Tag Archives: Obama

What do we mean by “racist?”

The term gets used all the time. Ed Kilgore, at Talking Points Memo, says “you don’t have to be a racist to practice racism.” This makes zero sense to me. What is racism? How is it different from prejudice or bigotry? My answer is pretty simple: a racist is a person who believes in the […]

April 9, 2014 – 1:15 pm | By admin | Posted in History | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)

Greenbacks, Negro Soldiers, and the President

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, an excerpt from my book Face Value. During the Civil War, Lincoln’s opponents saw African Americans in uniform and Greenback dollars as the same thing: inflated. We can see the same phenomenon today. The Civil War wasn’t all that popular in the North. Despite a […]

March 6, 2012 – 12:17 pm | By admin | Posted in History, teaching | Tagged , , , | Comments (4)

The Gold Standard of Lunacy

The gold standard is coming back in a a big way. Not only do a number of recently elected congressman and Senators favor a return to the gold standard: the President of the World Bank recently initiated a conversation about returning to gold, and the New York Times recently ran an editorial by James Grant […]

November 16, 2010 – 6:18 pm | By admin | Posted in History, Money, Top Posts | Tagged , , , , | Comments (32)