Sublime

The year 2020 began with an impeachment trial, the third in American history. The president had used his official powers to extort a political favor from a foreign leader in order to help his own reelection. His guilt was clear—only the tribal loyalty of his party kept him in office. But before long hardly anyone remembered the impeachment. The yea

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It is well‐known that history is written by the victors, but in the era of government money, victors get to decide on the monetary systems, too. The United States summoned representatives of its allies to Bretton Woods in New Hampshire to discuss formulating a new global trading system. History has not been very kind to the architects of this syste

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The second Thirty Years’ War began with World War I. At the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles was supposed to be the peace to end all wars. To later historians, it has become known as the peace to end all peace. The agreements reached in Versailles were so cynical and destabilizing that Europe failed to recover its economic vitality, and

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High demand had hidden an underlying problem with the industrial plant. It had aged, and the reluctance to invest curtailed the availability of capital to renew the industrial base. Countries like Germany and Japan, defeated in World War II, had many newer factories and produced more efficiently than American factories. They entered the U.S. market

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The replacement of colonial rubber with synthetic rubber was a sort of magic. Yet it wasn’t the only rabbit that chemists yanked from their hats. What’s extraordinary is how many raw materials the United States weaned itself off during the war. Silk, hemp, jute, camphor, cotton, wool, pyrethrum, gutta-percha, tin, copper, tung oil—for one after ano

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Rubber—once the cause of war, colonization, and mass death—became a commodity that Washington could be cavalier about. In 1952 a blue-ribbon commission convened to assess U.S. raw material needs concluded that rubber shortages could no longer pose a serious threat to national security. Natural rubber, coming mainly from Indonesia, Thailand, and Mal

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World War II spurred a worldwide rebellion against empire. The revolt started in Asia but spread quickly to Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. In a shockingly short period of time, colonized peoples dismantled the world’s great empires. In 1940 nearly one out of every three individuals on the planet was colonized. By 1965, it was down to o

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Humanity has never faced anything like the combination of climate change, the rise of a vastly powerful industrialized China, and the “total collapse of the neoliberal paradigm,” he said. “It is a non-repeating pattern; it’s a one-way street into radical unhinging,” he continued. Tooze isn’t a pessimist, per se. “We aren’t on the point of World War... See more

The atomic bomb posed a moral dilemma. As with Grace Kelly’s character in High Noon, the Americans chose victory and survival over the moral absolute. America was designed by the founders as a moral undertaking. As such it was offended by what was necessary to the nation. The argument began at the founding. It was decided in the desolate places of

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