Welcome to our textbook. This is a collaborative project that involves many authors bringing their own perspectives and approaches to their individual chapters, but with a common goal of presenting you with a different type of history than you are used to encountering. We will do this by looking at the history of the modern worldContinue reading “The Sparks of Hope in the Past”
Author Archives: History Against the Grain
Keep Doing the Work
Over the last four years I have rekindled my love for history while also becoming more aware than ever before how complicit the discipline has been in the maintenance of an unjust power structure. Instead of being handmaidens to that power structure we must become, in the words of historian Priya Satia, “the province ofContinue reading “Keep Doing the Work”
On Narrative and Empire
One of the key ideas presented in recent episodes is the notion that narratives are a crucial means of justifying and legitimizing the actions of the power structure. There are, of course, many successful examples of narrative construction, but one example I focused on was the Spanish state’s attempts to establish a unifying legitimizing narrative.Continue reading “On Narrative and Empire”
American History As Commemorative Plate
Tom Cotton, squidly Senator from Arkansas and cryptofacist rhetorical roustabout, has again courageously volunteered to be the defender of America’s genocidal mythology. In the run-up to this year’s Thanksgiving holiday, Cotton took to the Senate floor amid a worsening pandemic to fire a few salvos from his battlefield bunker, otherwise known as Mitch McConnell’s Senate.Continue reading “American History As Commemorative Plate”
Time to Start Over
Now, for the time being, as the active phase of street level protest has paused, reports are coming in detailing the scale of police brutality occasioned by the protests. Lovers of irony will note, how those protests were themselves sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, itself the culminating police misdeed in a longContinue reading “Time to Start Over”
Better Stories, Better Selves
As did millions, I watched in horror the killing of George Floyd by an expressionless Minneapolis cop named Derek Chauvin. Then, with breath out of turn, I watched in despair as a militarized police force, stretching from NYC to L.A., unleashed a storm of rubber bullets, batons, and chemical weapons against my fellow Americans forContinue reading “Better Stories, Better Selves”
The History of Now
Have been reading in the news reports and headlines of “rioting” and “looting” and “crimes” and “thugs”. Just tonight the NYT headline read “As chaos spreads, Trumps vows to end it now.” But you know, I think it is really just misplaced modifiers, or dishonest storytelling, or more likely, fraud. Chaos? Consider, the actual historyContinue reading “The History of Now”
We Need Better Heroes
In Vincent Leung’s Politics of the Past in Early China, he refers to various early Chinese thinkers seeking out exemplary personages in the past to serve as models for present behavior. These thinkers were a diverse group who wrote and thought across a wide swathe of temporal space, yet settled on a relatively small setContinue reading “We Need Better Heroes”
The Weight of all Past Generations
“The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living.” — Karl Marx “…there has been enough of poison spread in this country during the past years and months, and this poison has had an effect on people’s minds. We must face this poison, we must root out thisContinue reading “The Weight of all Past Generations”
History Against the Grain 