I need a couple books on the origins of the New Deal. Is there much on tha…

Still waiting

Graduation speeches in the 1930s were 🔥

I am fortunate to be part of this great group of colleagues and phd students in our (entirely voluntary and casual) seminar on 20th C international history. Great discussion on Berlin as a site of decolonization!

Lovely convo with my grad students this week, riffing with them about how to plot a book on decolonization and the Cold War. Dreadful chalk scribbles but fun intellectual exercise.

Sometimes old books can suddenly seem new again.

Fortune mag, March 1940. 65% say government should care for needy even if it means more taxes or higher prices.

Happy birthday FDR! Your New Deal state survived almost a century but some very bad people you would call “economic royalists” are going to destroy it from within.

History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes with Mussolini.

Read up on Italy from 1922 to 1926 for a preview of coming attractions.

Just saying, Denzel’s expression in his final scene in Galdiator 2 is me watching this movie

On Sept 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, Hitler gave a shrieking, grievance-filled speech to the Reichstag. The great columnist Dorothy Thompson heard it, and on NBC radio she reflected back to January 1933.

Anyone from Charlottesville will know exactly what she is talking about here.

Things are going to suck for a long time so taking pleasure in the occasional sunset seems like a good idea. Central Va.

Anyway Morroco is amazing.

And to all a good night…

A term of leave, in Oxford, feels like an extraordinary gift.