This post is a brief 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 … Continue reading How the Fall of the Roman Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity — and What this Suggests about 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 make war and war … Continue reading The State as Organized Crime
This post is a brief commentary on historian Walter Scheidel's latest 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 … Continue reading Escape from Rome: How the Loss of Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity — and What this Suggests about US Higher Ed
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 