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Article Topic: Washington Monthly

U.S. nationhood was created nearly from scratch in the 19th century. Was Daniel Webster responsible?

The early United States, scholars have noted, was a country in search of nationhood. Created as an ad hoc military alliance of disparate colonies to fight off a shared political… Read more »

Reviewing David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed sequel in Washington Monthly

More than thirty years ago, Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer resuscitated the effort to develop a historical narrative of the United States with a book called Albion’s Seed, a sweeping… Read more »

Reviewing Yascha Mounk’s “Great Experiment” in Washington Monthly

The world’s ongoing slide into authoritarianism has generated a frantic effort among political scientists, historians, and national security experts to identify the causes and possible solutions. University of Chicago law… Read more »

Reviewing Matthew Pearl’s “Taking of Jemima Boone” in Washington Monthly

“The frontier” has played a huge role in the American imagination, a place where civilization and savagery supposedly met and the former — with allegedly heroic intent and deeds —… Read more »

How we got here, the stakes and where we go now (in Washington Monthly)

  The United States, which was a state before it came up with an argument for being a nation as well, has always been vulnerable to dissolution. An accidental alliance… Read more »

Reviewing Keane’s “New Despotism” in Washington Monthly

Liberal democracies are under siege worldwide and a range of thinkers have been probing the reasons why. John Keane, a professor of politics at the University of Sydney, has a… Read more »

American Nations and the geography of the pandemic

The geography of the U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic follows, like so many other things in American life, the fissures of identified in American Nations to a startling degree…. Read more »

The American Nations and the Geography of the Pandemic Response

Depressingly, as the global coronavirus pandemic unfolded, President Trump took measures that helped it along: denying it existed; denying it was more serious than the seasonal flu; denying it was… Read more »

Reviewing DeParle’s book on migrants in Washington Monthly

Jason DeParle, a George Polk Award–winning reporter for the New York Times, embedded with a family of Manila slum dwellers thirty-three years ago and has kept contact with them ever… Read more »

The 2018 midterms, the American Nations and Washington Monthly

I have an expanded version of my American Nations-powered analysis of the results of 2018 midterm election here in the U.S. over at Washington Monthly. Please check it out. For… Read more »