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Historians and the isolationists: polling

The second in what is now for sure a series

Historiography

Isolationists

I previously said the professional opinion of mine most likely to have me like—

Andrew Hickey, practitioner of old-school American Studies (laudatory)

Historiography

American Studies

Even though I am not old enough to have encountered the mid-century American Studies scholars when they were flourishing or in many cases, when they were even still alive…

Reno, NV, circa 1997

Reno

Photography

From 1996–1998 I was a visiting assistant professor in history at the University of Nevada, Reno. It was a very good non-tenure track job and they treated me exceptionally…

Wages in Puerto Rico, 1934–1949

Puerto Rico

New Deal

Territories

Here are a couple charts showing wages in various forms of manufacturing, and then in various other forms of employment (including sugar growing) in Puerto Rico, for five…

Dylaniana

An Essay I’d Complete Forgotten

Bob Dylan

Girl From the North Country

Conor McPherson

Writings

I was looking through a drawer and came across a Bob Dylan-adjacent thing I’d written and forgotten, because my cv has only the academic stuff on it. Given the Discourse…

American History Hit

Historiography

Hoover

New Deal

I had the opportunity of a pleasant chat with Don Wildman of American History Hit about the Hoover-to-Roosevelt era (arguably a thing I’m expert on) and it became two…

New Fields, New Deals

Pretty pictures

USVI

New Deal

This post is no profounder than to observe that this (rather lovely, to me) Jack Delano photo of 1941, for the Farm Security Administration, of sugarcane cultivators at the…

Historians and the isolationists

Perhaps the first of a series

Historiography

Hoover

Isolationists

People sometimes ask, “what professional opinion of yours is most likely to have you like—”

Making a chart on the fly

Methods

I posted a map on social media recently that drew wholly from online resources; I’m trying to do this for all my charts and maps this quarter. There are practical reasons…

President Hoover was not a progressive

nor did the New Deal begin under his administration

Hoover

New Deal

Historiography

President Herbert Hoover was no progressive; the New Deal did not begin under his administration nor in a fantasy alternate history where he won reelection would he have…

Some updates

Curriculum vitae

Wine

New Deal

Kathy and I had a new article come out, “A New Deal for Wine,” in the Journal of Policy History.¹ Which provided the occasion for me to update my c.v.—it’s been linked in…

Archives come in all shapes and sizes and places

New Deal

Primary sources

Territories

USVI

As I mentioned, we had some good research trips this summer, including one notably productive one to the National Archives, but we got great material at some less-obvious…

An unnamed government agency, you say

New Deal

Primary sources

Mysteries

We had the good fortune to make several research trips this summer, including one to the National Archives at College Park (the big one). We’ve learned the pleasantest way…

Remember the women

New Deal

Women voters

Ben Mathis-Lilley of Slate asked me if I would talk to him a bit about whether women voters brought progressivism to the United States (or, as some would say, ruined the…

Thirty glorious years

New Deal

Media

A while back I spoke to the folks at Scene on Radio for their New Deal episode in their season on thwarted American potential, “The Land that Never Has Been Yet,” and now…

Somewhere East of Suwannee

USVI

New Deal

Territories

Greetings from the easternmost point in the United States, Point Udall¹ on the edge of St. Croix.

Japanese Americans, per IPUMS

Japanese Americans

Internment

IPUMS

IPUMS has now made available a preliminary complete-count sample—that is to say, everyone in the Census is represented in the sample—for 1950. Having both 1940 and 1950…

Compelled to look beyond

New Deal

Gold

SCOTUS

In February 1935 the Supreme Court was about to issue an opinion on the question of whether the Roosevelt administration’s policy of taking the country off the gold standard…

He reads to us from something called ‘Ulysses’

New Deal

SCOTUS

Comstock

Ulysses

Justices Thomas and Alito have brought the Comstock laws back into the news in an effort to craft a national ban on abortion. The laws banned a lot more, including James…

Not a review of Masters of the Air

B-24

Airpower

US strategy

This is not a review of Masters of the Air; I’m not a tv critic and in the end I mainly enjoyed it for what it was—this is instead a discussion of what it’s not: a story of…

Betty expects

US strategy

Navy

UK strategy

Neutrality

Greer

As previously noted, Admiral Harold “Betty” Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, wrote the “Plan Dog” memo on November 12, 1940, advocating a joint US-UK naval strategy against…

Panic and confidence

New Deal

Gold

Monetary policy

New Deal recovery

Barrie A. Wigmore has an article of 1987 asking whether the gold panic of early 1933 was caused by fears of devaluation, to which he answers “yes.”¹

