The History Onion

In this episode, we discuss the recent book American Whitelash by Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery. He frames American history as a never ending tug of war between mutually opposed forces: supporters and opponents of racial progress. We dig into his approach to history and the ways in which it can illuminate our understanding of the American past.

Show Notes

Lowery summer 2023 book talk

Credits

The podcast’s theme music was made by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

In this episode, we discuss the American philosopher Richard Rorty’s book Achieving Our Country, which provides a critique of the left from within. Rorty divides the 20th century into two distinct phases for the left, the first being dominated by the reformist left, and the second, starting in the mid-1960s, being dominated by the cultural left. Rorty’s sympathies lie clearly with the reformist left, but he is nonetheless highly appreciative of the successes of the cultural left, specifically as they relate to the fight against the Vietnam war. In the book, Rorty proposes a sort of alliance between the reformist left and the cultural left that can re-empower the left in politics and allow it to achieve the traditional leftist vision of America as a classless society and model to the rest of the world.

Show Notes

Richard Rorty 1997 interview

Ryan Grim on how internal culture wars caused a meltdown within progressive organizations during the critical early stage of the Biden presidency

MLK quote from Where Do We Go From Here: “A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself. But redemption can only come through a humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.”

Note: This episode was recorded before Biden dropped out of the presidential race.

Credits

The podcast’s theme music was made by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

In this episode, we do a deep dive on populism, its true history, and why liberal intellectuals like Richard Hofstadter are wrong to issue blanket condemnations against it. We argue that there is a very scary form of populism, that embodied in politicians such as Donald Trump, but that this is not the only form of populism, and not at all what populism originally meant when the term was coined in the late 19th century. The original populism actually represented an American version of a social democratic movement, and it had much to recommend it.

Show Notes

Thomas Frank’s Harper’s piece “The Pessimistic Style in American Politics”

Charles Postel’s article “Populism as a Concept and the Challenge of US History”

Talk featuring Michael Kazin and others on populism in American history

Michael Kazin article on Trump vs. Bernie style populism

Credits

The podcast’s theme music was made by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

In this episode, we discuss liberal historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964. We break down what the paranoid style is, its long history in American politics, and its evolution since Hofstadter’s essay first surfaced. In particular, we emphasize the prominent place the paranoid style has occupied in the Republican party throughout American history, and the ways in which it has increasingly dominated Republican politics in recent decades.

Show Notes

Thomas Frank’s 2014 retrospective on Hofstadter’s essay

2013 CAP study titled “Inside the GOP: Report on Focus Groups with Evangelical, Tea Party, and Moderate Republicans”

Sean Wilentz’s 2021 talk: “The Paranoid Style, Past and Present”

2020 study: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking”

Paul Krugman: “The Paranoid Style in G.O.P. Politics”

Credits

The podcast’s theme music was made by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

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This episode continues our conversation about poverty that we started with our episode “Poverty, by America,” a discussion and critique of the book of the same title by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond. We now turn to the work of another sociologist, David Brady, who we believe has a much more compelling approach to poverty.

Show Notes

David Brady paper “Poverty, not the poor”

Rich Democracies, Poor People: How Politics Explain Poverty, David Brady

Credits

The podcast’s theme music was made by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

In this week’s episode, we tackle Poverty, by America, a recent bestseller written by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond. Though we found this book compelling in some ways, it fell short of the providing the sort of serious analysis of poverty, and solutions to poverty, that we think is needed.

Show Notes

Road to Wigan Pier, by George Orwell

Desmond’s New York Times article

Desmond’s 2018 paper

EPI study on poverty and wages

Explainer from the Census on the two main US poverty measures

The argument for using a relative poverty measure for the US

Credits

The podcast’s theme music was made by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

This episode continues our discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final book Where Do We Go From Here?: Chaos or Community. We cover King’s views on history, on past American heroes, and his prescriptions for a better future.

Credits

The podcast’s theme music was made by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

Today’s episode is about the most influential democratic socialist in American history: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We start the episode by looking at how King is portrayed in American media and in high school history textbooks. We then move on to how King is portrayed by historians, who view him very differently and more in his totality. Finally, we begin a discussion about King’s last book, Where Do We Go From Here?: Chaos or Community. Part two of this episode, which will come out next Monday, will continue this discussion.

Show Notes

Note: This episode was recorded before Biden dropped out of the presidential race.

The Limits of Master Narratives in History Textbooks: An Analysis of Representations of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Derrick Alridge

King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop, by Harvard Sitkoff

King and the Other America: The Poor People's Campaign and the Quest for Economic Equality, by Sylvie Laurent

Why Socialism?, by Albert Einstein (note: accidentally flubbed the name of this article during the episode)

Where Do We Go From Here?: Chaos or Community, by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Credits

The podcast’s theme music was made by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

This episode continues our discussion of James Loewen’s bestselling book Lies My Teacher Told Me. We look at the reason he gives for why high school history textbooks are so bad, and we spend much of the episode talking about how high school history classes could be improved.

Show Notes

Link to the Popular Info piece cited at the top of the episode.

Great quote from the book: “But only about history and social studies do writers actually ask, ‘Can textbooks have scholarly integrity?’ Only in history is accuracy so political.” (pg. 333)

Credits

The podcast’s theme music was made by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

The History Onion is a listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this episode, we discuss James Loewen’s bestselling book Lies My Teacher Told Me. We begin the episode by talking about our own experiences with high school history, both as students and, in Aidan’s case, as a teacher. We then get into the material of the book, outlining Loewen’s main thesis and the examples he provides of the failures of American high school history textbooks.

Show Notes

Good interview with James Loewen if you want to hear the author in his own words

Summarizing Loewen’s major critiques of American high school history textbooks:

* They misrepresent the past

* e.g. The history of Reconstruction, the history of Indian assimilation

* They make the past just a bunch of unconnected factoids rather than a causal and contingent chain of events

* Little analysis of counterfactuals; history presented basically as inevitable, without alternatives

* They evacuate the past of ideas/ideology

* They tell a boring moral story of progress while obscuring villainy

* Something like slavery is portrayed as something like a natural disaster; people only do good things, not bad things

Credits

The podcast’s theme music was made by our youngest brother Tate.

Cover art by Arthur Santoro.

The History Onion is a listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.