Akim Reinhardt is a professor of History at Towson University in Baltimore. Born and raised in the Bronx, he has also lived in Michigan, Nebraska, and Arizona. He is the author of several books with more in the hopper. Email: yankeeslim [at] gmail.com
Website: https://ThePublicProfessor.com
Sometimes I don’t stand during the national anthem at baseball games. I often do not remove my cap, and almost never place my hand over my heart. Why? Because deep down I believe that group-think is actually antithetical to freedom.
by Akim Reinhardt Mr. Sabatini? I think that was his name. It’s hard to remember. Maybe it was a plumb position awarded to him because he had buttered up the right school official. Maybe he was owed a favor by a union representative. But for whatever reason, he was not among us very often. There…
by Akim Reinhardt There is pervasive form of Americana that is a pubescent rite of passage for so many: car culture. But having been born and raised in the Bronx, I never acclimated it. I walked to P.S. 24. I walked to J.H.S. 141. I walked or took a city bus to John F. Kennedy…
As Americans deserted the countryside during and World War II, rural America began to sag. Since then, the trend has largely continued unabated down to the present day. Since 1990, over 700 rural counties have lost at least 10% of their population. Half of all rural counties in America now have more deaths than births each year.
by Akim Reinhardt I opposed the second Iraq War from the start. My stance was simple. I did not believe the reasons for war being served up by the hawks. There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the September 11th attack. And I was very skeptical about the claim that he…
by Akim Reinhardt During the 1990s, there was much hand-wringing in some quarters at the prospect of America’s beautiful mosaic fracturing into an unworkable, divided society. Doomsayers fretted that Americans were no longer identifying themselves as, well, Americans first and foremost. Critics claimed that identity politics were the culprit in this emerging crisis. That too…
by Akim Reinhardt It wasn’t so very long ago that some Americans held people as slaves, other human beings as their own private property, as if that person were a horse or a chair, to do with, to use, abuse, exploit, beat, and rape as they pleased. What’s more, until the late 1840s most Americans…
Every year it seems, the weeks at the end of the calendar designated as the “Christmas Season” expand further and further in the direction of the blessed sunny months. Like a plodding, methodical, remorseless, invading imperial army, moving inward slowly and ineluctably towards the capital, grinding up territory with terrifying banality, the “Christmas Season's” expansion…
On Thanksgiving Day, 1970, Indians took Plymouth back from the Pilgrims. It was the work of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which had been founded in 1968 by Dennis Banks and several other Anishinaabe men (more commonly known as “Ojibway” or “Chippewa”) living in Minneapolis. Banks and his partners originally formed AIM to help the…