Ongoing Learning

✭✭✭✰✰: Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert is the astonishing story of water in the American West. The 19th-century society which crossed the 100th meridian was built upon a base of household agriculture. Under that system, success could plausibly be attributed to one's individual merits. The "Great American Desert," though, requires irrigation—that is, collectivism. The region's true progenitors were not cowboys, but Mormon canal diggers.

In the 20th century, America became more ambitious. Dams, planned and built by the rival Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers, were intended to remake the Arid West. A dammed river provides a reservoir, irrigation, electricity, flood control, jobs, graft, and a bureaucratic raison d'être, at the expense of local interests, the environment, and, increasingly, the American taxpayers. While early dams (Hoover, Grand Coulee) repaid their cost many times over, later projects faced progressively higher construction costs for less promising locations. Even with ludicrous over-estimates of the benefits, subsidies of 90% or more became required for supposedly self-funding projects to pencil. Yet, building continued through the '40s, '50s, and '60s. They finally encountered presidential resistance from Jimmy Carter in the '70s, and becoming untenable around the book's 1986 publication. Long after their economical rationale was lost, their political value persisted until finally halted by the overwhelming resistance of opposing economic interests, conservationists, and good-government types. In this way, the American dam-building obsession is a synecdoche for the New Deal political order.

Cadillac Desert is written in a style reminiscent of Robert Caro, and its central lesson mirrors his: those supposedly scientific and objective institutions claiming to champion the common good are often driven by petty motives to irrational and destructive conclusions. When Reisner lays out stunning fact after stunning fact about the Bureau's projects under Floyd Dominy, I could not help but think of Bob Moses deciding how "a population bigger than that of Minneapolis" would be housed. The book periodically shades into misanthropic environmentalism, with Reisner referring to humans as "cancer" and implying that it is better for nature to remain unobserved than to be seen by "overweight vacationers." Given that he is a conservationist writing in mid-century California (the same milieu gave us The Population Bomb), this was probably inevitable, but the elitist tone is annoying nonetheless.

I would note that the book is far too long (over 600 pages), made worse in its later editions by two lengthy addendums. To the general reader, I would recommend reading Chapter 1 (on America first encountering and failing to adapt to the Arid West), Chapter 2 (on LA's "theft" of water from the Owens Valley), and Chapter 7 (on Floyd Dominy, the Bureau of Reclamation chief who personally symbolized its excesses). One can stop there, unless one is, say, a Californian eager to learn more about the secret constellations of alliances so crucial to that state's politics. This is not to knock Reisner: the fact that he has accumulated page after page of information all pointing towards the same phenomenon indicates its overwhelming truth.

✭✭✭✭✭: How Asia Works is a historically informed account of contemporary economic development. Drawing on an intellectual legacy ranging from Alexander Hamilton to Hu Jintao, Joe Studwell explores the implications of three crucial insights:

1. Household agriculture outperforms landlord systems in poor economies. Agricultural yields can be increased almost indefinitely with additional labor, but this requires incentives directly tied to effort. In landlord systems, those who could supply extra labor do not benefit, making such systems inherently inefficient. Breaking landlord agriculture is, therefore, essential for any country aiming to raise incomes.

2. Manufacturing knowledge is the key to sustained growth. Learning from existing global techniques is vastly more efficient than reinventing them. Countries must engage in global trade, but on terms that foster a critical mass of domestic technical production. This creates a self-sustaining "community of knowledge" essential for long-term growth.

3. "Financial efficiency" is, at best, orthogonal to the problems facing poor economies. In underdeveloped economies, profit-maximizing investments are often usually not productivity-increasing. For example, land speculation may offer individuals a safe investment but adds no productive value. Financial liberalization is similarly unlikely to direct investments in ways that improve societal productivity.

These insights imply a radical rejection of both dominant development prescriptions. Studwell arrives at these conclusions primarily by contrasting the nations of East Asia, and he refreshingly decenters tautological explanations like "institutions," "culture," and "corruption. Countries often grow less corrupt and more democratic as they become wealthier, but even highly corrupt, autocratic regimes—such as South Korea—have achieved sustainable growth. 

What makes How Asia Works so convincing, besides its excellent interplay of statistics and anecdotes, is that it provides a framework for unifying so many other phenomena. To list in no particular order of importance:

• Why American slavery could have been simultaneously less efficient and yet the dominant mode of production where it was legal.

• Why Latin American protectionists has had so much less success than their European and East Asian counterparts.

• Why Marxist-Leninist groups have overseen both very successful and utterly disastrous land policies.

• Why highly resourced and self-motivated organizations so often engage in speculation.

• Why a c. 1898 debate in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) over whether small farms were economically viable could spiral outward into a permanent split of socialists into Social Democrats and Communists.

• Why exports are disproportionately important for growth.

• Why both the Washington consensus and the dependency theorists seem incapable of delivering lasting results.

• Why companies can be incentivized into becoming profitable exporters, when one would assume that any company that knew how would simply choose to do that.

✭✭✭✭✰: Alan Blinder's A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961–2021 chronicles and analyzes the major macroeconomic trajectory of the period after A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1961 by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz. While Blinder acknowledges Friedman's immense influence, he is explicit in identifying himself as a "center-left Democrat" rather than a mechanical monetarist, asserting that there is no viable alternative to pragmatic Keynesianism. The book's timeframe also neatly aligns with Blinder's life as an academic economist and policymaker—a career which culminated in a tenure as Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve. 

Blinder’s covers the developments one would expect: the post-Eisenhower invention of "fiscal policy" with the Kennedy-Johnson stimulus, the inflation wars of the late 1960s through the early 1980s, the structural deficits of the Reagan era, the broad-based expansion of the 1990s, the turmoil of the Bush years, the long Great Recession, and the economic response to COVID-19. The analysis buoys his Keynesianism, with one critical exception: in the 1990s, Bill Clinton pursued fiscal austerity, yet the labor market continued to tighten. Blinder grapples with this anomaly, coming to only fitful conclusions. Clinton’s deficit reduction worked because it convinced Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan that he could fuel the information and communication technology boom through low interest rates without risking inflation. It is not clear to me if this is supposed to be a laying of two different phenomena on top of each other (an austerity-led productivity boom coupled with a Fed-induced hot economy), a story of political blackmail (Greenspan explicitly told Clinton's Treasury Secretary what he expected), or if Blinder thinks that the economic rules of the game were actually different for a short period of time. Each option has profound implications, probably explaining Blinder's reluctance to too closely commit to one.

The best part of the book—non-coincidentally the section I cannot imagine anyone else writing—is when Blinder carefully untangles the relationship between academic economists, policy makers, and political discourse. Certain narratives over-emphasize academia's monetarist fad in explaining the 70s conservative turn. Blinder will have none of that. Instead, he shows how infrequently, contingently, and incompletely the academy's insights actually are felt. This is probably for the best, in Blinder's pragmatic perspective, as economic concepts themselves are not neutral and ahistorical. An indicative example is the strange history of the Phillips Curve: a phenomenon that bounced between empirical fact looking for theoretical grounding and theoretical outcome looking for empirical proof.

✭✭✭✭✰: The Slave's Cause (2016) is currently the definitive history of abolitionism. Its scope is somewhat awkward, as Manisha Sinha wants to resist the tradition which sees abolitionism narrowly as a project of literate white elites, but does not want a topic so unwieldy as to encompass all resistance to slavery anywhere at any time. The author, a professor of history at UConn, does a good job finding a middle-ground by identifying abolitionism with a trans-Atlantic network of individuals and literature ideologically opposed to slavery qua slavery. In her telling, it emerges with contact between Quakers and blacks in British North America. The unstated assumption—that whatever came from here was somehow more apt to change the world than previous anti-slavery sentiment—is compelling but hard to articulate. Did Quakers provide literacy? Christian universality? Access to the historical record? A structure of propagation? (This would not be the first work to see political ideologies as transfigurations of religions.) It is hard to say, but there is a real sense that all subsequent abolitionism is descended from Anthony Benezet.

From Philadelphia, abolitionism circulated around the Atlantic through black, evangelical, and radical networks. During the period of "First Abolition" (c. 1775-1815), large swaths of the world were secured for freedom by individuals who grabbed the opportunities created by war and revolution. Abolition was neither automatic nor easy; even in a place with virtually no slaves like Vermont, active enforcement was required to make freedom real. The Great Powers and their leaders were never the driving force behind the end of slavery, even in their own jurisdictions. Instead, Sinha highlights the central role of the marginalized: abolitionists were disproportionately black, poor, female, and unorthodox. The aperture then narrows to focus on the American case and its interlocutors (viz. British). If abolitionism in Brazil, Cuba, or the Transvaal is discussed, it is done so briefly that I missed it. 

After "First Abolition" comes the "Forgotten Era" (c. 1815-1840), which I found the book's most interesting. It was marked by white attempts at colonization, successfully defeated by black antipathy. The failure of anti-slavery in the Upper South coupled with its success in the Old Northwest caused a stark divergence along the Ohio River. This was accentuated by the most passionate anti-slavery Southerners, forced to move from their home states, providing the North with leadership at the expense of the South. Sinha's distinctive contribution is to assert that, counter to recent presumptions, abolitionism was generally aligned with the other progressive causes of the day. It was not primarily a play by ruling class elites to regulate society in a bourgeois mold. Rather, more often than not, they shared important affinities with republicans, socialists, feminists, and anti-imperialists. The split between Garrisonians and Evangelicals mattered, but was more indicative of underlying tensions than its source.

