What is lying behind the discussion over whether or not the government should allow a Mosque to be built so close to ground zero? The more important issue is whether or not the government has the right to determine what the good is in society. A fundamental belief of this republic we call ‘America’ is the belief… [Read more…]
July 27, 2010
If politics is a religion, then is it heresy to be politically active? As a religious and politically active person, I’ve become increasingly disturbed by politics, political dialogue, media dialogue on politics, and the political activities of religious people and groups. Based on my observations, it is no longer legitimate to discuss the separation of… [Read more…]
November 30, 2009
I admire Sewell’s attempt to foster a dialogue between history and the social sciences. In my own discipline I have worked to infuse abstract philosophy with real life historical examples and case studies. Granted, my work has been met with much resistance from what Sewell calls the positivists philosophers, but writers much greater than I… [Read more…]
November 23, 2009
Both books for this week address Derrida’s discussion of “archival fever,” and interestingly enough, both offer a critique of the materiality of archive: Steedman looks at dust, while Burton (in the introduction) talks of “googlemania.” More importantly, both challenge certain assumptions about what the archive is and the role of the archive in conducting historical… [Read more…]
November 16, 2009
One of the most intriguing features of this week’s three readings is the perverse role of assumptions in subjugating (or keeping subjugated) different groups. Below, I will point out some of the important assumptions that each author examines, and I will leave it to the reader to decide what conclusions should be gleamed from them.… [Read more…]
November 8, 2009
Denise Riley says in Am I That Name?, “As the soul of the woman shrinks and is made gender-specific, so vice swells her body; not, of course, with any novelty, except that, crucially, the territorial powers of the body are at the same time enlarged” (41). Even though Riley has a much larger thesis, this… [Read more…]
November 1, 2009
Throughout the semester we have encountered accounts of challenges waged against different paradigms: objectivity, the enlightenment notion of universal man, and among others trans-historical Marxism. Cusset’s book examines the historical impact of French theory on American intellectual life, which serves to bolster many of these challenges. Cusset’s most illuminating discussion is of the role of… [Read more…]
October 26, 2009
Each week I look for patterns and insights in the readings that shed light on the practice of history and our understanding of existence that shifts our approach to history. This week’s readings provide two examples. First, throughout the semester we have seen a variety of explanations of historical agency, some authors suggest economic forces… [Read more…]
October 19, 2009
In Discipline & Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault asks an important question that serves as a starting point for understanding his general thesis: “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (228). In an attempt to answer this fundamental question, Foucault uses four components of the… [Read more…]
October 12, 2009
This week’s readings question the future of history’s encounter with anthropology. Barber and Berdam propose a quasi-marriage to the two as the study of ethnohistory, which they define as “an interdisciplinary field that studies past human behavior and is characterized by a primary reliance on documents, the use of input from other sources when available,… [Read more…]
August 20, 2010
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