Given the current state of American politics – a partisan polarized electorate, dysfunctional government and civic unrest – it’s time to plumb just where we are as a people and nation at this time. To this point our courts and elected officials have done little to help resolve the impasse where we find ourselves. Eschewing…

On November 1st and 2nd Mexicans celebrate friends and relatives who have died. With typical pageantry they decorate their homes and graves with altars or ofrendas where they provide favorite foods and drinks for the departed, make masks with the names of the deceased and offer poems and light-hearted epitaphs in festive gatherings. As a…

Recently I have been reading a truly seminal book, one correctly praised by historians as being “awesome,” “masterful,” and a “once-in-a-generation” history of the United States and Latin America. In a sweeping narrative Greg Grandin tells the story of the United States and Latin America from the Conquest to virtually the present. America, America: A…

Not a day goes by, sometimes not many hours, before the Trump administration commits yet another atrocity against an alleged foreign adversary or against its own American people. We appear to be headed inexorably toward our own destruction without a clue of what awaits us. As citizens of a nation heralded for its unprecedented wealth…

Friends often ask me why people don’t see the threats coming from the White House. It’s as plain as the noses on our faces, blatant and incessant, they say. What can be wrong with Americans that they don’t stand up and quit supporting Trump and his MAGA lieutenants? What’s the matter with the Republicans? Why…

This morning as I sat in the doctor’s waiting room, I looked around at my fellow patients and wondered who these people were. They looked old, worn out, and a lot like the old people I knew growing up, a generation I frequently dismissed as a “bunch of old guys” with whom I had little…

I spent thirty years teaching history in colleges and universities and am hard pressed to recall one instructor or assistant professor who would have signed the “compact” for higher education offered by the Trump administration. Oh, there might have been one or two driven by politics or their contrarian nature, but most junior faculty would…

All of us, regardless of political affiliations or sentiments – whether Democrat, Republican or independent – should take a long hard look at the state of our politics. We must temporarily ditch our political beliefs and personal thoughts about single issues to take stock of what is happening in the United States today. We must…

Many of us – those who are politically concerned, at least – are at a loss to know what to do to correct the nation’s rush to dismantle democracy in favor of authoritarianism. To call what’s happening fascism is no longer speculative but an empirical truth. The United States is becoming a fascist state. And…

The recent tragedy of the Kirk killing has put a spotlight on right wing efforts to break down the separation of church and state so that *Christian nationalism and MAGA politics merge to become the ruling party in the United States. If successful, it means a return to the Middle Ages where church and state…