Daniel Little
I've spent the last several weeks designing a new honors course for juniors on the catastrophes of the twentieth century. It's not a "history" course, and it's not a philosophy course. Instead, I conceive of it as a learning experience for our honors students aimed at deepening one's capacity for coming to understand the past …
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The courageous Catherine Burks-Brooks passed in early July in Birmingham, Alabama, at the age of 83. The New York Times ran an extensive and moving obituary for her this weekend (link), and the piece is important reading in today's world of "forgetting" of our recent history of racist violence in the United States. Burks-Brooks and her fellow …
On any given day some 7,000 freight trains are in motion around the United States, with perhaps 70,000 individual freight cars and intermodal units in transit daily (link). (Here is the US DOT Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) website, which provides a fair amount of information about the industry.) Freight rail is big business, with record …
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Christopher Browning is a noted and respected historian of the Nazi period and the Holocaust (link). His October 2022 article in the Atlantic on "the politics of legality" during Hitler's march to power is an extremely serious warning to all of us who care about our democracy in the United States (link). It is a …
Continue reading "Trump, Hitler, and the politics of legality"
Diane Vaughan's recent Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk is an important contribution to the literature on safety in complex socio-technical systems. The book is an ethnographic study of the workspaces and the men and women who manage the flow of aircraft throughout US airspace. Her ethnographic work for this study was …
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A view shows a building of a restaurant heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in central Kramatorsk, Donetsk region, Ukraine June 27, 2023. Head of the Donetsk Regional Military-Civil Administration Pavlo Kyrylenko via Facebook/Handout via REUTERS The tragic death of Victoria Amelina in Kramatorsk, Ukraine on June 27 in …
The third meeting of the Asian Network for the Philosophy of Social Sciences (ANPOSS) took place in Bangkok last week (link). It was a highly stimulating success. Organizers Chaiyan Rajchagool, Kanit (Mitinunwong) Sirichan, Yukti Mukdawijitra, and others put enormous effort into carrying it off, and host institutions Thammasat University and Chulalongkorn University provided excellent coordination …
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photo: Hobsbawm at work The British historian Eric Hobsbawm was a leading member of the British Communist Party-affiliated Historians' Group. This was a group of leading British historians who were members of the British Communist Party in the 1940s. In 1978 Hobsbawm wrote a historical memoir of the group recalling the important post-war decade of …
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Aldon Morris's Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (1984) is a highly valuable treatment of the US civil rights movement of the 1950s through early 1960s. The book is a work of history and sociology, and it is deeply informed by the sociology of social movements. (It is significant that …
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The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., center, the first defendant called to trial in the racial bus boycott, held a press conference on March 19, 1956 on the steps of the Montgomery County courthouse where he and 92 others are on trial. They are charged with the violation of the anti-boycott law. King's wife, Coretta …
Continue reading "How “micro” does the sociology of social movements need to go?"
Understanding Society 