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Sound and Fury: The Last Stand of Isolationism
This is an historiographic essay written for my graduate history program discussing US foreign policy in the pre-war period. I think this is one of the most important chapters of US history. The change in global strategy occurred as the US reacted to Germany’s victory over France and revisionist Japan asserted a claim as hegemon of Asia. The term…
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Trumpageddon
President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. To most, that sentence states a fact. To many others, that sentence is just an ideological argument revealing someone’s epistemological preferences. And that’s the state of American civic life so far in 2021. The Art of the Steal Trump is a fascinating character. Before getting to denouncing him,…
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The Repression of Civil Liberties in the United States During World War I
I originally wrote this post as an historiography for a US History course for my graduate degree. In retrospect, I would do this paper differently if I had to revisit the topic. The book-by-book summary is now way to write a literature review. It’s pretty boring, plus my research was not very thorough as I’ve…
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American Discontent
I’ve always found it difficult to stay in the present. Chicago Fog comes from a love of history and a fascination with the ideas that shaped today’s world. At the same time I’ve always enjoyed futurism and the vision of science fiction writers, especially those who write near future realism. The context for science fiction,…
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Flyover Bourgeois GenX Man
I’ve witnessed history being made four times in my half-century of life: the end of the Cold War, 9-11, the Financial Crisis of 2007-08, and now the Coronavirus pandemic. Those events—spaced roughly by 10 years—play outsized roles in public dialogue and analysis. They are omnipresent in people’s imaginations as they wrestle with current affairs. However,…
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Mercenaries: Private Military Force in the Atlantic World
This was a paper I wrote for an Atlantic History seminar in my graduate history program. In retrospect, I wish I would have worked on finding additional sources. The paper is informative but not insightful. I have a fascination with private military force–this stems from reading too much libertarian science fiction and letting my mind…
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Opening Moves
Have you ever taken a personality test? I had to take one several years ago as part of an employer’s training program, doing different versions of the Myers-Briggs test and being scored an INTP or an INTJ. My scores for Thinking and Introversion were at extreme ends, I favored my Intuition over my Sensations, but I…
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Learned Optimism: Liberalism, Human Rights, and American Progress
A reader of Chicago Fog may know I’m not an optimist by nature. In fact, people who know me probably think I’m a “glass is half-empty and quickly draining” kind of guy. I bring both skepticism and cynicism to studying U.S. history, and I’ll readily admit a fondness for debunking popular American mythos, whether it…
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Change…and Fade Away
To be alive means to cope with constant change, just as it is that living means we face death one day. Nothing about us is permanent except the matter we are comprised of (or, at least, that is what we are told by physicists). We are also told by evolutionary biologists that as animals we…
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Imperial Blindness
“The history of the United States is the history of empire,” concludes Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire. Immerwahr’s book argues American political discourse resisted a societal and cultural self-identification of conducting an empire while the US government acted the part of an imperial power through its foriegn policy over the last 120 years.…
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Wither Moderation
In 2012 historian Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote an interesting book detailing the history of moderates in the Republican Party called Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party. Apolitical or centrist types may read Kabaservice and consider it tragedy, while far-right and far-left readers…
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Reparations: A Dish Best Served Cold
The following post was originally an historiographic discussion submitted as a term paper for a Modern European History reading colloquium. This was the first paper I ever wrote in my graduate history program. Reading it again years later, I’m still happy with the paper though I should have added more of my own thoughts and…
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Cultural Hegemony and False Consciousness
Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and…
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What Comes After God and Country?
Being Nietzschean (seemingly as a condition of birth), ideas like selfless devotion and blind faith always seemed like someone else’s means to an end, a will to power that wanted to sweep me up. Now it strikes me that statism and superstition are life threatening conditions. If humanity wants to survive we mush hang on to…
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The Hazards of Political Belief Spectrums
The graphic above is from a discussion on a UK website called The Student Room. Chicago Fog believes this is a good representation of the parameters of political beliefs reflected in contemporary society: communism on one end and fascism on the other. Clearly, the maker of the spectrum must be from Canada, but this graphic…