We have a glut of text and trade books on American history. But what we don't have is a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that will offer to American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their own country. Such an account can shape and deepen their sense of the land they inhabit and, by making them understand that land's roots, and share in its memories, will equip them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society. It will provide them with an enduring sense of membership in one of the greatest enterprises in human history: the exciting, perilous, and consequential story of their own country. The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. They are more likely to reflect the skeptical or partial outlook of specialized professional academic historians, an outlook that leads to a fragmented and fractured view of modern American society and fails to convey to American readers the greater arc of their own history. Or they disproportionately reflect the outlook of radical critics of American society, whose one-sided accounts lack the balance of a larger perspective and have had an enormous, and largely negative, effect upon the teaching of American history in American high schools and colleges. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. It perhaps goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale or a whitewash of the past; it will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But there is no necessary contradiction between an honest account of the American past and an inspiring one. This account seeks to provide both
Adam Shatz · Another Country: Visions of America
Is America a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is...
Writers at Risk Archive
PEN America champions the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. The bedrock work of the global PEN network is advocacy and assistance on behalf of individuals persecuted for their use of the written word or other forms of expression. PEN America’s Writers at Risk Database is a searchable catalog of the writers, journalists, academics, public intellectuals and others under threat around the world. The database includes historical cases PEN America has worked on from 1987 onwards; non-active cases are color-coded black. PEN America is grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for support that enabled the establishment of the Writers at Risk Database and to PEN International for their collaboration in assembling this database.
Governance Archaeology: Research as Ancestry
Abstract. This essay presents the idea of governance archaeology, an approach to learning from the past to inform the politics of the future. By reporting on a prototype historical database, we outline a strategy for co-producing a global commons of collective governance practices that can inspire institutional learning and experimentation, particularly in the face of rapid technological change and vexing global crises. Embedded in our approach is an orientation of ancestry whereby practitioners cultivate relationships of accountability and responsibility to the legacies they learn from, recognizing the harm from past patterns of exploitation. By taking seriously a wide range of historical governance practices, particularly those outside the Western canon, governance archaeology seeks to expand the options available for the design of more moral political economies.
‘The best we can hope for’: Rubio’s Munich unity appeal fails to woo Europe
US secretary of state sought to mollify but underlying message reinforced US administration’s talking points
Insurgent America: The revolt of the middle-classes
Insurgent America: The revolt of the middle-classes [Bingham, Alfred M.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Insurgent America: The revolt of the middle-classes
Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twen…
A timely defense of liberalism that draws vital lessons…
Fighting for a Livable Future: Exploring Frontier Climate Interventions with Kelly Erhart
The Root – Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture
Fighting for a Livable Future: Exploring Frontier Climate Interventions with Kelly Erhart
Listen to Fighting for a Livable Future: Exploring Frontier Climate Interventions with Kelly Erhart from The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens wherever you get your podcasts!
Abundant intelligences: placing AI within Indigenous knowledge frameworks
The current trajectory of artificial intelligence development suffers from fundamental epistemological shortcomings, resulting in the systematic operationalization of bias against non-white, non-male, and non-Western peoples. We argue that these failings are, in part, the result of certain Western rationalist epistemologies that exclude many ways of knowing about the world, and therefore they cannot provide a sufficient foundation on which to adequately, robustly, and humanely conceptualize intelligence. We present a new research agenda, Abundant Intelligences, an Indigenous-led, Indigenous-majority international, interdisciplinary research program that imagines anew how to conceptualize and design artificial intelligence (AI) based on Indigenous knowledge (IK) systems. Abundant Intelligences draws on the rich plurality of Indigenous knowledge systems, bringing together diverse sets of thought, culture, and protocol together. We show IK systems provide one way to rebuild AI’s epistemological foundations and transform these tools’ current role in reinforcing colonial practices of exclusion, extraction, manipulation, and eradication into engines of abundance that enable us to care better for ourselves, our communities, and our world. Our proposition is to fully engage with AI to explore how different conceptions of intelligence could be embodied in these technologies. In this paper, we present the tenets of the research program in detail, account for our methodological approach, describe the impact and limitations, and conclude on a discussion of the implications of the program.
Humanity’s Endgame
A new history of societal collapse by an expert in existential risk argues that our globalized society is edging toward the precipice.
REVIEW: Aztecs, by Inga Clendinnen
Aztecs: An Interpretation, Inga Clendinnen (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
The revolt of the reader | The Observation Deck
Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life. And because reading is important to me, writing is too: writing not only allows us to convey our ideas, but the very act forces us to test and distill them — at once making our ideas more robust while providing the vehicle by which to share them.
Climate Change: Global Crisis To Local Action By Kevin Anderson
Does modernisation erase cultural difference – or amplify it? | Psyche Ideas
We understandably fear the flattening effect of modernity. But global data from China to Peru tells a hopeful story
