Historians are fond of saying that the past doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes.
To understand the present, we have to understand how we got here.
That’s where this newsletter comes in.
I’m a professor of American history. This is a chronicle of today’s political landscape, but because you can’t get a grip on today’s politics without an outline of America’s Constitution, and laws, and the economy, and social customs, this newsletter explores what it means, and what it has meant, to be an American.
These were the same questions a famous observer asked in a book of letters he published in 1782, the year before the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War.
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur called his book “Letters from an American Farmer.”
Like I say, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.
Latest Posts
- I have been thinking lately about taxes and war and citizens and what the government should do for its people.
- Listen now |
- “The Republican Party’s new favorite talking point is calling Democrats communists,” Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) said yesterday on the floor of the U.S.
- The front page of yesterday’s New York Times featured some of the 440,000 Americans from Arizona alone who have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits since the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act made the deepest cuts to SNAP in its history, expanded work rules, and shifted costs to the states even as cuts to federal grant programs have forced Arizona to lay off a third of its caseworkers.
- Brian Tyler Cohen
- On Friday an Iranian attack on a U.S.
- Spent a lovely day with family and friends, and the fact the internet was down when I got home just confirmed I should take the night off.