Why does the United States intervene militarily around the world? Supporters might claim that the U.S. acts in the interests of national security. For critics, a likely answer would be that the country wants to exercise influence and domination over others. Journalist Andrew Cockburn, however, argues that a great number of military decisions are based on financial benefit and profiteering, including for rival bureaucracies within the military. (Full length.)

photo: Michael Afonso via Unsplash

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Is there such a thing as society? Was the mid-twentieth century an antisocial moment in U.S. history? Theodore Martin describes what happened to the idea of society in the wake of the New Deal and World War II, and argues that sociopolitical changes fueled the emergence of a new kind of antisocial novel, examples of which include Richard Wright’s “The Outsider,” Patricia Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train,” and Jim Thompson’s “The Getaway.”

Kennan Ferguson, ed., The Big No University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present Columbia University Press, 2017

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Prisons, jails, immigrant detention centers. We know them as places of unfreedom, but we don’t often think about them as places of work. Yet compulsory labor is a key part of incarceration in this country. Sociologist Erin Hatton discusses the state of coerced work in prisons, the lack of worker protections, and how work has been used as a way of dampening prisoner activism. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

photo: Hasan Almasi via Unsplash

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Who were the Jacobins? What did they believe in, what did they accomplish during the French Revolution, and how should they be judged? Micah Alpaugh discusses the Jacobin clubs’ social and political stances, the policies they enacted, and the Jacobins’ turn toward terror.

Micah Alpaugh, ed., The French Revolution: A History in Documents Bloomsbury, 2021

Micah Alpaugh, Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions Cambridge University Press, 2021

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The experience of trans people has burst into the mainstream in the last decade, although the struggles of gender variant people are nothing new. Jack Halberstam talks about the politics of categorization, generational differences, radical vs. single-issue politics, and anti-trans feminism. (Encore presentation).

Resources:

Jack Halberstam, Trans* A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability UC Press, 2018

photo: Pixabay

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