New Yorker Book Review of The Insurgent: Garibaldi and his Enemies

Suddenly you are looking in his eyes. Officially, they’re brown, but for you they’ll always be blue. He is speaking in a soft, seductive voice. Glory if you follow, eternal shame if you don’t. Rome or Death. In a moment, your destiny shifts. Incredibly, you have volunteered. You are given a red shirt, an obsolete rifle, a bayonet. You are taught to sing a hymn full of antique rhetoric recalling a magnificent past, foreseeing a triumphant future. You learn to march at night in any weather and over the most rugged terrain, to sleep on the bare ground, to forgo regular meals, to charge under fire at disciplined men in uniform. You learn to kill with your bayonet. You see your friends killed. You grow familiar with the shrieks of the wounded, the stench of corpses. If you turn tail in battle, you will be shot. Those are his orders. If you loot, you will be shot. You write enthusiastic letters home. You have discovered patriotism and comradeship. You have been welcomed by cheering crowds, kissed by admiring young women. Italy will be restored to greatness. From Sicily to the Alps, your country will be free. Then, with no warning, it’s over. A politician has not kept faith. An armistice has been signed. Your leader is furious. You hardly understand. Rome is still a dream. Your group disbanded, you receive nothing: no money, no respect, no help in finding work. But, years later, when he calls again, you go. You will follow him to your death.

The Insurgent: Garibaldi and his Enemies

Garibaldi and his Enemies Response Sheet

Britannia Redux: The Economist's Special Report

The birthplace of globalisation in the 19th century is coping well with the latest round, writes Merril Stevenson. But can it keep it up?

To thee belongs the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine:
All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine.

Rule Britannia, Britain‘s unofficial national anthem dating from 1740, celebrated not only Britain‘s military might but its commercial prowess as well. A century later Britain had fully risen to the advance praise. This was the high-water mark of its influence in the world, which coincided with the last great wave of globalisation. The first country to industrialise, Britain was soon turning out more than half the world’s coal, pig-iron and cotton textiles. In 1880 its exports of manufactured goods accounted for 40% of the global total, and by 1890 it owned more shipping tonnage than the rest of the world put together.

Less than a century on from those glory days Britain had become the “sick man of Europe”, infamous for wild swings in inflation and growth and for confrontational trade unions. Shorn of its empire and a late and reluctant arrival in the European Community, Britain was grappling with the prospect of irreversible decline.

Now its fortunes are looking up again. Steady economic expansion for the past 14 years has pushed its GDP per head above that of France and Germany. Its jobless figures are the second-lowest in the European Union. Inflation has been modest, and sterling, the Achilles heel of governments from Clement Attlee’s to John Major’s, is if anything too strong for Britain‘s good.

Read the rest of the report here

On the House of Lords

The cure of admiring the Lords is to go and look at it. (Walter Bagehot)

The House of Lords is like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days (Clement Atlee)

A Brief History of the Lords

On the Wakeham Report

On the White Paper

Implications on Democracy

Response Sheet for Lords Readings (using the four readings above)

——More on the Lords…

Blair’s Vacillating Stance(s)

ummm…the other House of Lords (I can’t say which is more nauseating)

If that is not disturbing enough, you can watch the real House of Lords here

Large vs. Small Parcels of Western Land

Wikipedia on The Preemption Act of 1841, the  Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, and the Homestead Act (1862)

A summary of the Preemption Act 

The fight for the Preemption Act 

Good summary of the Homestead Act from NARA  

Primary Source Document: The Homestead Act

Free homes for free men. Speech of Hon. G. A. Grow, of Pennsylvania, in the House of Representatives, February 29, 1860

Horace Greeley and the Western Land Debate: “Go West, young man, go forth into the Country.”


Political Culture

Consider the following news headlines from across the globe:

  • The Russian president proclaims that he will appoint hundreds of political officials who until then had been elected by the people, and no one in the country seems to object.
  • The Chinese government sends troops to arrest farmers who refuse to give up their land to state-sponsored developers as China continues to bolster its market economy.
  • The citizens of Mexico vote the one-party system out of its 75-year rule by selecting a president from a party on the right in 2000, but now seem to be leaning toward a leftist president candidate for 2006.
  • Almost every week, the British prime minister faces the opposition party leader toe to toe in a “question hour” that encourages even members of his own party to hurl insults at him.

How do we make sense of the actions that we read about in the news? Start by reading this

Gender & Comparative Politics

We know that although women don’t come from Venus, and men aren’t from Mars, men and women do experience and participate in politics in very different ways. If we could line up all the leaders of the nations around the world, we would see few women. If we could put all the world’s legislators in the same auditorium, we would see more women, but it certainly would not be half (or rather 52%) of the legislative population. And if we counted up all the references to women, girls and females in comparative politics textbooks, we wouldn’t need many fingers to do the counting either.

So why study how gender operates in politics? One reason is that more women are to be found at various levels of governance, and more and more women are participating in politics through voting and political action at local and regional levels. We might also want to know whether an increase in women’s participation has any effect on policies. Or we might want to discover the relation between political and social change and greater gender equality in a society.

Print, read, respond, bring to class

Comparative Essay on Democratization and Revolutions

The field of comparative politics starts with the assumption that knowledge in the social sciences must proceed by way of the search for comparisons, or what has been called “suggestive contrasts.” Scholars of comparative politics compare in order to discover similarities and explain differences. As infrequent and highly complex events, revolutions have attracted a great deal of attention from comparativists.