Anti-slavery thus enters the "Second Abolition" (c. 1840-1865) reinvigorated with radical and popular energy. Modern discourse often asserts that ideas must moderate to gain appeal, but the opposite happened with abolitionism. The eventual collapse of consensus over slavery, Sinha argues, was a result of radical abolitionists making their issue unavoidable. William Lloyd Garrison, far from the loony radical Brahmin I had imagined, emerges as an extraordinarily dedicated and effective son of an indentured servant. He won, and millions were freed.

✭✭✭✰✰: Gateway to Freedom is a cool book by one of America's best historians. It covers the New York Underground Railroad, focusing on both its key figures and interesting one-off stories. For a generation, the work of abolitionists has been downplayed as relatively unimportant: they were always a small minority of white people, and they did not succeed in freeing the vast majority of enslaved blacks until the Civil War crisis made it a fait accompli. Yet, more recently, their work has been being re-emphasized. Organizations like the New York Committee of Vigilance and the myriad of informal networks together helped perhaps 1% of all slaves reach freedom. It was from their ranks that the vanguard of black anti-slavery activists emerged (both Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman fit into this category). Interestingly, despite Northern complicity in the escape of runaways being a major grievance of the Fire-Eaters, the Upper South slave states most effected by fugitive slaves all stayed in the Union. Thus, it is safe to safe that it was the disrespect rather than the practical effects that most infuriated the Southerners.

A minor detail which I found notable: Gateway to Freedom came out the same year as Sean Wilentz's No Property in Man [reviewed: below]. While there Wilentz insists that the Fugitive Slave Clause was an unimportant consideration in framing the Constitution, Foner follows the traditional line that it was a significant concession.

✭✭✭✰✰: Of the half-dozen American historians who occupy the peak of the academy, Sean Wilentz is the funniest. He read Michael Kazin's American Dreamers, which makes the banal argument that radicals helped make America better, and became so enraged he wrote a rebuttal. The Politicians and the Egalitarians instead posits that progress comes from moderates independently coming to moderate versions of the same conclusions. The hero of his narrative is the humble party functionary, who—without possessing any personal courage—allows the party to implement good policy over the heads of vested interests. Because radicals seek to break the discipline of the two major parties, they actually impede what they claim to hasten.

The literal argument of No Property in Man is simple: that the exclusion of the word "slave" from the 1787 U.S. Constitution was not the sidestep of embarrassed hypocrites, but rather an intentional victory by anti-slavery delegates. In their legal thinking, slavery was so odious a violation of common law principles that it must be positively sanctioned to exist. The decision to only say "persons" meant that the federal government did not itself recognize "property in man." Of course, with all debate beng private, this distinction was immediately lost on the next generation of Americans. Even a Massachusetts-born Supreme Court Associate Justice like Joseph Story (1779  - 1845) could claim that the Fugitive Slave Clause acknowledged "the existence of a positive, unqualified right on the part of the owner of the slave which no state law or regulation can in any way qualify, regulate, control, or restrain"—completely at odds with how certain Northern delegates understood their work.

This discontinuity is a central weakness of No Slavery in Man. Even if Wilentz is correct in how the Constitution's guarantees of slavery came to be, his constant insistence that it mattered begs credulity. While claiming he is not engaging in "Originalism" (Wilentz is too much a Democratic Party insider to embrace such a doctrine), he argues that had the Constitution actually implied positive property rights in slaves, then the whole grounds with which anti-slavery advocates had attacked the institution would have been impossible. This seems wrong. Even in the time period, people had wildly different interpretation of the Constitution. Some Southerners claimed that it was illegal to even criticize slavery (as that would provoke slave uprisings, which would in turn violate guaranteed property rights), while some Northerners claimed that the Constitution actually outlawed slavery in 1789. I feel he is sympathetic to a related argument, that the liberal institution of representative government creates pressures for all other democratic rights, but instead retreats to the this technical re-litigation of early 19th century anti-slavery debates.

Wilentz's establishment perspective likely prompted his interest in this topic. William Lloyd Garrison, the republic's premier radical abolitionist, insisted that the Constitution was a "Covenant with Death" and should be repudiated. Yet it was Lincoln, who always claimed absolute allegiance to the Constitution, that accomplished slavery's demise. One cannot help but see parallels to The Politicians and the Egalitarians, and his own personal relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

✭✭✭✭✭: I knew Trade Wars are Class Wars was for me when it began with a quote from Belle Epoque theorist J. A. Hobson. Matthew Klein (an economics journalist) and Michael Pettis (a professor of business) succinctly summarize their argument in a conversation with Adam Tooze:

They identify two black holes distorting the 21st century world economy: China and Germany. They both produce far more than they consume, with the surplus being exported. For these trade imbalance to persist, the money earned from importing nations must be returned to them without buying their goods. The only way for this to occur is for the exporters to buy financial assets in the importing countries. Thus, these trade imbalances represent a dual flow of goods and capital into the importing countries, with financial claims running the other way. Klein and Pettis argues that this is not the boon to the recipients that it might seem. The United States, the largest deficit country, is not short on capital; rather, it is short on profitable investments. Here we can find the origin of a persistent and controversial phenomenon: America's low savings rate. The gap between the amount people want to invest in America and its investment opportunities under current conditions must be offset by a drop in domestic savings—via some combination of rising household debt, federal deficit, and unemployment.

I can't help but think back to Zach Carter's excellent The Price of Peace [reviewed: February 2022]. In it, Keynes realizes that investment drives growth, but demand drives investment. Thus, if savings is a necessary condition for growth, consumption is too. One should be at maximum utilization before trying to boost savings. (This is yet another way David Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations [reviewed: below] is more wrong than right.) The original trade imbalances are not the result of German and Chinese workers being "better." They are, actually, 19% and 70% less efficient on average than their American counterparts respectively. Rather, the imbalance is from both countries' governments preventing worker compensation to rise to their productivity. This allows their firms to pay less to run at full capacity, crowding out competition from less repressive states. Such a massive expropriation from the working majority to capitalists has all sorts of negative knock-on effects. Domestically it lowers living standards, and abroad it undermines demand for new investments. There seems to be something special about the secondary sector, in that its monopolization by a few countries also causes a monopolization of world growth.

The specific arrangements Klein and Pettis document came out of specific political and historical circumstances. China's repression is about threading the needle between shock therapy and planned stagnation, which entails continually stimulating investment by state demand. Germany's repression was the chosen means of integrating the new economic frontiers of the former Soviet Bloc on terms agreeable to its capitalists. Both represent to Klein and Pettis successful projects of "class-war": decreasing the purchasing power of the lower classes in order to increase the power of the elite. Despite such talk, they are not coming out of a Marxist-Leninist tradition. Their citation to the radical liberal Hobson, rather than his contemporaries Rosa Luxemburg or Vladimir Lenin, is telling. They are, in Keynesian fashion, seeing the economy as a political creation, and thus something which can be re-created by humans.

✭✭✭✰✰: I read Out of Italy to wash out the taste of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes [reviewed: below]. Fernand Braudel is what of the great historians of the 20th centuries, and in this short work he sets out to show how Italy worked as the beating heart of Europe's early modern economy.

A few things are striking about the work: its confidence, its breadth, and its willingness to mix quantitative and qualitative (such as having a graph without a measurable y-axis). Italy's music has never much interested me, nor how Germany or Poland or France interpreted it, but it is interesting to me that the responses were nationally-based. Thus certain imagined communities already existed, and did so within the context of a world-system. The fact that commercial centers can rise and fall says a lot about how trade and finance worked. Overall, this was a nice reprieve which made me wish I knew more about the world it described.

"The history of Chinese advances is one of points of light, separated in space and time, unlinked by replication and testing, obfuscated by metaphor and pseudo-profundity—in effect, a scattering of ephemera. Much of the vocabulary was invented for the occasion and fell as swiftly into disuse. Much thought remained mired in metaphysical skepticism and speculation. This subjectivity explains the uncertainty of gains and the easy loss of impetus. Chinese savants had no way of knowing when they were right." -David Landes, accidentally describing his own book.

✭✭✰✰✰: David Landes was an economic historian (and later emeritus professor) at Harvard from 1963 to 2013. During this time, he shaped generations of American elites, creating and bestowing a consensus understanding about how the world works. At the beginning of his career, he wrote Bankers and Pashas (1958), a fascinating book about Egypt's failure to enter the European core during the 19th century. Thus, I was excited to read his final synthesis, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), and see what he learned from half a century of study.

The result is a mess. His narrative bounces between cute anecdote and sweeping generalization. A typical section runs thus:

Beyond the unpleasantness of Landes' prose, each way of parsing this argument has such glaring weaknesses that to reconstruct it would seem uncharitable to Landes. When explaining the success and failure of different civilizations, Landes resorts to their fundamental cultural traits. This is a difficult undertaking under the best of circumstances, but he is so inconsistent as to be tautologically wrong.

The immigration of foreign artisans both indicates Britain's vibrancy but also Spain's decadence. Europe's use of the market to specialize brought them the Smithian growth needed to industrialize, and "the Industrial Revolution found fertile ground in the American colonies and then the United States" because they were self-reliant—the opposite of market-based specialization. The Latin American economies are dragged down by their feelings of inferiority, while China was dragged down by its feelings of superiority. Egypt was in turn dragged down by a misplaced feeling of equality, while Japan was buoyed by its national pride. Portugal's culture apparently turns on a dime: it had once been adventurous, but then "the bulk of the people were disinclined to independence of thought and, in all but a few instances, too much averse from intellectual activity to question what they had learned." This is the underlying reason for "the government's failure to promote agriculture and industry had reduced Portugal to the role of 'the best and most profitable colony of England.'" That he attributed Europe's special culture to the fact that "Enterprise was free" there just 70 pages before doesn't seem to faze him. The only consistency is that the positive gloss applies to rich countries, and the negative to poor. This is most jarring when a region goes from poor to rich: East Asia's rise is chalked up to their obedience (good), in contrast to their previous obedience (bad).

