How Do We Know an Intervention Has Succeeded?

We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation. . . . We’re monitoring that situation very carefully. We have put together a range of contingency plans. – President Obama Back in late August of 2012, President Obama uttered words these in an impromptu press conference. At the time, it represented the most concrete and coherent statement of policy regarding the conflict in Syria. With the latest revelation that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on a small scale, calls …

Did the Broken Windows Theory Work?

Political scientist James Q. Wilson died last week at the age of 80.  The Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, Wilson was friend to politicians like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and a contributor to journals such as Public Interest, which promoted the notion that well-intentioned policies often have “unintended consequences.”  This idea was popular among conservatives and ex-liberals, who had grown skeptical when the once dominant philosophy of liberalism floundered in the face of inflation, crime and joblessness in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea for which Wilson is most famous, of course, is the “broken windows theory.”  It proposes that …

Essence Precedes Existence? The Problem of Identity Politics in Hurewitz’s Bohemian LA

What does it mean to “be” white, or black, or gay, or working-class? How might a Jewish Ethiopian-American who grew up in poverty but now has a big bank account define himself? Which identity matters most – the current status of wealth and privilege, the experience of coming from a hardscrabble background, or Jewishness or Africanness or national identity (native or adopted)? Does one dimension of identity actually have to subordinate the others? Our current president is almost always described as being black, despite having one white parent and growing up almost entirely with a white family. His own experience is far more complex than our contemporary framework of race and identity …

Making the Spectral Real: Asian American Film in Glen M. Mimura’s Ghostlife of Third Cinema

“What is Asian American cinema?” asks Glen M. Mimura in Ghostlife of Third Cinema. As other scholars in related fields have addressed Asian American citizenship, housing segregation, and racialization, Mimura explores the cultural production of Asian American film and its relation to the transnational Third Cinema. Mimura describes Third Cinema as a “revolutionary international movement,” radical in its politics and form. Emerging in the 1960s, the Third Cinema proliferated over the following two decades. According to Mimura, it helped to develop community based film centers and independent Asian American cinema, while also creating spaces for previously marginalized identities, …

Dog Days Classics: Said Said What? Orientalism and the Other

Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978 Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism is without a doubt a massively influential work that grad students and others sometimes use far too carelessly. Along with later works such as 1993’s Culture and Imperialism, Said established a critical insight into how Western works, fictional and historical, created a discourse about the East that conflated it with femininity, emotionality, and sensuality that left Eastern culture submissive to the masculine, scientific, and rational West. The book exploded the idea of an objective history and raised questions about the efficacy of Western histories of the East. After all, the West’s imposition of the above traits on …

Dog Days Classics: Foucault’s Vision of Domination

Ahhh summer. If you are not melting on the East Coast or Southeast then hopefully you are relaxing on the left coast or surviving the brutal heat of the Midwest. As such, it seems a perfect time to reflect on how we got to where we are intellectually. Here at T of M, we are revisiting some old classics that shaped our thought in our younger years along with, as is true of any work, their flaws Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1975 Foucault’s influential classic can be credited (blamed in some people’s eyes) for fueling a shift in how historians and others think about discourse and the creation of social norms. Along with works such as The History of …

Seven Ways of Looking at a City

Assumptions about human nature have long shaped the way people think about politics, economics, and even their own personal relationships. Often these assumptions take the form of metaphors or tropes, as when we think of an election as a horse race or the workplace as a rat race, with all the unspoken implications about greed, success, failure and fulfillment they entail. A famous example of these tropes can be found in the literature on immigration, where a classic work of history, The Uprooted, approached the subject with a very different set of assumptions in 1951 than The Transplanted did in 1987. Newer literature eschews both the themes of ripping people out of one culture and planting …

How to Approach a Historical Methods Course?

Teaching historical methods is a bit like studying American history – outsiders are prone to be skeptical. America has history? History has methods? You mean, like statistics and models and guidelines for the proper use of a Bunsen burner?  (My question is informed, or should I say misinformed, by a total lack of knowledge of what research methods in the sciences might actually be.) Almost every history major (except for one of the degenerates who writes for this site) has to take some variation of a methods course as an undergrad. For most people, this class is the first time they ever hear the word “historiography.” I know when I saw a snarky comic strip on my professor’s door …

America’s Ace in the Hole Is, Of Course, Its Awesomeness

The United States likes to think of itself not just as “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” but also as the world’s heartland of homegrown optimism. Since at least de Tocqueville, visitors have commented on Americans’ predilection for thinking big and looking on the bright side – a cultural trait that has often been linked to the American fixation with free enterprise and capitalism. A depressive poet is not likely to conquer a continent or invade everything from Mexico to the moon. As a Latin American history professor once told my class, the American businessman’s idea of history is a 45-degree angle into the future, quite unlike the squiggly, ambivalent line most …

Mapping the Ineffable: The Nebulous Flow of History in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Three or four times only did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides . . . I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never changing map of the ever constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds. - Timothy Cavendish in Cloud Atlas (373) If only we could have some sort of “never changing map of the ever constant ineffable?” Yet, would not such a map only be relevant for a brief moment? The ineffable maybe indescribable but is it …