Clearing the Desk

Here are a couple things that piqued my interest that I didn' t have time to blog about extensively during the last couple months.

Lee Harris argued that Hegel was a proponent of Turner's frontier thesis before Turner and that--contrary to popular belief--Hegel was not a determinist and the conflation of his ideas with Marx is unfortunate.

Michael Barone talked about the role that history plays in the politics of delegitimization. According to Barone:

FDR encouraged the idea that history is a story of progress toward an ever larger and more generous government. That version of American history was propagated by a brace of gifted historians and in most mainstream media.

For decades afterward, presidents were judged by the FDR standard... Ronald Reagan wrote a different version of history. Like FDR, he showed that a strong and assertive America could advance freedom in the world. But unlike Roosevelt, he saw government at home as the problem, not the solution, and he utterly refuted the liberal elites who said that low-inflation economic growth was no longer possible and that America was on the defensive in the world.

With these two "standards" as background, Barone delves into the Republican attempts to delegitimize President Clinton and the Democrat attempts to delegitimize President Bush.

R.I. Moore wrote a book review of two important new books on the Middle Ages, Chris Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages and Julia M. H. Smith's Europe After Rome.