And now we get to the South. Between reelecting their legislators until they die and defending segregation, southern states have played a powerful role in American politics from the beginning of the republic to the present. Georgia is possibly above average compared to the region and certainly two Georgians have played key roles in the […]
Author: Erik Loomis
New Jersey has had a somewhat weak group of national politicians throughout its history with an obvious choice for the top. I suspect a lot of this is getting overshadowed by New York and Pennsylvania
Yglesias has been reading Middlekauf and tries to learn lessons on modern health care from the disastrous medicine of the time: I think discussions of health care economics pay far too little attentio
A couple of notes as we go forward in this series: 1. I am doing the states in order of joining the union. 2. Some of you are bringing up state-level politicians. That was really interesting to me. I hope you keep doing that. But understand that outside of some western states, I just don’t […]
Douthat applies the same tortured logic he uses to discuss abortion and gay marriage to euthanasia, promoting state sanction and imprisonment for those who would engage in assisted suicide without pro
Now that I’m writing at a site with something I understand is called “readership,” I thought I might revisit a few older ideas of mine from time to time. I hope nobody minds. Last ye
I’m grading AP US History exams this week. It’s not a particularly fun process. Most of the tests are not very good. But it drives me INSANE that the other graders find it just so damn funny that students are confused and say ridiculous things in their essays. Oh, you confused the Gentlemen’s Agreement of […]
In the comments to yesterday’s post on German Civil War reenactors, people mentioned Germans’ love of westerns. This reminded of the remarkable box set released by First Run Features a few
This is a day where death has dominated the headlines–Jack Kevorkian, the American economy, Marshall Matt Dillon. But I want to say a special word about the recently deceased Geronimo Pratt, the
Yoni Applebaum has an interesting piece on the popularity of reenacting the U.S. Civil War in Germany. While one might poo-poo any real analysis of this as being just Gone with the Wind romanticism without any political meaning, I’d be skeptical to agree. As one German Union reenactor says, I think some of the Confederate […]
Over at the United Steelworkers blog, Dean Baker unloads on Alan Simpson and the idea that Simpson knows anything useful about Social Security: Former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson has been a holy terr
I’d like to start my first post at LGM by thanking everyone else here for asking me to join the blog. I’ve been blogging in obscurity at Alterdestiny since 2004 and expanding my audience b