Book tripleversary

New Deal

Methods

Historiography

While doing a Reddit AMA for Myth America, in which I have a chapter on pernicious myths about the New Deal, I received a question about Murdering McKinley, reminding me…

Istrian annexationists

Maps

Nazi strategy

Corrections

Great War

Geography

Thanks to David Wondrich and Ken Schultz I now know cshapes has an error regarding interwar Italy, which it depicts without the Istrian peninsula. I have endeavored to…

Declaration of Panama

US strategy

Nazis

Geography

Neutrality

Franklin Roosevelt told George VI during the king’s visit to the United States early in June 1939 that the Americans planned to control an area extending five hundred miles…

Architecture after a Green New Deal, UCLA

New Deal

Public works

Green New Deal

TVA

Here are my slides from my presentation at the rather wonderful conference, “Architecture after a Green New Deal,” at the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design.

Mobilization, Philadelphia Navy Yard edition

US mobilization

Philadelphia Navy Yard

Just for fun, a quick visualization of the number of employees, clerical and mechanical, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.¹

Americans in a World at War, Washington History Seminar

Below are my comments, as prepared, from the Washington History Seminar session of October 16, 2023, if you’d like to read them. If you’d like to see the whole session as it…

You didn’t build that

New Deal

US mobilization

B-24

Movies

There’s a pivotal moment in Ford v. Ferrari when Henry Ford II explains why the American automaker is going to defeat the Italian one.

Wine grape varieties in California

Wine

Prohibition

Repeal

New Deal

UC Davis

The fine folks at AAWE posted a chart a week ago, showing how as recently as 1960, Bordeaux was planted mainly to white grapes, perhaps contrary to one’s modern…

Field on the New Deal recovery

New Deal denialism

Economists

New Deal recovery

In addressing various arguments against the New Deal, I’ve generally cited Alexander Field’s fine (and wonderfully titled) A Great Leap Forward.¹ I’ve never cited his…

Price levels and the Nazi vote

Nazis

Inflation

Deflation

People will commonly blame the Weimar hyperinflation for the rise to power of the Nazi party, disregarding the ten-year lag and the intervening Great Depression, an episode…

The only thing worse than being assimilated to the Borg

New Deal

Methods

Madness

The Atlantic ran an article or two about the Books3 database, into which some 180,000 books were fed to form a corpus for Meta’s large language model LLaMa, among other…

What did U.S. Voters Want from the New Deal in 1932?

New Deal

Election of 1932

Public opinion

I published an article in 2019 arguing that “the New Deal was on the ballot in 1932”—that is, that Roosevelt “ran on the New Deal and was elected on it; while 1933 predates…

The Bluesky “What’s History” Feed

Methods

Madness

Awhile ago I set up a feed called “What’s History” on Bluesky, the as-yet invite-only microblogging social media service that is a bit livelier than some and freer of…

Teflon Doug

MacArthur

Pacific

Philippines

Some current nonsense on social media reminded me that Douglas MacArthur did have at least one substantial secret, about which historians now know pretty well thanks to the…

Former local man

New Deal

Florida man

It’s always nice when your hometown paper picks up something you’ve done (in a good way). The headline here isn’t “Onetime Florida Man Debunks Historical Myths,” but it…

Oppenheimer omnibus

Oppenheimer

Movies

Atomic bombs

Pacific strategy

US strategy

Unconditional surrender

We went to see Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX yesterday. It was a fantastic experience, but I’m not a movie critic so I’ll leave to others to explain why Nolan is especially good…

Counterfactuals, Dial of Destiny edition

Methods

Movies

Spoilers for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny herein.

Mistakes and counterfactuals

Nazi strategy

Methods

In the latest episode of the Unclear and Present Danger podcast, Jamelle Bouie and John Ganz discuss the movie Fatherland with Sam Goldman. Ganz spends some time explaining…

North Africa maps

Maps

North Africa

Students in World War II need to understand the North Africa campaigns both for a sense of what British imperial strategy was like, and for the competing demands on German…

Mothballs

US strategy

Neutrality

The US strategy for building up an Atlantic squadron depended on reactivating ships from the first world war, mothballed during the optimistic years of the 1920s. Roosevelt…

Everything everywhere

Teaching

US strategy

Together with my colleague, and sometimes solo, I’ve been teaching our department’s course on the history of World War II for something like a dozen years. Students have…

Neutrality patrol 1939

Neutrality

US strategy

The war in Europe had barely begun when the president urged his acting secretary of the navy, Charles Edison, to swifter action.

