This post is a commentary on historian Walter Scheidel’s book, Escape from Rome, which is a stunningly original analysis of a topic that has long fascinated scholars like me: How did Europe come to create the modern world? This post is republished in my new book, The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education. Scheidel examines … Continue reading How the Fall of Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity — and Parallels with the Rise of US Higher Ed
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. Given the state of the second Trump administration, there has never been a better to time revisit this analysis. … Continue reading The State as Organized Crime
This is my first ever Pollyanna post. I wrote it last year in order to cheer myself about the world we live in. I think it still stands up. We Live in the Best of Times We seem to be in a world … Continue reading We Live in the Best of Times — Really
This post is an overview of the 2014 book by Stanford classicist Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For? In it he makes the counter-intuitive argument that over time some forms of war have been socially productive. In contrast with the message of 1970s song by the same name, war may in fact be good for something. … Continue reading Ian Morris — War! What Is It Good For?
This post is an essay by Gordon Wood that was published recently as in op-ed in the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. His focus is on why the American colonies produced such a remarkable set of republican thinkers and leaders. And he attributes of lot of this to their modest position in … Continue reading Gordon Wood: What Explains the Genius of the American Founders?
This post is a new essay of mine that was published two years ago in Kappan. Here's a link to the original. And here's a link to the pdf. It is also reprinted as a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. The essay focuses on an issue I've been thinking about for years, … Continue reading The Fraught Connection between State and School
This post is a commentary on historian Walter Scheidel’s book, Escape from Rome. It’s a stunningly original analysis of a topic that has long fascinated scholars like me: how did Europe come to create the modern world? His answer is this: Europe became the cauldron of modernity and the dominant power in the world because … Continue reading How the Fall of Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity — and Parallels with the Rise of US Higher Ed
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 makes war and war makes the state. … Continue reading The State as Organized Crime
This post is an essay I wrote for a festschrift volume in honor of my dear friend and colleague, Daniel Tröhler, who is a professor at University of Vienna. The book is National Literacies in Education: Historical Reflections on the Nexus of Nations, National Identity, and Education, edited by Stephanie Fox and Lukas Boser. It was … Continue reading Reflections on States, Schools, and National Literacies
This post is a fascinating essay by Yasheng Huang about the Chinese examination system, which was recently published in Aeon. Here's a link to the original. It draws on his new book, which I highly recommend: The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exam, Autocracy, Stability and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They … Continue reading Yasheng Huang — The Exam that Broke Society
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 