His most repeated assertion is that the key to understanding the emergence of modern economic growth is to appreciate that there are two kinds of cultures: those who respect property rights and those who don't. The former includes Europe's ancestors, and the latter the rest of the world. His evidence that the Germanics were one such society is that King Clovis (fl. 500) asked a soldier for a vase he looted, but the soldier broke it rather than give it up. Then the king killed the soldier. The next example is of the Israelites—also apparently a property respecting people—demonstrated here:

In contrast, Chinese are not a property respecting people. The evidence for this is as follows:

The problems with this approach are myriad. They require seeing cultures as homogeneous and timeless. The selections are cherry-picked, and even then do not obviously lend themselves to the interpretation Landes asserts. Could not a counter-Landes say the first anecdote shows that Germanics loot, demand, and destroy the property of others? And how is the Chinese example any different than a very precocious Machiavelli, that product of commercial Tuscany? When his colleagues have even technical disagreements with this analysis, Landes takes vicious jabs at them:

He similarly complains that,

Ten pages after this, he then admits that "Nothing like [the genocide of Native Americans] would be seen again until the Nazi Jew hunts and killer drives of World War II. Within decades, the native Arawaks (Tainos) and Caribs were largely wiped out." Landes both thinks Columbus was a Hitler-like figure, and that we should put him on a stamp to own the "politically correct." His lack of empathy extends into prurient descriptions of contact between occupying soldiers (of which he was once one) and powerless civilians.

This review is so long because I think Landes is best understood through his own, brutal writing. My most charitable interpretation is that this is an exoteric work, one meant to impart on (what he views as) the dumb masses the beliefs most useful for them to know. He lays out why one might want to do so in the conclusion:

I fear, however, that this is too cute an explanation for why Landes wrote this book. In actuality, many Harvard academics can get away with mediocrity as long as they well-connected, charming, and say what the powerful want to hear. The only interesting argument was done later and better by Walter Scheidel in Escape From Rome [reviewed: June 2021]: long-run growth is likely to emerge from states with enough resources to fund intentional projects of re-organization, but not enough power to stifle destabilizing innovation. Europe, as a polycentric state system, well fits this mold.

✭✭✭✰✰: Is America's central political struggle that between separate centuries-old nations hidden by our federal union, as journalist Colin Woodard contends in American Nations? No. Still, for a book whose basic premise is wrong, I think it is pretty good.

I appreciate that Woodard is so clear about his argument: due to the first effective settlement effect, it matters how a society came into being. He is trying to argue that there is something beyond material facts which structure societies. He calls it "culture," but, because that is a meaningless term, I gloss it more constructively as "social institutions able to reproduce themselves." Examples might be a given dialect of English, public education, religion, and slavery. With each, a preponderant part of the population participating is both necessary and sufficient for producing more participants. This is more significant than the banal observation that first settlers contribute to later culture; rather, it argues that there is an asymmetry between immigrants and hosts. New arrivals will take on more of the society's existing mores than vice-versa. You can imagine this for yourself: if you migrate to a foreign culture, maybe you would successfully resist adopting the language, religion, politics, music, sports team, and so on of your hosts (though even then I imagine at least some of those would be negotiable). But even if you inculcate in your children those norms most important to you, those few exceptions are not guaranteed to survive. In any sort of intermarriage with the majority, the weight of society will be in favor of the majority parent. Over the generations, the attributes which require work to maintain will be those most likely to be lost. Thus my grandparents of German, Russian/Danish, Scotch, and WASP descent all had much more in common with each other than any of their genetic cousins back in their respective home countries. If we accept that there are persistent cultural difference between American regions, something similar would be at work.

The fact that his model lines up with objective measures like the prevalence of American dialects lends his choices a prima facie validity: there is a real sense that southern New Jersey must be culturally more connected to Missouri than to northern New Jersey. The horizontal settler patterns are a real phenomenon. This cannot, however, be as clean as Woodard posits. Certain immigrant groups can come in such numbers as to become culturally self-sustaining. Boston's 50% growth due to Irish Catholics has certainly left a lasting impact, one which can be seen in its divergence from rural Yankeedom. In addition, Woodard seems to sometimes conflate his provocative model of 'nations' with the uncontroversial idea of 'regional history'. Did so many Appalachians fight for the Union because they are a separate nation? I don't think so. Otherwise, why would East Tennessee be torn from their Central Tennessee kin? A better predicter of anti-secession sentiment was ownership of slaves. This corresponds to certain settlement patterns, but that is secondary to economic institutions. Similarly, his assertion that Yankees' investment in education was solely cultural is anachronistic. 19th century farmers were well-aware of its economic benefits. As Abraham Lincoln (no Yankee) told the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859:

When economic institutions overwhelm the cultural influences of settlement, Woodard posits a sort of ethnogenesis: hence the "Left Coast" and the "Far West." These two regions should, if his main model holds true, actually be a series of islands of the other cultures which originally established them. But instead they only diverge on whether they were tilted towards economies of extraction or economies of high-wage/high-investment. Once you admit that these identities are significantly shaped by economic institutions (not original settlers), the different "nations" seem to lack causal power. While it is neat that Southwest Texas has a lot of commonality with Chihuahua, surely the experience of being ruled by the United States since 1848 has given it more in common with, for example, East Texas. It is true that the rural Left Coast and Yankeedom vote very differently than rural Deep South, but this seems to be becoming less true every election. One now sees Confederate flags in rural Connecticut and Michigan, despite their region's ancestors having fought very hard to destroy that movement. This is because their imagined ancestors are provided by an increasingly national culture, drawing upon a composite of pasts. This is the origin of the modern red/blue cultural divide which Woodard seeks to refute. I predict that these regional trends will continue to converge to the extent economic institutions do. 

✭✭✭✭✰: The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order is Gary Gerstle's 2022 sequel to his co-edited 1989 volume The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. He charts how the interlocking "ideologies, policies and constituencies that shape American politics" (a "political order") shifted from the mid-century "New Deal" to the contemporary "Neoliberal."

Chapters 1-2 (on the fall of the New Deal) and 3-6 (on Neoliberalism's heyday) are simply excellent. In what feels like a direct challenge to Brad DeLong's story in Slouching Towards Utopia [reviewed: below], he argues that communism did not primarily cause the center-left to tack right, but rather caused the center-right to tack left. Hence, business' post-war willingness to concede generous wages and benefits in exchange for labor peace. Once communism fell, we get the "hubris" of unrestrained free market ideology. Gerstle pulls no punches when it comes the pointless, murderous incompetence of the Bush years (something I think liberals have been way too eager to whitewash). He, unlike Trump, ended his time as the most unpopular president in American history. 

Where the book weakened was after about 2010. Due to not knowing what comes next, the best he can do is to broadly lists off different figures and social movements which might or might not matter. His descriptions of Trump, Bernie, and Hillary are all mediocre. For a book all about the out of touch establishment, he baffling describes Joe Biden in terms totally congruent with his own mythmaking:

I truly do not think a single voter who does not have an Op-Ed column ever cared about Beau's death, or Biden's (overblown) dignity in handling it. Gerstle similarly chalks up Biden's declining cognitive capacity to "a speech impediment he had had since childhood." This had already been an untenable lie by the point Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order was published. Matt Bruenig had bluntly remarked on it as early as 2019:

There are two other major weaknesses of this (overall great) book. The first is an overhasty wish to predict neoliberalism is over. While cracks are showing, both the right and left alternatives have so far been more illusion than reality. The second is the related failure of Gerstle to try and sheer apart the successful and unsuccessful parts of neoliberalism. Brad DeLong would, despite knowing where the story ends, still say that the '90s telecommunications boom, Clinton deficit cutting, and financial deregulation were all net-benefits for America, and would have been overwhelmingly so with just minor adjustments. Simply rejecting the efficacy of neoliberalism, as I interpreted Gerstle to do, is unconvincing without a thorough philosophical investigation into why the good cannot be sheared from the bad.

✭✭✭✭✰: The City-State of Boston is a cool book. It takes seriously the contingency of history by treating the "City-State of Boston" as a meaningful unit of analysis. Just as historians can talk about "Italy" prior to 1861 or "Ukraine" prior to 1917, Yale historian Mark Peterson treats greater Boston as a semi-sovereign polity which was fully capable of birthing a 19th-century nation-state—even though it didn't. He instead places Boston into an Atlantic context—a place equally adjacent to Britain, South Carolina, and Barbados, and just one step removed from Germany, Greece, and China—intentionally avoiding the nationalist or continental frames more familiar to post-Revolution history. Peterson is upfront that this is an interesting interpretation able to shed new light on important topics, not one meant to replace traditional historiography.

"The Commonwealth," as Massachusetts was known, had its origin as an Atlantic node once the initial wave of Puritan immigration faded c. 1640. It became dominant in the carrying trade, deeply integrating the metropole and countryside in a manner reminiscent of past city-states like Athens. Its influence on neighboring New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut can traced via the effective circulation of its currency—the fiduciary, illegally minted, and arrogantly-designated "New England" shilling. Even after it was required to receive a royal governor, the region was at its core a self-governing republic.