Quantifying German Jewish refugees, 1933–1938

Holocaust

Historiography

Methods

So far as I can tell the best source of data on the number and direction of German Jews fleeing the Nazi regime remains Werner Rosenstock’s 1956 article, “Exodus…

The Holocaust as a historian’s problem

Holocaust

Historiography

Methods

The effort to quantify the dead of the Holocaust inspires a queasy feeling, as of dealing with the genuinely obscene, but it is a necessary methodological substitute for the…

Time and rate of the Holocaust

Holocaust

Historiography

Methods

Of the effort to arrive at a number of Jews murdered in the Nazi death camps, Yitzhak Arad writes,

Travel by map

Geography

Historiography

Movies

Muppets

In The Muppets (2011) the almost fully reunited gang, together with Jason Segel and Amy Adams, need to travel to France from the United States to find Miss Piggy. They have…

The literature of the Irving case

Historiography

Holocaust

David Irving sued the historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel in 1996, and lost in 2000, when an English judge’s opinion held that Lipstadt was justified in her…

Ray Moley as a source

New Deal

Raymond Moley

Historiography

Methods

Historians often rely on Raymond Moley’s memoirs for accounts of the early New Deal.¹ I have been skeptical of leaning too hard on these sources: memoirs written after the…

Pan Am for hemispheric defense

US strategy

Pan Am

Shortly after the German invasion of France in June 1940, the Roosevelt administration authorized Pan American Airways to build and maintain airfields for the US military.…

Franklin Roosevelt, budget-cutter

New Deal

Balanced budget

Much as I crankily complain about e-texts (tldr; for scholarly use and for instruction they are not as accessible as they should be), we live in an age of wonderful online…

Geolexigraph

US strategy

Neutrality

Today’s fun source is the “Geolexigraph of the Neutrality Act of 1939,” in the Department of Commerce’s own journal, Comparative Law Series, of May 1940.¹ The journal…

Basics of the Greer speech

Greer

US strategy

Nazi strategy

Ultimately, what troubles me most about standard accounts of the Greer incident is the tendency to treat evidence showing the U-boat captain didn’t know the destroyer was a…

Chiseling on Justice

SCOTUS

Judicial reform

The Roosevelt administration considered a series of methods to improve an obstructionist federal judiciary in the 1930s; its best known was the Judicial Reform Bill of 1937…

Fearless finger

La Guardia

Civilian Defense

Fiorello La Guardia, Federal Director of the Office of Civilian Defense and candidate for a third term as mayor of New York City on a Fusion ticket, in a photograph used in…

A red herring in the fog of war

Greer

Destroyers-for-bases

Hasselwander noted that historians will sometimes say or suggest that Lt. Fraatz, commander of U 652, might have mistaken Greer for one of the Wickes-class destroyers the US…

The Greer: just some more facts

Greer

Convoys

Nazi strategy

US strategy

UK strategy

Earlier I posted a bare-bones, “just-the-facts” narrative of the Greer incident, from Samuel Eliot Morison’s account. Here are some more facts; as the Dude would say, “new…

Four Fears, Four Freedoms: US ideology

US strategy

US politics

Admiral Stark’s “Plan Dog” memo sets as a basic aim the “preservation of the territorial, economic, and ideological integrity of the United States plus that of the remainder…

The German threat: Plan Dog

Convoys

Greer

US strategy

On November 12, 1940, shortly after Roosevelt’s re-election to a unique third term in the presidency, Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark sent a memorandum to the…

The Greer: Nazi strategy

Greer

Convoys

Nazi strategy

The September 4, 1941, U-boat attack on the Greer was materially inconsequential, but symbolically vital, and to understand why, we have to think about this particular…

The Greer: just the facts

Greer

Convoys

On September 4, 1941, the German submarine U-652 attempted to torpedo the U.S.S. Greer, a destroyer ferrying mail from the United States to Iceland. The president used the…

The German threat to the United States, 1940–1941: Atlantic geography

Airpower

Nazi strategy

This is a follow-up to the previous post on Roosevelt’s assessment of the German threat in December 1940, pursuing the big question, “How much of a threat did Germany pose…

The German threat to the United States, 1940–1941: bomber range

Airpower

How much of a threat did Germany pose to the United States before Pearl Harbor? That’s the big question; let’s look at a small part of it. Historians often say Roosevelt…