Jim Cullen: For me the most compelling questions in terms of improving historical literacy turn less on what we want students to know—I have no serious disagreement with what I see here—than how we can help them know it.
Review of Dave Eggers’s “Zeitoun”
By
Jim Cullen: Zeitoun is revealing less in what it shows about those awful days in August and September of 2005 than as a lightning-illuminated snapshot of the ongoing decay of an egalitarian American democracy.
Rule of Empires: Who Built & Endured Them, and Why They Fail — Review
By
Jim Cullen: Parsons’s most important contribution to a discourse of empire: his attention to the issue of assimilation-which runs between conquering and subjecting.
Richard Schickel’s Clint: A Retrospective
By
Jim Cullen: Clint Eastwood is, finally, an inspiring figure in his demonstration of the value of hard work for its own sake, and the hope, whether realized or not, that it might also have value for others.
Lone Star: Discovering the Music of Sam Baker
By
Jim Cullen: Baker, a writer in the tradition of John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, and Steve Earle, has extraordinary gifts as a storyteller. He’s one of these people who can narrate a life in three minutes.
It’s Morning in Reagan Studies
By
The argument of The Reagan Revolution belies its title: according to Troy, there was no Reagan revolution. This is not to say Reagan was an inconsequential president: Troy portrays him as a man who changed the nation’s political climate even if he never changed its topography.
Beyond Diversity: The Cosmopolitan Dilemma
By
There is, of course, an enormous difference between diversity as an idea and diversity as a reality. Moreover, many of those who profess to support the ideal harbor doubts and hostility toward it, doubts and hostility that typically focus less on attacking diversity itself than what it is interpreted to mean
Bruno’s American Dream
By
If Bruno teaches us anything, it’s the imperative of finding a source of friction in something, or someone, other than ourselves — not instead of ourselves, which is another form of totalitarianism — with which to get a life that does not finally rely on the admiring attention of others.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Recent Comments