Category: Papers
Historical research and academic writing on diplomacy, war, state formation, and U.S. foreign policy.
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Reconsidering Early Modern European Diplomatic Thought
In May 2018, the United States relocated its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to its capital Jerusalem, a city whose status remains disputed. The Trump Administration’s decision to move the embassy sent two messages: an external one to Palestinians and their allies, signaling a decidedly pro-Israeli stance in U.S. foreign policy, and an internal…
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Slouching Towards Economic History
Book Review: J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2022). In 2016, President Barack Obama guest-edited the November issue of Wired magazine, contributing an essay that described the virtues of the present age and America’s bright future. He declared, “Because the truth is, if you had to choose any…
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Religious Violence and the State
Complexity, Variability and the Importance of Historical Context This historical essay, written for a graduate reading seminar on religion and violence, explores the intersection of religious violence and the modern state. A significant challenge in crafting this paper was the requirement to rely primarily on source materials from the seminar’s readings, encompassing around sixteen books…
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Was Historical Objectivity Overthrown?
This is an historiographic essay from my graduate program’s History & Theory reading seminar. I centered the paper on Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. This is a great book to read. I wanted to get more grounded in intellectual history as well as get more exposure in American history. I believe objectivity…
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Byron Nuclear Power Station: State Power and Grassroots Resistance
The following is a research paper I submitted in my graduate history program. While I doubt I’ll ever come back to the subject, I thought the paper was useful in two respects. First, we should have no delusions that nuclear power was a result of free market economics. The technology, commercialization, and construction of nuclear…
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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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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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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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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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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…