This post is a chapter from my 2004 book, The Trouble with Ed Schools. Here's a link to an earlier version that was published in 2003 in Educational Researcher. I wrote this in response to my experience teaching doctoral students in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Nearly all of the students … Continue reading Peculiar Problems of Preparing Educational Researchers
This post is a reprint of a piece I published in Quartz in 2017. Here’s a link to the original. It’s an effort to explore the distinctively populist character of American higher education. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that US colleges and universities have managed to generate is their ability to reach beyond … Continue reading Nobel Prizes Are Great, But Football Is Why American Universities Dominate the Globe
This post is a piece by David Frum that was published in 2017 by Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. There has been a lot of talk lately about the threats to democracy, brought on by the disaster of the Trump administration and other shifts toward populist autocracy around the world. In this essay, … Continue reading David Frum: Democracies Fail in the Absence of Strong Conservative Parties
This post is a commentary on a classic essay by Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime," which appeared in the 1985 book Bringing the State Back In. Here's a PDF of the original chapter. His essay is a riff on an aphorism he developed earlier: the state make war and war … Continue reading The State as Organized Crime
This post is a stunning essay by Paul Fussell published in The New Republic in 1981. Here's a link to a PDF of the original. On August 2, we observed the 76th anniversary of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. In light of that, it seems like a good time to revisit the debate about … Continue reading Paul Fussell — “Thank God for the Atom Bomb”
This post is about, of all things, the Byzantine Empire. Unlike its western counterpart, what is usually called the Roman Empire, it has received little respect over the years. Even the name is a calumny (drawn from the name of the original Greek city of Byzantium that later became the empire's capital, Constantinople), which was … Continue reading The Triumph and Tragedy of the Byzantine Empire — How It Preserved the West and Devastated the East
This post is a tribute to the Normans and how they came to shape modern Europe. It draws primarily from the book The Normans: From Raiders to Kings by Lars Brownworth and also from a recent essay in Unherd by Ed West. The Normans were Vikings who in the ninth century conquered a piece of … Continue reading How the Normans Shaped Modern Europe
This post is a piece I ran into online written by Morgan Housel, manager of the investment firm Collaborative Fund. It offers a few rules, not about investment but about life. I'm not usually big on epigrams, but these I find really compelling. Here's a link to the original. See what you think. A Few … Continue reading Morgan Housel — A Few Rules
History is full of ironies. One is that sometimes buffoons can be more beneficent national leaders than great men. A case in point is Napoleon III. My source for this analysis is the new book by Alan Strauss-Schom, The Shadow Emperor: A Biography of Napoleon III. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was the undistinguished nephew and heir … Continue reading Beneficent Buffoon — The Case of Napoleon III
Here's a challenge to any writer. How do you write a book about someone famous who never did anything? Craig Brown found an answer with his book, Nine-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. In this book, he provides not a biography but a set of impressions of Queen Elizabeth's younger sister as they were recounted by … Continue reading Craig Brown – Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 