Blueprint America is a precedent-setting multi-platform initiative — developed and produced by Thirteen/WNET, and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation — that will harness the power of public broadcasting’s most prestigious programs, primetime documentaries, community and educational outreach, and the web to shine an unyielding spotlight on one of the most critical issues facing our country, yet one that has been under-reported by the traditional news media: America’s decaying and neglected infrastructure. We hear about infrastructure only when it results in a catastrophic bridge collapse or levee failure, but in fact, it is placing our quality of life and our ability to compete in a global economy at risk.
I like Mary Beard’s TLS blog. But this time I fear she has Gone Too Far. Or, perhaps more likely, she’s pulling our collective leg — though I don’t remember her pulling it in quite this manner before. Even out here at the veriest Edge, the cityscape is clotted with victors’ memories of the War of Eastern Aggression. Just yesterday I was out picknicking with fellow parents of future yuppies at the Black Point Battery; and of course the map is full of streets named for Vicksburg, Grant, Lincoln and the Union. (Not to speak of the Confederate general from Big Sur.)
That’s the program title. If you’re really, really interested in listening to me talk about the New Deal at some length, with France Kassing on our local one and only KDVS, it’s here.
For those of you who really, really enjoy this sort of thing, here’s a whole hour of me on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal talking about the New Deal. But certainly the highlight is the part when they show our blog!
On Friday, when I was in New York for the AHA, I also got to go around to the NPR studios and talk with some of my favorite radio hosts.
Doing a radio interview by phone is weird; there’s none of the normal intimacy you get in a telephone conversation. Doing a radio interview in studio is more natural, because you can see the hosts and get all the normal cues you get in conversation—but it’s still weird; you’re being timed, and monitored, and there’s a big microphone in your face.
Still, after we’d been talking for some time, it got to seem more natural. Which was probably about when I stopped making sense—if you’re jet-lagged from the redeye, and also sitting comfortably in pleasant company, you start to lose coherence I fear.
Below (or by download here) you can hear me on Virginia’s Only Statewide Public Radio Program, “With Good Reason”, discussing—what else?—the Great Depression and the New Deal. This time by studio ISDN line rather than telephone, so I just have to live with the notion that that’s what I sound like.
Jonathan Dresner kindly puts us in his “History Carnival.” Then, for “the other side,” he links to this post about the “fascist NRA” and how the Roosevelt “Administration targeted Jewish merchants/middlemen for the dual sins of being good capitalists and observant Jews”.
We had the privilege of the excellent Andrew Cohen post on this a while back.
In Shlaes’ portrayal, the Schechter brothers were small immigrant businessmen crushed by a tyrannical federal government exceeding its traditional jurisdiction.
The real story is much more interesting. A.L.A. Schechter & Co. was actually the largest firm in Brooklyn’s $60 million kosher poultry market, grossing over $1 million per year. The corporation had grown by undercutting their five hundred or so rival slaughterhouses, represented by three groups: the Greater New York Live Poultry Chamber of Commerce, the Official Orthodox…
I’d already decided on “teledon” as a replacement for “doofus” for this kind of thing, and then lo and behold, I am opening act for a real-live teledon, my erstwhile colleague Niall. Those who like this sort of thing will enjoy listening here as I crack wise based on Keynes’s wit.
Also, jftr, the thing that sticks out to me about Geithner is his Bretton Woods/international economics experience.
UPDATED to add, people know that the doofus in question isme, right?
Can’t get enough New Deal? Here’s me on WILL, UIUC’s public radio. I like how the podcast begins in the middle of a report on the BNP: “a bunch of skinhead morons.” Sweet.
Oh, and if you missed the Sacramento public radio program, it’s here.
KCRA, our local NBC affiliate, had a pretty well researched and thoughtful report on the history of (mainly) GOP complaints about the press hating on (mainly) Republicans. Too bad they ruined it by interviewing some random goofball live at the end.
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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).
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