In this article we will address the following topics:

  • The Concept of Revolution
  • Why Revolutions Happen?
  • Can Revolutions be Predicted?
  • What Do Revolutions Accomplish?
  • What Are some of the Failures of Revolutions?
  • Comparing Characteristics and Outcomes of Some Revolutions
  • Questions

Lazar on Growing up in the Cold War of the 1980's

Caveat: as ridiculous as it now seems, what follows was very real to me during my formative years. In not-so-subtle ways, what you are about to see shaped my world view.

On my eight birthday my parents ordered “Wrestlemania” from Pay-Per-View television. The party consisted of my buddies and I sitting around and jeering at wrestlers like Nikolai Volkoff and The Iron Sheik, from the USSR and Iran respectively. It was a classic struggle of good versus evil and each blow to the evil ones resonated with us. This video opens as the Soviet National Anthem is interrupted by our good guy, Hulk Hogan. On other occasions Volkoff would slowly sing “his” national anthem while the crowd verbally assaulted him.

A few points of interest:

  • In real life, Volkoff is Croatian
  • His tag team partner is Canadian, but was billed as a Russian. He never spoke.
  • Volkoff soon partnered with the Iron Sheik. They were attacked in a parking lot by pro-American fans
  • One of the announcers later became the Governor of the State of Minnesota!

You have to see this:

Somewhat to my chagrin, the following video would have got me “all pumped up” 25 years ago. Listen to the lyrics and find out why…

When Ronald Reagan passed, Slate magazine wrote an article about the relationship between the Cold War and professional wrestling. Please read Hammers, Sickles, and Turnbuckles. Soviet wrestlers mourn Ronald Reagan

Throughout the Cold War, and to an extent still today, Americans felt that they had an enemy within their borders as well. African-Americans, especially those who were particularly outspoken or “uppity”, were likewise seen by many as a threat. In Rocky I and II, our American hero Rocky Balboa (who was our rags to riches story) defeated Apollo Creed (who was akin to Muhammad Ali in his audacity). In Rocky III, Rocky defeats an even more audacious Black man played my none other than Mr. T (who killed Rocky’s manger, Mickey). By the time Rocky IV rolls around, Creed and Balboa are friends who have united against a new enemy, Ivan Drago. You guessed it, he’s a Soviet. Drago’s symbolic evil is represented by his blatant steroid abuse, his underhanded tactics in the boxing ring and, ummm, that he killed Apollo Creed in a fight.

So, our hero, Balboa, GOES TO THE USSR to avenge his best friend’s death. Balboa, after training hard in Siberia while eluding the KGB following him in a Mercedes, wins the fight in a true barn burner. At the end of the film, as the real life Cold War comes to an end, Balboa tells a stadium full of Russians (who by this time he won over and they are cheering wildly for him!) tells the crowd that we can all get along. Poetic.

Here’s Apollo’s last fight (from Rocky IV). The introduction matters most:

And here is Rocky’s Final speech, given to the Soviets on Christmas Day 1985 (just months before Gorbachev announced the glasnost and perestroika policies). Either control your emotions or get your tissues out.

In 1982, nine years after US troops left, Sylvester Stallone, in the Film Rambo (yes Rambo), dealt with his Vietnam War Syndrome by laing siege to a town. This film was released the same year that the Vietnam War Memorial in DC was unveiled. Between Stallone and artist Maya Lin (whose parents fled from China in 1949 when Mao Zedong’s Communists took control of China), the US was able to overcome “Vietnam Syndrome”. This is seminal scene from the end of Rambo I. It is a MUST watch:

In Rambo II, John Rambo went back to Vietnam to find all of the prisoners of war and, in the process, won the war singlehandedly (yes, he also found and saved the POWs). You heard me right: he defeated an entire nation full of Commies with his own two hands. See it for yourself:

I regret to inform you that the fourth Rambo film, the first in two decades, is scheduled to be released in 2008. This time it seems that he will pacify war-torn Burma. You don’t have to watch this per the assignment but, should you be interested, here’s the trailer:


Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA was deemed to be a patriotic anthem of epic proportions. A whole generation heard this song and felt damn proud to be American (which, of course, was a reminder that we were, by extension, superior to the Soviets). Alas, the twist is that this song is one of protest–protesting the fallout of the Vietnam War, protesting the receding economy, protesting empty promises, etc. Read the lyrics here.

Along the same lines, John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” made us all proud to be Americans. We heard the part that we wanted to hear, this being the chorus and the groovy beat, and we ignored the lyrics.

Last but not least, a more well-balanced perspective, in respectful memory of the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a video montage to the Sting song, Russians (lyrics here):

……

Note: in any of the above videos are not available on the website (you know YouTube…) please simply search for them at www.youtube.com (it won’t be hard to find). Sorry for any inconvenience.

…….

Your assignment is to use evidence from the above as a means to constructing an essay which clearly describes how film and music illustrate how propaganda helped Americans to cope with the insane (MAD) mentality of the Cold War in the 1980’s.

A well-organized one page, single-spaced Times New Roman font will suffice.

20 Point Rubric:

___/5 Organization & Clarity of Style
___/10 Use of Evidence (demonstrate that you have watched the videos)
___/5 Analysis (demonstrate that you have thought about the videos)