After the revolution protected Boston from monarchist retrenchment, it developed an ambivalent relationship with the new Federal government. Maritime New England was consistently on the losing side of Antebellum politics: Virginia's choice triumphed over Massachusetts' ten times between 1800 and 1856, while the converse occurred just three. A more conciliatory system might have minimized the resentment Boston felt, but the era's politicians pursued a winner-take-all maximalism. To highlight this disaffection, Peterson follows sectionally-oriented politicians like Harrison Gray Otis, Caleb Strong, and Fisher Ames in addition to the more famous nationalists John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Daniel Webster.

In the generation between 1830 and 1865, the traditional sources of Commonwealth cohesion disappeared. The ethnic homogeneity was broken by waves of destitute Irish immigrants too large to be assimilated. The symbiotic agrarian-commercial relationship of the metropole and periphery gave way to an antagonistic agrarian-industrial one. The church was disestablished as puritanism split between hardline Calvinists and liberal Unitarians. The city was incorporated, removing the hyper-democratic town meeting. Violence erupted between pro- and anti-slavery mobs. Through a bizarre political quadrille, the 1850s Yankee elite were briefly re-united in the Republican Party. National power, seized with the secession of the South, proved the final deathblow to Boston's autonomous tradition. From 1865 on, the future of Boston was inevitably American.

I do wish Peterson better articulated the distinction between "Boston" and "New England." Early on, he implies that all of the Puritan descended colonies (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut) were the hinterland of "Boston," but then, towards the end of the book, he implies Connecticut is not part of the greater Boston circulation of persons (evidenced by it sending fewer students to the Round Hill School than Mexico). There is basically no mention of the western areas settled by Yankees, and it is not clear to the extent Boston acted as their cultural or political capital. 

✭✭✭✰✰: My experience reading The Puritans reminds me of Peter Wilson's Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire [reviewed: December 2021]. I already knew enough of the outline that the story wasn't new, but I lacked the historiographical context to see where the historian was making his contribution into the debate. I also read it when home sick, and admittedly was not at my best mentally.

I thought Chapter 8 (on Puritanism during the British Civil Wars period) was a real highlight. I am guessing David Hall thinks so too, because he kept referring the reader to it throughout the other sections. I appreciated the author consistently making clear how individuals and groups did not break down as neatly as later generations assumed. Many figures would surely have been surprised to see which denominations made them into a predecessor when they went looking for a usable past.

The defining aspect of Puritanism seems to be its simultaneous belief in the importance of community worship, and the belief that it somehow corrupted or took from that community if individuals who did not deserve to participate did. This is a completely foreign concern to me, and it is not at all intuitive given other Puritan doctrines. This dissonance is useful, as someone broadly inclined to sympathize with them: I should worry if I ever think their world feels like mine, for I am not a 17th-century Angloid.

Context: First as candidate then as president, Barrack Obama chose the Democratic Party response to the financial system's implosion, siding with the right-liberal clique friendly to Wall St. This meant rallying the House votes for TARP, appointing Tim Geithner to Treasury, not prosecuting bad actors, and allowing banks to pull-off mass fraud to stay solvent. Perhaps the most consequential decision was to follow Larry Summers and pursue only a partial stimulus in 2009, then calling for austerity at his first State of the Union when unemployment was still at 9.8%. Others have written about this better than I ever could (see: Brad DeLong and Zach Carter), but the result was disastrous. The United States took 90 months to return to pre-Recession unemployment. The Democratic Party hemorrhaged support. (During the Obama years, it lost 12 seats in the Senate, 63 seats in the House, 800 seats in state legislatures and—of course—the presidency.) When a second unprecedented financial collapse hit in 2020, the left-liberal wing of the Democrats stole a march. Isolating right-liberals like Summers, they argued to go big. This unequivocally worked, even undoing some of the long-run damage caused by Summers' austerity (the "frying pan"). Summers cautioned that there was now: 

About a one-third chance that inflation will accelerate significantly over the next several years, and we’ll be in a stagflationary situation, like the one that materialized between 1966 and 1969, where inflation went from the range of ones to the range of sixes. I think there’s a one-third chance that we won’t see inflation, but the reason we won’t see it is that the Fed hits the breaks hard, markets get very unstable, the economy skids downward close to recession. And I think there’s about a one-third chance that the Fed and the Treasury will get what they’re hoping for, and we’ll get rapid growth that will moderate in a non-inflationary way.

Once inflation picked up, this meaningless non-prediction was Summers' ticket back to power. With control of a major political party on the line (notably the one most academic economists consider themselves part of), analysists looked for alternatives to Summers' harsh monetarism. This is the moment Isabella Weber's history of China's "market reform debate" arrived. Her argument, that certain price controls in certain circumstances are actually effective at improving growth, made her the focus scrutiny, support, and hostility far beyond expectation.

✭✭✭✭✰: "Shock therapy" is a method for transitioning society to using markets as the primary method of economic investment and distribution. It prescribes a simultaneous liberalization of most wages and prices to make insolvent firms inefficient firms. In the short term, this must decrease total output (and thus living standards), but with the hope of better long term growth. The thinking is that, once unproductive firms go under, the more efficient remaining ones will expand, putting the newly available resources to better use. The crucial thing, under the shock doctrine, is the simultaneity of the withdrawal of all important price regulation. Partial deregulation will only re-channel mal-investment into new arbitrage opportunities: if the price of toasters remain static even as nickel skyrockets, then it will be profitable to melt down the former for the latter. Only total release will allow the market to discourage such waste.

While "liberalization of wages and prices" and "unproductive firms go under" sound technical and inoffensive in the language of economists, it feels like absolute chaos to those experiencing it. Prices for inputs, outputs, and labor all rise in competition with each other as each market actor tries to establish its position. The first bankruptcies occur once firms costs' outpace their revenue, but before they reach that point the savings rate (having dropped to near zero as people try and divest themselves of currency-denoted assets) will itself become a source of inflation: the share of national income going to wages not only needs to decrease proportional to its gap with production, but also to make up for the higher share of wages used for immediate expenditure. (NB: a transition from a ~30% to a ~0% savings rate, as happened in the Soviet Union, increases nominal consumption ~40%). As firms go bankrupt, they don't just painfully decrease the wage fund by laying off workers, but they also stop producing goods. Market logic is supposed to make sure that only firms whose outputs are not worth the costs of inputs are liquidated, but even in theory this can mean a 2% discrepancy between inputs and outputs might require a 10% decrease in workforce, to offset an accompanying 8% decrease in production from those now-unemployed workers. The firestorm of inflation → rising costs → bankruptcy will only extinguish when there is so much widespread unemployment that some goods remain unsold, making firms unwilling to keep paying ever-higher costs themselves. The most famous example of shock therapy would be the Russian case, where none other than Larry Summers and his fellow Harvardian (pejorative) Jeffrey Sachs oversaw 240,000% inflation, half the nation entering deep poverty (<$4/day), and a default on Russia's sovereign debt. This is the (embarrassingly American) origin of the Putin regime, built on the promise of stabilizing the crisis.

How China Escaped Shock Therapy argues that China almost went down this path, but benefited from choosing a more gradualist approach. While on paper shock therapy should be the shortest path out of the crisis, models never perfectly represent reality. I think this is part of why Summers and his allies get so vitriolic on the topic of inflation: they see themselves as realists, willing to embrace hard truths (e.g., "Russians need to suffer more!"). Yet they are profoundly unempirical, relying on demonstrably false simplifications. Isabella Weber documents how China used its huge size to run actual experiments, issuing special currencies so they wouldn't cross-contaminate each other: in one county they tried the neoliberal approach (deregulating prices and replacing grain quotas with a cash tax) and in the other they made a small change to the existing system (introducing a "dual track," where the government continued buying quota grain at the specified price but farmers were free to do as they wished with the surplus). In the freer trial, grain production initially shot up to chase prices but then overproduction left farmers worse off than they started. In the dual track case, what was originally an expropriating quota gradually transformed into subsidizing price floors, buffering the newly commercialized farms from a whiplash effect. Despite this ill-omen, China still almost liberalized prices in 1986 and did begin in 1988. The social damage this unleashed led to the PRC's worst ever crisis of legitimacy. It was only saved by abandoning shock therapy, and repressing the unrest.

Instead of shock therapy—the simultaneous liberalization of most wages and prices—China's reformers settled on a piecemeal strategy Weber analogizes to Jenga: one by one, sectors would be set up to take advantage of market logic, but without ever having a single "big bang." This would limit the opportunities for run-away inflation, and since 1989 China has done a remarkable job keeping prices stable. When one reads accounts of the fall of the Soviet Union (see Kotkin's Armageddon Averted and Zubok's Collapse [both reviewed: Spring 2024]) it is impossible not to be struck by the central role inflation played in unwinding the previously productive relationships which had made the country a world-leader in certain industries. Weber legitimizes the interventionist approach to fighting inflation by pointing to its under-appreciated success in the West. After the brutal inflation-deflation which accompanied the transition out of the World War I wartime economy, the US took a much interventionist approach to the post-World War II economy, setting the stage for three decades of roaring economic growth.

As she ends her story, Weber points out one final irony: at the highest levels of state power, good policy does not lead to political success. In China, the pro-shock therapy faction was able to alienate their opponents in the market debate, even while eventually implementing their program.

