Cato on Campus - History: American History

Banished: 'The Forsaken' by Tim Tzouliadis

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:49:00 EDT

Reviewed by Richard Pipes: "Most of these expatriates, not intellectuals but simple working men, were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag."

Crying Wolf: Are we all fascists now?

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:46:00 EDT

By Michael C. Moynihan: "To anyone that has attended a political demonstration, trawled a blog, or attended a Western university in the past half century, the scattershot use of 'fascist' will ring familiar. And almost as clich�d as accusing an ideological opponent of fascist sympathies is the accurate observation that such charges often demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of just what qualifies as fascist, other than 'someone I vehemently disagree with.'"

The Klein Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Polemics

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:49:00 EDT

By Johan Norberg: "To make her case, Klein exaggerates the free-market reforms that take place in times of crisis, often by ignoring central events and rewriting chronologies. She uses loose metaphors and wild distortions to claim that free markets are a form of violence. She confuses libertarianism with corporatism and neoconservatism and blames Milton Friedman for encouraging reform by stealth. To do so, she engages in one of the most malevolent distortions of a thinker that has been done in a major work in recent years."

Narcissists With Nukes

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:46:00 EDT

By Shawn Macomber: "Should Cato Institute Senior Editor Gene Healy's wonderfully informative, perception shifting examination of the wayward American executive, The Cult of the Presidency, receive the attention it so richly deserves, however, it may serve as a perfect literary tonic for our historical and cultural amnesia. Perhaps Healy, armed with a persuasive, good-natured outrage, will even inspire some among us toward a more narrow definition of presidential virtuousness and, by extension, broaden the conception of our own."

Bernstein on the History of Trade

Thu, 01 May 2008 09:18:00 EDT

"William Bernstein talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the history of trade. Drawing on the insights from his recent book, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, Bernstein talks about the magic of spices, how trade in sugar explain why Jews ended up in Manhattan, the real political economy of the Boston Tea Party and the demise of the Corn Laws in England."

Inventing Alexander Hamilton: The troubling embrace of the founder of American finance

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:30:00 EST

By William Hogeland: "Now, a Hamilton revival is not only under way but an accomplished fact. Wrestling anew with Hamilton�s contributions to national politics and economics could be both fascinating and worthwhile. But Neo-Hamiltonians, like the latter-day Jeffersonians of the �30s and �40s, have been eagerly chopping up the past to make it conform to their political aims."

What FDR Had In Common With the Other Charismatic Collectivists of the 30s

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:42:00 EDT

By David Boaz: "When economic crisis hit � in Italy and Germany after World War I, in the United States with the Great Depression � the anti-liberals seized the opportunity, arguing that the market had failed and that the time for bold experimentation had arrived."

Alexis de Tocqueville

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 10:25:00 EDT

A site about the life and work of Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the great modern political thinkers and an inspiration to classical liberals ever since. This site gives detailed biographical information as well as images and text in English and in French.

'Knowing' Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840 � 1864

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EDT

Experience shows that Common Law and Private Property Rights can be an alternative to top-down regulation on air pollution. In this essay, Christine Meisner Rosen examines nuisance law "from the perspective of an environmental historian who is interested in how people made sense of industrial pollution problems in the past."

The Common Law: How it protects the environment

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EDT

"The purpose of this PERC Policy Series paper is to show, by examining specific cases in American and English history, that strong legal traditions enabled ordinary citizens to protect their air, land, and water, often against politically potent parties."