to re-publish one of his reflections from September 11, 2001, and I decided to do so too. But I didn't become a blogger until 2006, and then, it appears -- perhaps because, however schmaltzy, commemorations of the attack ...
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What Berkeley Needs is a Non-Violent Containment Squad

Reflections from a civil rights veteran

Those reports took me back to the 1960s when I was doing voter registration for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and marching against segregation in Birmingham and Mississippi. Then, we were the equivalent of the "fascists" that Antifa and the black bloc are beating up in Berkeley. They called us Communists, ...
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Why Colin Kaepernick Isn’t Working

Football’s Sketchy Labor History

Football may be entertainment for most of us, but it is labor for those who play it, a kind of work that requires as much preparation and discipline as any academic or white collar professional training. In fact, many parents begin fantasizing about an NFL career when their children are ...
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The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter

A Memoir

My father was a Communist Party organizer, a fervent believer in the political philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, the intellectual foundation of what became a faith, ideas that had nurtured and inspired him since his adolescence in “the old country” of Kishinev, Romania. Or Russia -- he would always add -- Russia, Romania ...
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Remembering Romanian Fascism; Worrying About America

Losing Our Moral Compass between Past and Future

Living under Ceausescu was in some ways like living with Donald Trump as president. There was a lot of nationalist swagger, posturing, and boasting about independence from the Soviets. When Ceausescu refused to send troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 as part of the Warsaw Pact crackdown on student protests, people ...
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A Pre-History of Post-truth

East and West

The end of “The End of History” arrived together with the end of belief in reality. The Cold War world was a world of warring ideologies; in the twenty-first century, both American capitalism and post-Soviet oligarchy employ the same public relations specialists catering to gangsters with political ambitions. As Peter ...
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