✭✭✭✰✰: Empire of Liberty is perhaps the weakest installment in the "Oxford History of the United States," meant to take the role vacated by over-focused The Age of Federalism [reviewed: below]. Gordon Wood, a professor at Brown University since the 1960s, is one of the few academic historians to make an impression on the general public: he has been an outspoken critic of the 1619 Project, praised by both Newt Gingrich and Barrack Obama, and immortalized by Charlie Kelly's "Does no one know who Gordon Wood is?" In my very first college history course (HIST 363: The American Revolution, with the excellent Dr. Hunter Price), his Radicalism of the American Revolution functioned as our central text to either dispute or affirm. (I largely did the latter)

The best thing I can say about Empire of Liberty is that Wood wrote exactly the volume he wanted. He is above-all an intellectual historian, curious about how the exact contours of hegemonic ideas have evolved with time. This works well for certain topics: Chapters 11 & 12 on the development of law (a traditionally conservative and elitist field) in a democratic republic were the highlight of the book. Similarly, I found the sections on science, on relations with European culture, and on reform interesting (though poorly balanced, allotting space without enough regard for importance), and I even think his central thesis—in 1789, one had to perform being a rentier gentleman to be considered a proper participant in politics, while in 1815 respect could be accorded to anyone with mediocre wealth—is both correct and important. But the volume's focus is too narrow and his evidence too airy to be effective as a history of the whole nation.

This is because, in order to chart the changes in attitudes which interest him, Wood overwhelmingly focuses his narrative on the (often private) writings of great men, most especially his hero Thomas Jefferson. Why did America democratize, in Wood's telling? Seemingly because Jefferson "set forth at the outset of his presidency a body of American ideas and ideals that have persisted to this day." The evidence for this is (1) his telling Joseph Priestley America was something "new under the sun... [and its] consequences will ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe” and (2) announcing during his inauguration, "A just and solid republican government... will be a standing monument & example for the aim & imitation of the people of other countries." I simply do not find this enough to be persuasive. These quotations probably are (though I lack the context from which Wood extracted them) evidence of Jefferson's democratism. That is not entirely unimportant—it certainly is interesting that a slaver aristocrat often expressed such sentiments—but Jefferson never passed a "Democracy Act" or published a best-selling pamphlet describing why states should adopt democratic reforms. Thus, the mechanism Wood implicitly posits for the propagation of democracy (along with freedom, equality, and the rest of the values he see as bursting onto the scene in this time) is as a torch passed from individual to individual until a preponderant share of society is enlightened. The initial spark, of course, could only come from a world-historic genius like Jefferson. This is why his name appears over a thousand times in 800 pages, as Wood tracks the gradual emergence into the historical record—at least the record Wood thinks is worth consulting—of each significant trend of the era. By contrast, the words "slave" and "Indian" appear one-quarter as often combined.

I am not totally dismissive of the possibility of writing good history from the perspective of one individual: all of our lives contain our own age in many ways. But Wood believes the role of history is to act as an "inspiration for a nation," and thus wants Jefferson to emerge heroic. So the most interesting contradiction of Jefferson, this supposed prophet of liberty raping his mixed-race slave, is elided in two sentences: "When Jefferson married Wayles’s daughter, Martha, these enslaved children, including the quadroon Sally Hemings, passed to Jefferson. Although the evidence is now overwhelming that Jefferson was sexually involved with Sally Hemings, that may be less important than the fact that miscegenation was part of his family and going on all around him at Monticello." Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I believe the job of history is to tell the truth (no matter how inconvenient), and if I had access to “the best study of a slave family ever written,” I would have a damn good reason not to take advantage of it—especially when I already mention one of the key players a thousand times.

Wood's Burkeanism shows itself in other ways, such as when he plainly states without citation "in Paris [the guillotine] was on average cutting off more than two heads a minute." Unless he was referring to one specific minute where 3 people died, this cannot be true. The Reign of Terror lasted perhaps 18 months, and at such a rate 1.5 million people would have to have been guillotined in Paris. (The real number is around 2700, less than one day's work at two per minute.) This is an unfathomably large error to make, indicative of where his priority lie: with understanding the exact moment Thomas Jefferson invented America.

✭✭✭✭✭: In 1812, the United States declared war on the world's most powerful empire, and was predictably almost annihilated. Only extreme luck let the young republic off the hook with a restoration of the status quo ante bellum in the Treaty of Ghent (1814). I never understood why the U.S. would do something so foolhardy. Thanks to Alan Taylor, I think I finally have an answer. Rather than signifying a clear separation, the Peace of Paris (1783) introduced a considerable degree of ambiguity into the British-Atlantic world-system by inserting a republic within the British Empire. This significantly undermined Britain: sailors who became American citizens could evade British conscription; Americans could take advantage of low taxes and generous land-grants in Canada by becoming British subjects; Irish rebels could continue their struggle from the safety of another nation; and Indian allies could extract large gifts on what had become an international frontier within North America. This would be frustrating in the best of times, but by the early-1790s Britain was waging (what proved to be) a generation-long, near-total war against France. Each of these leaks weakened the empire's capacity to continue the fight (or at least to do so on terms ideal to the imperial ruling class), and so came to seem an existential risk. Yet to erase the ambiguities on terms favorable to Britain would require the de facto destruction of the United States as an independent entity. The Northwest forts used to control Indians would have to be maintained in violation of US territorial sovereignty. Defectors from Britain's merchant fleet, army deserters, and revolutionary Irishmen could not be given the right to naturalize. American trade could not be allowed to undermine the British efforts at strangling France. It was the appreciation of Britain's creeping counter-revolution that impelled America's Republicans to take such a drastically anglophobic line.

While certain of the Republican attitudes are obvious complements to their republican nationalism, there are others that were particular to post-revolutionary America. Most consequentially, they possessed a Country Whig suspicion of centralized fiscal-military capacity. Thus Republicans dis-empowered the regular army, dismantled internal taxes, and abolished the national bank while also courting a war they could not win without them. Certain younger Republicans, not defined by the struggles of the 1790s, appreciated that this was a bad idea (notably: Henry Clay and a still-nationalist John C. Calhoun), but the ruling generation was determined to defeat England by purely "republican" means. This first led to the disastrous Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts (more successful in exacerbating American than British divisions), and subsequently the War of 1812. Republican militias proved to lack every virtue (funding, discipline, competent leadership) necessary to conquer Canada. Its previously apolitical population was brutalized into Toryism, not submission. Defeat after defeat caused the circle of American sovereignty to shrink. POWs suspected of naturalization were treated as traitors, Eastport was annexed to Canada, and Nantucket and Eastern Maine were de facto made independent. This was only the beginning of disunion: Massachusetts made peace overtures to Britain without federal authorization, and in Hartford anti-war New England Federalists met to cohere their alternative to the Republicans. Only the news of Ghent prevented further crisis.

Yet the United States would leave the war unchastened. With the post-Waterloo United Kingdom no longer facing an existential threat, commercial restrictions and impressments came to an end. The United States gradually asserted freedom of the rivers, lakes, and seas. It prevented extradition of British deserters. The freak total victory of Andrew Jackson at New Orleans gave the US the impression of triumph, and largely overrode the true lessons of the war. Americans preferred to believe that it was the raucous Hunters of Kentucky who won the day, rather than the book-smart artillerymen and mixed-race infantry actually responsible.

The biggest losers, though, were the Native Americans. No longer able to play two hostile powers off each other, they were vulnerable to total expropriation by the United States. Worse, both sides had used them as a metonymy for civilian massacre. While this could (and did) force surrenders during the war, the fantasy of Indian terror gave post-war settlers justification to enact the most horrific violence. Even having been a loyal American ally, as the Lower Creeks were, proved no protection.

✭✭✭✭✭: The amount of information contained in The Age of Federalism (1993) is staggering. My notes on it runs to 34,393 words, about 10% longer than George Orwell's novel Animal Farm. Stanley Elkins & Eric McKitrick were initially commissioned c. 1970 to write the 1789-1815 volume of the "Oxford History of the United States," but were so engrossed by their period's first half that they never got to the second. Eventually allowed by their editors to write the book they wanted, they spent over 20 years carefully assembling what still stands as the definitive account of the Federalist Era. Instead of neatly eliding the processes of government, the authors carefully lay out the specific meetings, letters, delays, and debates which established our system. This is very useful in understanding the political period most defined by personalities and relationships. John Adams, for example, seems to routinely arrive at the right decision via perverse process; his failure to grasp a second term after an objectively successful first makes no sense without seeing how he alienated his natural allies. Similarly, James Monroe's perpetual presence as an advisor and confidant of Jefferson and Madison makes his post-1796 political recovery legible.

The most striking feature of the early republic is its vulnerability to foreign powers. Britain totally dominated the Atlantic and held a series of forts deep into the United States. Spain threatened to crack off the West by cutting off access to the Mississippi River. France had been responsible for the success of the revolution, held a huge amount of US debt, and was capable of reaching directly into the US to stir the citizens to war. Weak powers often find their internal politics defined by their relationships with the great powers (as seen in modern Ukraine, mid-century Latin America, and Napoleonic Europe). The United States was no exception. Because every government policy had to take into account whether Britain or France would be America's imperial sponsor, coalitions had to build around one of those poles. All the other faultlines (democratic/aristocratic, centralizer/decentralizer, free/slave, East/West) had to be subordinated to this primary one. It took scarcely ten years of Federalist control for the country to drift into war with France, and it would take scarcely eleven to go from the assumption of Republican power in 1801 to go to war with Britain.

