I have a new open-access article out in Global Studies Quarterly, “What’s at Stake in the Indigenous Empire Debate,” in which I argue against historian Pekka Hämäläinen’s claims that the Comanche and the Lakota constituted empires. Many others have provided reasons...
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) recently published results of a survey of historians on the best and worst foreign policy decisions in U.S. history. There are few surprises—wars in Vietnam...
I get emails. Sometimes they find me well; sometimes they try to convince me that I need to bring artificial intelligence (“AI”) into the classroom. “AI is going to revolutionize higher education!”...
Kenneth Waltz famously claimed that anarchy—i.e., the absence of a global sovereign—is the ordering principle of world politics, and much International Relations (IR) scholarship since then has...
Amid the annual deluge of end-of-year lists, I started to think about what readings generated the best classroom discussions I have overseen in the past calendar year. That list of readings is below, but I first need to provide some context. I teach seven courses per year—three each in Wartburg’s Fall and Winter Terms and one in our May Term. These include courses in Security Studies and American Politics as well as general education seminars (of which I occasionally teach two sections per term). My classes are relatively small—usually 10 to 15 students in Political Science classes and up to...
I wrote a chapter for a newly published edited volume, Teaching Political Science and International Relations for Early Career Instructors. The volume itself, capably edited by Michael P.A. Murphy and Misbah Hyder, is indeed concerned primarily with providing guidance for “Early Career Instructors” (ECIs) ranging from Ph.D. students to tenure-track faculty members. I was asked to write about mentorship for ECIs—given the challenges one faces in the classroom, how can mentors support ECIs? My chapter, “Teaching in Context,” argues against the idea that there is one “right” way to teach any...
In the recent Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop, Lachlan McNamee makes a rationalist argument—“colonization projects” are “characterized by a triangle of actors—settlers, indigenes, and the central state,” and for his purposes, we can “assume that all settler migration is voluntary and economically driven”. McNamee is not the only one with such a reading of colonial politics. Director, co-writer, and star Kevin Costner takes a similar view of the nineteenth-century American frontier in his recent film, Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter One. (Hereafter, Horizon....
Alongside research and teaching, most tenure-track jobs come with some expectation of service.
Even well-intentioned warnings of political violence in the United States potentially leading to civil war may inadvertently strengthen the very same actors who are intent on making civil war a reality.
Just like Al Qaeda in its heyday, armed accelerationists in America are strategic actors who take advantage of narrative ammunition that is handed to them.
A narrative perspective lends itself to pro-active approaches, not just appropriate restraint.
Just like any other medium, video games can serve pedagogical purposes.
Like millions of other people around the world, I have spent much of the past few weeks playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK), the nineteenth installment in Nintendo’s widely acclaimed series.
There is more continuity in the history of U.S. military basing policy than is typically assumed.