Tag Archives: History
A Special Halloween Post
It’s that time of year again: Halloween, and map quizzes in my US History survey. These two events converge in the single most common undergraduate typo: the labeling of the “Eerie Canal” through upstate New York. Reliably, every year a … Continue reading
Posted in Historian in the World
Tagged Canals, Erie Canal, Halloween, History, Rust Belt, Upstate, Utica
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The Moral Entanglements of Defending Capitalism
The early Americanist internet exploded last night with the news that The Economist had given a negative review to Ed Baptist’s magisterial new book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The shocking part is that the main criticism … Continue reading
College Admissions and the Commodification of Experience
The academic social-media-o-sphere has been abuzz for the past couple of weeks with discussion of William Deresiewicz’s piece in the New Republic entitled “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.” The piece was an obvious piece of clickbait (as Salon put … Continue reading
Posted in Historian in the World
Tagged Academia, Higher Education, History, Tourism
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A Very Special Virginia Anti-Marriage Equality Argument
David Cohen in Slate has brought word of what he calls “The Worst Argument Ever Made Against Gay Marriage,” made last week before the Fourth Circuit in Richmond. The occasion was the state’s appeal of the Eastern District of Virginia’s decision … Continue reading
Fxbg’s Landscape of Slave-Made Capitalism
This recent post by Julia Ott, a historian of capitalism at the New School, articulates forcefully a point that can’t be repeated enough: in a very real sense, slaves were the capital that made the emergence of capitalism possible. … Continue reading
Posted in Historian in the World
Tagged Auction Block, Fredericksburg, historic district, History, Landscape of Slavery, slavery, Virginia
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Fixing FXBG’s Traffic
Fredericksburg can be a weird place to live. If you stay downtown, life flows smoothly and easily along, with relatively few delays and inconveniences. But if you leave “the bubble” (as Brian calls it) then things get ugly really fast. … Continue reading
Places I Have Lived, in 1941
Yesterday Kevin sent me a great site put together by Yale that has made available 170,000 photos taken by the Farm Security Administration between 1935 and 1943 to document the last years of the Depression and the early years of World … Continue reading
Posted in Digital Life, Historian in the World
Tagged 1941, Fredericksburg, History, Kevin, Links, Photos, Upstate
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