Social Sciences Archives

Social Sciences

Politics & Paine: Part 2

Welcome back to the Politics & Paine series. Harvey Kaye and Elvin Lim are corresponding about Thomas Paine, American politics, and beyond. Kaye is the author of the award-winning book, Thomas Paine: Firebrand of Revolution, as well as Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change & Development and Director, Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. Lim is author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, and a regular contributor to OUPBlog.

Politics & Paine: Part 1

Earlier this month, Harvey Kaye led a discussion of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings at the Bryant Park Reading Room. It got me thinking: what is the influence of Paine on Americans today? Who among us are the devotees? Are we over-quoting, over-citing, over-appropriating his politics?

So, I decided to introduce Harvey Kaye to Elvin Lim, and ask if they wouldn’t mind corresponding about this matter. They readily agreed. Below is the first of four installments of this conversation; the second of which will appear tomorrow.

Elections 2010: Politics at a Time of Uncertainty

By Elvin Lim We have 99 Days to go before Election Day. How different things look today compared to Obama’s first 100 days. In the last year and a half, the national mood has turned from hope to uncertainty. The sluggish job market is the economic representation of this psychological state. Business are not expanding […]

The Essential Stonehenge

Stonehenge was begun about 2800 B.C. by a people who had no written language, no wheeled vehicles, no draft animals, and no metal tools. To dig holes in the ground, they used the antlers of deer. The initial Stonehenge consisted of a circular embankment 350 feet (107 meters) in diameter, four marker stones set in a rectangle, some postholes, and the Heel Stone. The Heel Stone was apparently the first of the great boulders brought to this site as construction commenced. But it may not have stood alone. A similar huge stone stood just to its left as seen from the center of Stonehenge. In that ancient time, the Sun at the beginning of summer probably rose between the famed Heel Stone and its now-vanished companion, and the alignment with sunrise at the summer solstice was probably exact.

Racism, the NAACP and the Tea Party Movement

The NAACP was doing its job when it accused the Tea Party movement of harboring “racist elements,” but it didn’t necessarily go about it in the most productive way. All it took was for supporters of the Tea Party movement like Sarah Palin to write, “All decent Americans abhor racism,” and that with the election of Barack Obama we became a “post-racial” society, and the NAACP’s charge was soundly “refudiated.” Or, as Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell put it to Candy Crowley on CNN on Sunday, he’s “got better things to do” than weigh in on the debate. He was elected to deal with real problems, not problems made up in people’s heads. Case closed.

The War on Poverty

Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History, pieces together oral history interviews with former president Lyndon B. Johnson and his team of advisers as they undertook the Great Society’s greatest challenge. This excerpt is taken from an interview with Robert J. Lampman, a staff member of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 1962 to 1963 who worked in the Kennedy Administration along with Walter Heller, chairman of the CEA. The Saturday Group, called so because of their Saturday “brown bag” lunches, would meet informally (at first) to discuss how they could approach the problem of poverty and solutions that could be brought about with assistance from the government. Their luncheons were the beginnings of a social movement that would become pivotal in giving assistance where it was needed. Their work is still seen today, in the forms of public assistance that we once never had an option of choosing when survival was the only thing that was of importance.

Quantum mechanics? That’s child’s play.

Vlatko Vedral is Professor of Quantum Information Science at the Universities of Oxford and Singapore. He has published more than 130 research papers, two textbooks, and is the author of Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information. Here, Vedral makes the case for why four-year-olds just might be the best students of quantum mechanics.

Robot Teachers! (Coming Soon to a Classroom Near You)

They’re coming, and they’ll be here by September! Robot teachers, programmed with a single mission: to save our failing schools. Funded by the Frankenstein Foundation, computer engineers in secret mountain laboratories and workshops hidden deep below the desert floor are feverishly soldering chips and circuit boards onto bits of aluminum to create mechanical life forms whose sole purpose is to teach English. We need this invasion of English-teaching robots because, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego, “an unprecedented number of children in the US start public school with major deficits in basic academic skills, including vocabulary skills.”

Why Obama is Losing Independents

Gallup reported last week that President Obama’s job approval among Independent voters dipped to 38 percent, the lowest support he has ever received from this group of voters. It would be too easy for Democrats to blame these numbers on the Tea Party movement. Some Independents are Tea Partiers – and those the President has forever lost – but not all Independents are Tea Partiers. To understand why Obama has lost so many other Independents, we need to understand that Independents are a curious bunch. They don’t believe in partisan loyalty, yet they are notoriously fickle. They may be fairer than Fox and more balanced than MSNBC, and yet because they are beholden neither to personalities nor parties, but to issues, their love for a politician can be vanquished as quickly as s/he fails to perform.

Is Greece Relevant? Seven Lessons for the U.S. From the Greek Fiscal Crisis

Are Greece’s fiscal woes relevant to the United States? Responding to the simmering national debate on this issue, Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, answers with an emphatic “no.” “America isn’t Greece,” Professor Krugman confidently tells us. With equal assurance, Charles Krauthammer on Fox News comes to the opposite conclusion. Given current trends in U.S. public finance, Dr. Krauthammer contends, Greece is our “future.” In a similar vein, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan approvingly cites the analogy between Greece and the U.S. as setting “the stage for a serious response” to the United States’ budgetary challenges. The Greek experience is not inevitable, but it is instructive.

OBO Recommends: Shakespeare

Oxford Bibliographies Online is a series of intuitive and easy-to-use “ultimate reading lists” designed to help users navigate the vast seas of information that exist today. To introduce you to this new online tool, Andrew Herrmann, Associate Editor of OBO, has some suggested reading related to Shakespeare. Use his study guide below to impress your friends this summer.

Ethiopia Since Live Aid, Part III: On Africa, aid, and the West

This third and final part of our ‘Ethiopia Since Live Aid’ blog feature is an original post by Peter Gill, in which he discusses the West’s view of aid and Africa. If you missed it, on Tuesday we read an excerpt from the book, and yesterday we ran an exclusive Q&A with Peter.

Ethiopia Since Live Aid, Part II: A few questions for Peter Gill

This exclusive Q&A is the second of three OUPblog posts from Peter Gill. Yesterday we read an excerpt from his book, and check back tomorrow for an original post by him.

The Meaning of Independence Day

Americans celebrate Independence Day on July 4, the day the words of the Declaration of Independence were set on parchment. John Adams had famously predicted that this day “ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Because these celebrations have become annual rituals, we have stopped thinking about exactly what it is we are celebrating.

“I am Troy Davis”

Troy Davis has been on death row since 1991 for the alleged 1989 murder of a police officer in Savannah, Georgia. Now, key prosecution witnesses have come forward and admitted that their original testimonies were not truthful. On June 23, an evidentiary hearing began, and a ruling on Troy Davis is expected not long after legal briefs are filed on July 7th. Here, Elizabeth Beck and Sarah Britto remember the death row sentencing of Troy Davis, the ongoing controversies, and consider what it means to be the man accused of a crime he may not have committed.