✭✭✭✰✰: The Glorious Cause is a solid overview of the American Revolution from origins to its constitutional settlement. A little over 40 years old now, it was the first volume published of the still-incomplete "Oxford History of the United States" series. (I have reviewed The Republic for Which It Stands [December 2022] and Freedom from Fear [Spring 2024]) The book's age shows in its emphasis—it gives roughly as much more attention to military and Great Man political history as all other topics combined—and some of its assumptions; authors like Terry Bouton, William Hoagland, and Alan Taylor sharply disagree with the once ubiquitous idea that the post-independence economy experienced anything like the smooth, natural, and fast recovery Middlekauff takes for granted.

The British imperial system, the crisis of the 1760s, the move to war, and the military campaigns are all described well. A strength of Middlekauff's approach is to explore the exact ways decisions were made, with all of the contradictory details and mitigating contexts. The gap between de jure and de facto power, present to a degree in every society, caused a seemingly insignificant—even arcane—disagreement about principles to spiral to an expensive and destructive civil war. 18th ideas about liberty are crucial here: distinctions which strike me as arbitrary (whether external taxes were to regulate trade or to raise revenue) were important to powerful individuals (at least rhetorically), and there was nothing contradictory in using coercive violence to congeal resistance to perceived tyranny. As the book reaches the 1780s, it transitions to being a conventional narrative, lacking the depth of analysis which recommends earlier sections.

✭✭✭✰✰: This is a fun easy book on a dark subject. I thought the core plot lines on H. H. Holmes and the Chicago World's Fair were both good, and the B-plots (Prendergast murdering Harrison, Olmsted) dragged, though not excessively. The author went an improbably long period of time without saying Ferris' name to try and keep the wheel a surprise. The aspects which interest me the most about this period have been explored elsewhere (notably by Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower), which makes it hard to not compare it unfavorably.

✭✭✭✭✭: Taming Democracy is a powerful counter to the traditional understanding of the American revolution. Terry Bouton argues that we should understand the American Revolution as having three distinct phases: (1) Colonial population resisting British economic extraction by creating new popularly-based governments (c.1763 - 1776), (2) Gentry breaking their previous cross-class alliance by imposing even more onerous economic burdens on common Pennsylvanians, and (3) Restructuring the state and national government to limit the influence of ordinary citizens. By 1800, the power of the "many" is reduced to choosing which of the "few" get to rule them; there is no illusion that democratic rights extend any deeper. His story is centered in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most important state in the revolution. It was here that the Declaration was signed, that Washington wintered at Valley Forge, that the Constitution was framed, and the final spurts of revolution (the two Pennsylvania Regulations [1][2]) repressed. Pennsylvania was the central "keystone" of the Thirteen Colonies, and Philadelphia was their largest city.

A question I have when historians posit the domination of an elite class within a formally representative system is: If there really are such striking antagonisms, how does the minority continue to win? (The relevance of this to today might be apparent.) Bouton does an exceptional job showing how, because the gentry controlled an interlocking series of institutions (newspapers, local governments, networks, businesses, land), a challenge against any one alone would be an uphill battle. Running and holding office was a time consuming, complicated, and expensive endeavor—all the more so if you were not trying to profit off it. When the rural anti-Gentry movement was able to recruit someone suitable, they would then be put into a new context ideally suited to co-opt them. This is the exact fate of Princeton-educated Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who once removed from Westmoreland County became a lackey of Robert Morris. He was turned out the next election, but by then disillusionment had set in: 79% of Pennsylvanians stayed home after Brackenridge’s cohort had failed to fulfill their promises. One of the few major successes of the anti-Gentry movement was to limit the outsized ownership of land by wealthy speculators, which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court then ordered read as to include everyone except wealthy speculators.

In the decades immediately after the Revolution, the average Pennsylvanian was worse off. Brutal war-time inflation was followed by brutal peace-time deflation. 95% of hard money drained out of circulation. Onerous taxes were paid to reimburse wealthy speculators for loans they themselves did not originally supply. When most common people could not pay, the state expropriated what they did have and arrested them too for good measure. Wealth was 5.8 times as concentrated in 1795 as in 1780. The normal mechanisms communities had used to protect themselves from overreach (which Bouton names “rings”) were dismantled one-by-one; in this sense, the “representative” replaced “democratic” government.

✭✭✰✰✰: I love French history, I love the Belle Époque, and I absolutely eat up books which try to meld politics, economics, and culture into one melange. Yet even I found this book merely "fine." For every interesting section (such as on the women who worked in the era's new department stores), there were several which were banal, embarrassing, or self-indulgent. Here is Rapport's attempt to make his grand point about what the Dreyfus Affair means for today:

What is actually said here? Mostly nothing, I think. To the extent that there is an argument I think he is positing that the solution to political misinformation is for common citizens to do their own research. Yet that is not the lesson of the Dreyfus Affair. The Dreyfus Affair ended with victory for the Left because their communicators were more capable at humiliating the Right in the media than vice-versa. How many Parisians actually did any personal investigation beyond that presented in their morning journal? If Rapport means the mere platitude that "it takes someone doing some research to discover reality," then okay, but one would have to be an utter nihilist to disagree with that, and none of the quoted section would disabuse such an individual even a step.

✭✭✭✭✰: "Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” Thus began the process by which America's constitution was written. 

Founding Finance is a neo-Beardian interpretation of the creation of the United States. William Hogeland, an independent historian, unpacks the interconnected issues of sovereignty, property, war, financing, speculation, expansion, and class conflict which created the United States. Written in the wake of the Tea Party, he tries to unmoor certain pre-conceptions we might bring to the era. The pro-market faction was also the big government faction; the socialistic democrats were led by a fanatical evangelical.

Tons of interesting episodes and contradictions are expanded upon, bring new importance to things of which I was only vaguely aware. John Dickinson emerges as a key figure in 1776, and his dethroning by Tom Paine and the common people of Pennsylvania deserves a spot in world history on an order with the Storming of the Bastille and Lenin's Red October. Hoagland is refreshingly dismissive of Thomas Jefferson as an intellectual, instead seeing three large groupings in revolutionary America: Tory, Whig, and Radical. The Newburgh Conspiracy is better explored here than I have seen it anywhere else.

While informative, well-written, and correct, something feels missing. I think this is likely due to the "of the moment" way the book was written, referencing contemporary (c. 2012) political disputes in a way which has not necessarily retained its relevance. 

✭✭✭✭✭: This is a book I will be chewing on for a long time. J. Bradford "Brad" DeLong is explicit in having written it as a rejoinder to the second half of Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of..." series. As Hobsbawm has it, two new forces are unleashed c. 1789: industrialization (in Britain) and mass politics (in France). They mutually fed into each other, as revolutionaries wiped away the fetters keeping capitalism down and technological development widened the possibilities of social organization. 1914-1924, the liberal-capitalist-imperial world-order—unable to contain the contradictions of nationalism and universalism, militarism and enlightenment, capitalism and democracy—committed suicide. To Hobsbawm, the only hope for a humane industrial future was communism. Thus the 19-year-old refugee Jew from Hitler's Germany joined the Party in 1936. From this point of view, the years between 1962 (when Hobsbawm wrote the Age of Revolution) and 1994 (when he wrote The Age of Extremes) saw a retreat in the aspirations for human freedom.

DeLong, a left-liberal who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in Bill Clinton's Treasury Department, could not disagree more. He is on paper someone I should hate. He has three Harvard degrees and brags about being a Mayflower descendant. When he discusses intellectuals, he displays two tell-tale signs of Ivy-League brain (pejorative): he ranks individuals ordinally by how smart they are (Larry Summers, for example, is apparently first), and he traces interpersonal academic connections as though they are the primary driver of knowledge production. (Does which MIT professor someone had for an introductory grad school class really override all other factors in how they see the world?) Yet, in my description, I give away the game: I know his idiosyncrasies so well because I have followed his work with interest.

Slouching Towards Utopia has many interlocking arguments, but the central one seems to be in favor of optimism: by objective measures, the "long 20th century" was a success for humanity. We are on average much freer, healthier, and wealthier than our great-great-grandparents. Moreover, this improvement should be sustainable. We know those institutions conducive to the expansion and application of science to improving human wellbeing. (Those, by the way, are: [1] the corporate research lab; [2] a market for goods, capital, and labor; and [3] a social-democratic state which provides broader-based access to the inputs and outputs of that market.) Hence, in 1995 he confidently wrote:

His view can be summed up as: "Why do you think the world is worse in 1994 than you did in 1962? The defeat of communism does not represent a resurgence of the Right, like you claim, but the Center, which will do a good job going forward." But now that Stalin has been dead for 71 years, the Soviet Union for 33, and Hobsbawm for 12, have the Western democracies done a better job? On climate, war, poverty, immigration, and human rights, DeLong admits that more often than not his government has failed to follow the rational consensus. He, a Democratic Party insider, naturally blames the failures on the Republicans. Thus, if only Trump didn't use racism in 2016, or Bush II didn't pull out of Kyoto, or Reagan didn't run up a massive deficit, then the crises of the 21st century would have been easily manageable. But blaming Gore's loss on the Supreme Court doesn't grapple with the fact that Bill Clinton won and then got to govern for eight years. The world of 2000, with its 5-4 decision to embrace all that DeLong despises, was the product of Clinton more than any other person. It was whatever Obama did from 2008 to 2016 that led to the supposedly unconscionable caesura of Trump. The elite geniuses DeLong admires seem to be at least as constrained and selfish as before, and all of that literature which showed how Obama should have handled the Great Recession was ignored despite his two Ivy League degrees. These past three decades are the closest we could get to a case study on what America would look like without communism "offstage," and DeLong thinks that voters and politicians have not done nearly so well as before, without an explanation as to why.

