necessitous posts

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…
Mar 26, 2024
Eric Rauchway

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…
Mar 15, 2024
Eric Rauchway

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…
Feb 12, 2024
Eric Rauchway

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
Jan 25, 2024
Eric Rauchway

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…
Dec 18, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Dec 1, 2023

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…
Nov 19, 2023
Eric Rauchway

 

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.
Nov 10, 2023

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
Nov 10, 2023

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…
Oct 28, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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.
Oct 23, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Oct 15, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Oct 8, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Oct 2, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Sep 27, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Sep 22, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Sep 19, 2023
Eric Rauchway

 

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…
Sep 6, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Sep 5, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Jul 27, 2023
Eric Rauchway

Counterfactuals, Dial of Destiny edition

Methods
Movies
Spoilers for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny herein.
Jul 23, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Jul 17, 2023
Eric Rauchway

Series of maps showing Italian, British, and German advances over the early years of the North Africa campaign.

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…
Jun 13, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Jun 10, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Jun 1, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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.
May 30, 2023
Eric Rauchway

Chart showing initial movement of refugees to Europe, then to Palestine, then to the USA over the period 1933--1938.

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…
May 26, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
May 24, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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,
May 22, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
May 17, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
May 15, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
May 10, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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.…
May 5, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
May 3, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
May 1, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Apr 28, 2023
Eric Rauchway

 

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…
Apr 26, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Apr 24, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Apr 21, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Apr 19, 2023
Eric Rauchway

 

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…
Apr 17, 2023
Eric Rauchway

 

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…
Apr 13, 2023
Eric Rauchway

 

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…
Apr 12, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Apr 10, 2023
Eric Rauchway

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…
Apr 7, 2023
Eric Rauchway

 

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…
Apr 5, 2023
Eric Rauchway
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