Daniel Little
There hasn't been much historical scholarship on the forms of political activism that existed within the Chinese-American communities in the US in the early part of the twentieth century. Historical research on the Chinese-American community has more often focused on poverty, discrimination, employment, immigration law, and racism. A very important exception to this is the …
Continue reading "The Chinese-American Left in the early 20th century"
What is the role of the intellectual in France in 2010? And has that role declined in the past several decades? Have the media and the internet profoundly eroded or devalued the voice of the intellectual in public space? The Nouvel Observateur takes up these questions in a recent issue devoted to "Le pouvoir intellectuel" …
Continue reading "Public intellectuals in France and the US"
When does a society need a process of "truth and reconciliation" along the lines of such processes in South Africa, El Salvador, and Argentina? Here are some recent examples of truth and reconciliation processes: the fate of the "disappeared" in Argentina (link); Indian Residential Schools in Canada (link); Korean War civilian casualties (link); Liberian civil conflict (link); …
Is there a place within the social sciences for the representation of concrete, individual-level experience? Is there a valid kind of knowledge expressed by the descriptions provided by an observant resident of a specific city or an experienced traveler in the American South in the 1940s? Or does social knowledge need to take the form …
Clifford Geertz was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and he succeeded remarkably well in bridging the gap between the university and the public in many of his "postings." (I think of these contributions as a pre-web version of a blog.) Many of these contributions are collected in a superb recent …
Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Katz did an important empirical study of regional adjustment to employment shock in 1992 (link). Here is their central conclusion: "We have shown that most of the adjustment of states to shocks is through movements of labor, rather than through job creation or job migration." (54) In other words, they find …
Here are four interesting graphics representing different kinds of activity in the United States. The top panel represents population concentrations across the United State. The second image is air traffic across the country, and the third image is internet traffic across the country. The final image is a photograph of the United States from space …
Earlier posts have raised the possibility that Michigan's jobs crisis will lead to significant population loss (link, link, link). The basic idea is this: Michigan has lost more than 800,000 jobs since 2002. Its population in 2002 was about 10 million. The current unemployment rate in the state is about 15%, or just under. In …
What was Karl Marx's enduring contribution to the social sciences? Does he deserve the status of being one of the founders of sociology, along with Durkheim and Weber? Did he put forward substantive hypotheses about the workings of the modern world that continue to illuminate our social world? Is there anything important for sociologists, political …
What is involved in "making society better"? What do we have in mind when we aspire to improving society? I suppose there are several things we might mean by this idea. Superficially we might say that a society is better off when its members are better off; but is there more to the story? There …
Understanding Society 