✭✭✰✰✰: The Revolutionary Temper is a totally replacement-level cultural history of Paris in the generation prior to the French Revolution. Robert Darnton argues that the population's emergence as an actor distinct from elites (visible in its thwarting royal attempts to subvert the National Assembly in 1789) was only possible due to the collectivity constructed in this period. He reconstructs (using a genuinely impressive amount of ephemera: conversations, tracts, descriptions of street actions) how the public reacted to and discussed the culture wars of the late Enlightenment.

The writing style is likely to win praise, but I dislike it. Its unnecessary use of original French quotations along with translations serves no purpose except to flatter the middle-brow (such as myself) who can mostly read the former but still would like a little assistance from the latter. Chapter 5 seems to posit a QAnon-esque government child-snatching scheme without exploring its veracity. This is a troubling choice by Darnton: if the crowd is capable of creating a false moral panic which must be stopped with murderous violence, then that should be the main story. If, on the other hand, the Ancien Regime was actually perpetuating a horrific crime upon its subjects, then that too says something very important about 18th-century France. This is not something which should sit in ambiguity.

This is the heart of why The Revolutionary Temper felt so mediocre. The pieces are mostly here to do something interesting, but the author does more compiling than analyzing. I am guessing he would give a response similar to Christopher Clark's in the introduction to his The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 [reviewed: May 2023]. There, Clark says, "Questions of why and how are logically inseparable, but they lead us in different directions. The aim is to let the why answers grow, as it were, out of the how answers, rather than the other way around." But, unlike that excellent work, I do not think Darnton fully documented the "how." He tries to have it both ways by having the revolution of 1789 giving weight to the unfolding drama but without the responsibility of explaining its origin. ([Postscript] As I finished this review, I found this quote in the introduction: "I think it possible to show how the French Revolution happened—not by tracing a clear line of causality, but by narrating events in such a way as to describe the emergence of a revolutionary temper that was ready to destroy one world and construct another." I find the substitution of "narrating events" for "causality" deeply unappealing, not least because it is impossible.)

I think the most fun part was reading it before embarking on several books (The Glorious Cause, The Age of Federalism, Power of the Purse) which featured the same people and incidents but from an American perspective. It is nice to see Beaumarchais, Turgot, Ben Franklin, and the rest from a Parisian point of view. The Revolutionary Temper is not a "bad" book, just less good than most that I finish. Many of the anecdotes on 18th century society (Catholic orders, stock trading, how it is determined who won a battle, some stuff on publishing) are interesting.

✭✭✭✰✰: Other People's Money was an accessible history of early American banking, focusing on the antebellum period. I put off reading it for years because I was afraid I would not be knowledgeable enough to understand it; I actually think I should have read it much sooner, as it stated plainly things I had to piece together from passing remarks in other books. Examples include: depositors' primarily attraction to banks were the services they offered (like checking), not interest payments; the predominance of very short-term (e.g., 90 day) loans even for long-term (helping explain ); the origins of the 1819 depression; the import of the "specie circular"; and the differences between region. The section where she breaks down how the North and the South paid for the Civil war was the cleanest explanation of this important topic I have yet seen. An interesting aspect is how Murphy sees Antebellum banking as series of experiments, with the most successful incorporating aspects of both Whig and Democrat programs. In fact, the extremes seem to have had better ideas than the middle, with tighter regulation on banks going hand-in-hand with their proliferation.

✭✭✭✭✭: The Making of Europe is a really cool book with a ton of information. It answers a ton of questions I had about the Middle Ages, and raises a bunch of new ones. In sum, it argues that "Europe" is a shared social system which expanded and homogenized c. 950 and 1350. Interlocking political, economic, and ideological institutions mutually reinforced this change, and created parallel phenomena in the Celtic, Scandinavian, Slavic, and Iberian frontiers. There was a material shift, as intensification of both production and exploitation created more elites able to then colonize new areas. The formerly urban South of Europe and the less materially complex East were both warped to fit this mold. Human relations were literally objectified in coins and charters.

The takeaway here, besides how correct Wickham and Moore are, is the way that social organization ("institutions")—more concrete than "culture" but airier than "technology"—are very powerful even under methodological individualism. Bartlett succeeds under these terms, and I think it is possible to further scale up his work to help explain the Great Divergence.

[Re-read]: The Inheritance of Rome is the blog's first repeat, I believe, being a book I originally reviewed back in October 2021. I re-read it with an eye to putting it in dialogue with Against the Grain and The First European Revolution [both reviewed below], which proved extremely productive.

✭✭✭✰✰: I read this 1100-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the early Civil Rights Movement in preparation of teaching the post-war period. As one might imagine, it was detailed, well-written, with vivid portraits of many important individuals. Yet, it was not the synthesis I had hoped. Major events have their moment-by-moment minutiae reconstructed, but without Taylor Branch pulling back and clearly arguing why what happened happened. So when we have Kennedy saying such-and-such thing which contradicts a thing he said before—am I to understand that he is confused, misinformed, cynical, or actually his views changed? A different book could have used these ambiguities to emphasize the messiness of real life, but Branch is instead intent on on maximizing the theatrical power of each utterance and decision by a Great Man. It makes for a good story, but my notes are scattered with unanswered questions.

I wonder if the book's high reputation is in part due to the political context of its publication. In the 1980s, the Civil Rights Movement was only just gaining mythic status among white America (the first federal MLK day was celebrated in 1986). As the book put King on equal footing with the other leaders of the era, it was a validation for the liberal white boomers who have dominated cultural taste my entire lifetime.

✭✭✭✭✭: Rejecting the traditional search for an origin in the Classical Mediterranean, historian R. I. Moore compellingly argues that out of the collapse of Carolingian society emerged “European civilization—a mutually reinforcing set of social, political, religious, and environmental institutions, emerged. I list “social” first because, despite not being explicitly stated in the work, it seems the nexus for everything else. There was a shift from horizontal to vertical kinship, from partible inheritance to primogeniture, from de facto polygamy to enforced monogamy, from peripatetic to settled elites. At the heart of this is a change to the importance of marriage to procreation. This is not a revolution in how people actually had sex, but a change in the legitimate family. In 1035, the bastard William succeeded his father as Duke of Normandy; upon the death of his son Henry I in 1135, none of Henry’s illegitimate children were even plausible as successors, despite the obvious looming catastrophe.

Why this shift matters to politics should be obvious—just imagine English history where Henry VIII could have kept both Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth Blount alongside Catherine of Aragon—and in religion, Europe’s dominant religion (Catholicism) emphasizes the sacral importance of the boundary between licit and illicit sex. But where I think Moore is most insightful is the economic implications of shifting the unit of social reproduction. A society ruled by a collection of atomized lineages is different than that ruled by an extended clan. The problem of “second sons'' became more acute, swelling the ranks of professional warriors and clerks. Cerealization and sedentarism transformed humans’ relationship to nature, and encastellation and monastization allowed the more numerous lords to more extremely police and exploit peasants. Northern Europe’s population tripled and urbanized. It is in this sense that I think it is useful to talk of a “civilization”: a society increasingly legible to and controlled by centralized, sedentary, literate, and (occasionally) urban exploiters. (I am drawing from James Scott [reviewed: below]) If the social change was the most central, then this material one was the deepest. To this day, Europe has not had as small or as nomadic a population as it did prior to this “revolution.”

Upon this foundation, a new cultural edifice was erected: Chivalry, Scholasticism, Gothic Architecture, Gregorian Catholicism. When the upper orders wanted to emphasize their nobility, they did it by contrasting their adherence to the sacred calendar to the peasant’s earthly cycle. When the lower orders wanted to rein in their rulers, they supported a “Peace and Truce of God.” To exalt the aristocracy, one could point to the gifts they gave the church; to criticize the clergy, one could do the same.

This is only one interpretation of this work, and I am not sure it is the one Moore intended. The book actually climaxes with the creation of a trans-national circulation of elites, both warrior and scholarly, which seems to be the sine qua non institution of “Europe” to him. As his contribution to the Great Divergence debate, he locates (similar to Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome [reviewed: March 2021]) the continent’s later dynamism to the resulting polycentrism. This inter-regional comparison is very broad and does not seem well-supported in the text, though that does not make it wrong.

“We are broke right now, more or less." -President George H. W. Bush (1991)

✭✭✭✭✭: In Collapse, Vladislav Zubok masterfully chronicles the unraveling of the Soviet Union, providing what will undoubtedly remain the authoritative account for years to come. Many passing conversations, near-forgotten moments, phone calls, and canceled meetings—the ephemera of which the past consisted—are recovered and compiled. The terrible intimacy punctures many of the era's myths, most notably that of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. He is revealed to not just be a brilliant idealist, but also, sadly, a blowhard who several times fumbles the bag to catastrophic results.

