Resources for December 4, 2013

Kevin Brown interviews for History for the Future:

Historian Kim Phillips-Fein on the making of the conservative movement from the New Deal: "Invisible Hands"

Sociologist Erin Hatton on the historical development of a "temp economy": "From Kelly Girls to Permatemps"

Historian Sophia Rosenfeld: "The History of 'Common Sense'"





Lofty Nathan for The New York Times has made a short documentary video: "Riding With the 12 O’Clock Boys: A group of dirt bike riders in Baltimore have been called reckless. But to them, riding their bikes provides a sense of escape."

Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years. ~ Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012

"What is history for? What do we want it to do? In 1731, an obscure Kentish schoolmaster named Richard Spencer offered some answers. Properly to ascertain his position in geographical space, he reasoned, required not a single map, but access to a global atlas, one that would allow him to ‘see what London and the adjacent parts are in the kingdom; what the kingdom is in Europe, and what Europe is in the universe’. Much the same, he thought, applied to history. ‘Particular histories represent to you, what things have happen’d to such or such a People, with all their circumstances,’ he explained: ‘But to understand the whole clearly, you must know what relation every history can have to others.’ Only when such connected and wide-angled histories were available, might one hope to ‘see all the order of time’." -- Linda Colley, "Wide-Angled" (2013)





Tammy Castle for Uprooting Criminology provides a contextual analysis of the film Blood Diamond (2006): "Blinded by the Light: Resisting the Diamond Invention."

logolepsy (n) an obsession with words

Marc H. Ellis for Mondoweiss: "Film Review: Hannah Arendt is a love letter, eulogy and elegy to the prophetic voice"

Rubenstein, Richard L. The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future. NY: Harper Colophon, 1978. [excerpts from pages 15-33]