So as I read this, a Bretton-Woods–style system of stable exchange rates would be a potent weapon in the war on terror. You identify the countries harboring problematic insurgencies, set your adjustable peg high enough that insurrections can’t operate effectively, and watch the rebellion wither! Is there any problem FDR’s policies can’t help us solve?
Actually, rhetoric like this — pinning hopes for world peace to the Bretton Woods system of stable exchange rates, and thus freer trade and capital flows — was not at all uncommon. As one participant later recollected,
Peace was seen as linked with world prosperity, and prosperity, with free trade, free capital movements, and stable exchange rates.
He goes on to admit, “Although the causality was ambiguous….”1
1Raymond F. Mikesell, “The Bretton Wood Debates: A Memoir,” Essays in International Finance no. 192 (March 1994),…
Of course this is from F is for Fake, so treat it accordingly. FDR never met with the aliens. If he had, he would have driven them from New Jersey by the sheer force of his awesomeness.
paints a better picture of Tom than F. Scott Fitzgerald did…. a straightforward adventure yarn, “Banana Republican” offers the pleasures of an exotic setting, inventive plotting and a metaphor that captures the waste and fatuity of our more recent global misadventures — not too bad for a slender and unpretentiously written little novel.
I think “not too bad” and “unpretentiously written” are exactly the kinds of things I would like to believe about my work.
Also, my distinguished former colleague Tom Holloway long ago traced the origin of the term “banana republic” to O. Henry’s Cabbages and Kings. Whether this is authoritative depends on what connotation you’re putting on the term “banana republic,” I suppose.
It’s striking, when one reads female philosophers from the early modern period, how little the arguments that a given trait belongs solely to women or to men have changed over the years. In the 17th and 18th centuries, no one used the term “genetic” or “evolutionary” or “long end of the tail” or “back on Ye Olde Veldte”, but instead argued in terms of “natural” or “innate” differences. What particular traits belong in the set “innate to women” or “innate to men” have changed according to social fashion, but what’s curious is that the form of the argument hasn’t:
Girls are from their earliest infancy fond of dress. Not content with being pretty, they are desirous of being thought so; we see, by all their little airs, that this thought engages their attention; and they are hardly capable of understanding what is said to them, before they are to be governed by talking to them of what …
Tuition—at some point, it began to be called tuition, instead of “fees”—at the UC is up, lots, these days. Which is the occasion for Michael O’Hare’s letter to his students, via Mark Thoma. Basically, he points out, a generation that got its UC education (and lots of other state services) paid for by its parents is declining to do likewise for its children. Perhaps not the greatest of generations. (more…)
UC Davis ranks number 6 in this year’s Washington Monthly rankings of national universities, up from number 8. Shanghai Jiao Tong has us at 46, up from 48.
A survey of military history posts from around the web, inspired by Ralph Luker’s “Notes” and “Things” at the History News Network’s Cliopatria blog. Different from Carnivals as it is my idiosyncratic collection from regular blog reading. Nominations for blogs to follow and include in this survey are welcome. As to why this is #125, it started at H-War a while back.
The Chronicle Blog Network, a digital salon sponsored by The Chronicle of Higher Education, features leading bloggers from all corners of academe. Content is not edited, solicited, or necessarily endorsed by The Chronicle. More on the Network...
This blog is a blog about history, Yiddishkeit, and the Muppets, neither exclusively nor necessarily in that order. And as William Gibson said about this very blog (no, really), “History can save your ass.” Yiddishkeit and the Muppets are just extras.
is the associate director of the Cornell in Washington program and a senior lecturer at Cornell University. He teaches courses on European history, modern military history, guerrilla war, and the role of popular will in waging war.
is an associate professor of history at UC Davis. He is the author of A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize in 2004, and his new book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, will be published by Harvard University Press in fall 2012.
is a professor of history at UC Davis, and the author of several books on US history including The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction, and Murdering McKinley, among others.
is a professor of history at UC Davis. She is the author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (Oxford, 2009); Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (North Carolina, 2002); and Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (North Carolina, 1996).
Follow The Edge of the American West through your favorite RSS reader: SUBSCRIBE