The story begins with Yuri Andropov, the KGB's top spook, attempting to invigorate the Soviet economy through top-down reforms. This pulls Gorbachev, whom Zubok describes as a "true Leninist," into the top ranks of Soviet leadership. However, these early economic changes exacerbated the systemic issues they aimed to solve. The reduction in alcohol production slashed state revenue, while cooperative firms failed to reinvest their earnings. Top-down quality checks led to a dilemma of what to do with all the subpar goods: either they could actually nix their sale (forcing firms to go bankrupt), or they could continue to continence to economic inefficiency. The leadership chose the latter, avoiding immediate crisis of unemployment and shortage at the expense of long-term sustainability. Perhaps the single worst decision was to allow newly entrepreneurial Cooperatives and State-Owned Enterprises to perform financial functions. This policy led to a de facto multiplication of the money supply as every firm was incentivized to turn easy rubles into real resources, and real resources into foreign currency. Wild arbitrage ensued, leaving the Soviet economy flush with cash and low on goods, a recipe for disastrous inflation.

In stark contrast to other sectors of the Soviet economy, the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) maintained a level of innovation and productivity comparable to the West. Its members had a unique position within the Soviet hierarchy, with more open intellectual and cultural life. Even while it became a key source of liberal dissent, it remained the institution most reliant on the continuity and stability of the USSR. As the crisis barrelled on, the MIC would find itself not transformed into a Russian Silicon Valley, nor the germ of a social-democratic care economy, but simply torn up and discarded along with the Union.

Gorbachev's navigation of the crisis deserves criticism. He constantly weakened himself at home to win praise abroad, with none of the desperately needed material support ever materializing. This is a brutal lesson in realpolitik, and one I think still lingers in the back of countries considering negotiating with the United States: while the USA would have gladly paid $100 billion to destroy the USSR, why would they pay a cent to help save it? In the end, the reform efforts spiraled out of control, requiring increasingly radical changes that the existing political structure could not sustain. New political actors seized control of the sub-Soviet republics and seceded, destroying the USSR and the MIC. A few of them have fared well, but I cannot help but wonder if the USA should have spent a few dozen billion helping out Gorby. At the very least, it would have probably helped avoid the current gas prices.

✭✭✭✭✭: In Armageddon Averted, Stephen Kotkin masterfully interprets the period before, during, and after the Soviet Union’s collapse. His choice to center the economy—by 1980 so dysfunctional that laborpower decreased the value of its products—is in alignment with Hobsbawm’s adage that "It is the paradox of the USSR that, in its death, it provided one of the strongest arguments for the analysis of Karl Marx." 

The exact course the Soviet Union took after this point came down to the remarkable Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. As the first Soviet leader actually born within the USSR, Gorbachev was a "true believer" at heart—someone who had faith that the masses would embrace socialism if only given the chance. This spurred him to implement sweeping reforms known as Perestroika (economic restructuring), Glasnost (openness), and Demokratizatsiya (democratization). However, Kotkin points out, the brute fact of history is that these reforms, particularly the key "Law on State Enterprise" and "Law on Cooperatives," did not improve production but rather harmed it, while simultaneously allowing semi-autonomous entities to take advantage of their new capitalist powers to dump money into the system.

This double shock—less goods and more cash—led to inflation, exacerbating the economic woes of the average Soviet citizen. Faced with a choice to retreat from these policies, Gorbachev instead doubled down on “acceleration,” a decision that Kotkin argues sealed the fate of the Soviet Union.

Until practically the last moment, Gorbachev could have reimposed the old systems of control. Yet, he did not. The significance of this should not be overlooked. A useful contrast can be made with fascism: once it became certain that the Nazis would lose, they became unencumbered by any practical considerations. This freedom intensified the murder of the disabled, the drafting of teenagers, the shooting of their own women and children. Two doctors conceived and executed a complex scheme—with help from every level of the German army—to infect a quarter million Italians with malaria as punishment for giving up. Hitler’s dying regret was not that he had destroyed his own country, but that so much of it had survived to surrender. To the extent fascism meant anything, it meant an all-encompassing rage. When we contrast that with defeated and unencumbered communism, we see that communism meant the promise of something better. Once that promise became impossible, the state’s ideological glue became a solvent: the largest army in the world idly allowed itself to be dissolved along with the largest country in the world and the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, never once used.

✭✭✭✭✭: Against the Grain by James C. Scott is a short book packed with fascinating and compelling arguments about the interplay between states and their subjects. Scott breaks with those who see the state as a natural outgrowth of human society; rather, he portrays it as an actor that shapes individuals to suit its needs, often through coercive means. The title itself hints at the core theme: as states develop, their subjects become increasingly pressured to adopt a grain-based diet. While less healthy or enjoyable for the populace, this shift ensures that a surplus can be captured by the tax collector.

The state's efforts to make society more legible and manageable, through measures such as standardized measurements, language, and legal codes, are shown to be both a means of control and a facilitator of state logistics. However, Scott equally centers the resistance and adaptability of populations, whose responses continually shape and subvert state policies. This dynamic is not depicted as a simple binary but as a complex, ongoing, dialectical negotiation. While it is not obvious to me what role the "domus" (our personal ecology which we use to imperialize new territory to our biological preferences) plays in his argument, the idea is useful and interesting.

Above all, though, I cannot stop thinking about how Scott's framework lends itself so well to so many other topics: why poaching (a non-legible food source) is so central to Robin Hood, what a useful concept of "civilized" would entail (to be en-stated), and what exactly is going on in Central and Eastern Europe during the Early Middle Ages (c. 500 - 1066). It compares favorably, in my view, to Scott's fellow anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber (whose Dawn of Everything I reviewed in March 2023 and Debt: The First 5000 Years in June 2022).

✭✭✭✭✭: After Virtue is Alasdair MacIntyre taking a sledgehammer to the fields closest to my heart: history, philosophy, and the social sciences. The book's central claim revolves around the historicization of philosophy: what usually constituted “morality” (or “ethics,” or “virtue”) was never the result of abstract reasoning, but was rooted in a community’s idea of what was prosocial. This is why different societies can adopt such different perspectives on morality. Achilles’ slave raiding was seen as good to Greek oligarch and democrat alike because both agreed that it furthered humanity’s fundamental purpose (“telos”)—in this case, socially reproducing one’s own polis. In this sense, “moral” simply means “advancing the telos.”

Due (primarily?) to the inability of Latin Christendom to re-homogenize after the Reformation, state “tolerance” towards different personal moralities became a necessity. The Enlightenment project justified this with a sharp severing of instrumental rationality (means) from teleological rationality (ends). Thus, once social goals are decided upon, those who value it for conflicting reasons could work together despite mutually irreconcilable beliefs. What was once a pragmatic response to political realities became, like all other governing methods, the basis of a moral discourse: liberalism. Liberalism posits that diverse personal moralities can be mediated by an acceptable public framework of shared civic values.

While capable of marshaling tremendous resources, liberalism’s public sphere is morally vapid. It both affirms that the vast majority of the population has very important beliefs on teloi and yet also says that these must be set aside for the sake of liberalism, a meta-political principle of discourse. (A good argument can be made that our very concept of “religion” names a slice of human experience which liberalism excludes from the domain of politics.) Modern society is thus unusual in the extremity of the gap between public and private discourses of morality. Our terms for morality, then, are not expressions of a shared telos (for our society lacks any), but vestigial from when we last had telos embedded in the language community.

MacIntyre's project has two additional parts I think are also very good: his fourfold argument against deterministic “social science” (on the grounds of: conceptual innovation, human freedom, game theory, and chaos), and the fact that moral frameworks are not impervious to critique despite being incommensurate. Philosophies can fail on their own terms. The Fall of Berlin disproved Nazism, and the brutal exploitation of Soviet workers disproved Stalinism. Initial conversions to systems which delivered the desired telos better ended up dialectically changing the participants' telos. Adenauer proved a better protector of Germans than Hitler, and then some Nazis-cum-Christian Democrats came to adopt other of Adenauer’s values as teloi themselves.

✭✭✭✭✰: Freedom From Fear is David Kennedy's contribution to the "Oxford History of the United States," whose editorship he took over shortly after publication following the 1999 death of C. Vann Woodward. Two of my absolute favorite books—Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought and Richard White's The Republic for Which It Stands—were put out under his imprimatur. 

The book itself is very solid, having clear and defensible lines of interpretation on the Great Depression, New Deal, and World War II: e.g., that the stock market crash was epiphenomenal, that FDR was not a Keynesian, that Operation Torch was a distraction from the task of ending the war in Europe. In writing style, it reminds of me other books on the New Deal like Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself or the works of Eric Rauchway. It feels a little under-edited, but it is impolite to speculate too much on whether Woodward's then-failing health (he was 90 and months away from death when the book was published) had an adverse effect on this aspect of the book. The fact that the book could be marketed in two halves covering the Great Depression and World War II attests to its under-integration, and the opening chapters on Herbert Hoover's presidency (1929 - 1933) are a slog. Still, these are minor complaints.

For the first time since starting this site, I fell behind on writing reviews, even as I read less than previously. This is a result of having a much better outlet for my love of history: my new job as a classroom teacher. Because of that, everything between Ages of American Capitalism [reviewed: August 2023] and The Inheritance of Rome [reviewed: March 2024] were written long after I finished the books in question, and I feel the reviews are resultingly of worse quality.

In 2023, I read 47 books, 9 essays, and 9 substantial sections of other books. This is a noticeable decrease from 2022, when I reached 55 books, 35 essays, 33 pieces of Ancient Greek oratory and short prose, 5 plays, and 2 longer poems. The drop-off corresponds to the last third of the year, exactly when the school year started. The quality is apparently also a bit lower: of the full-length books, 9 were five-stars, 16 four-stars, 18 three-stars , and 3 two-stars (1 was an unrated re-read).

The nine books which rated "five-star" are on the left: two books on modern European history, six books on US history, and a book on contemporary politics.