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
by Akim Reinhardt Satire seems all but dead for now. Maybe it’s because the world became increasingly ludicrous, culminating with a real-life president as ridiculous as any satire Jonathan Swift or Dorothy Parker could dream up. Donald Trump’s bizarre presidency may have been the peak of absurdity (fingers crossed), but it had been building for…
by Akim Reinhardt I can’t sing. Or so I always thought. A notorious karaoke warbler, I would sometimes pick a country tune, preferably Hank Williams, so that when my voice cracked, I could pretend I was yodeling. Then one night, I stepped up to the bar’s microphone and sang a Gordon Lightfoot song. I wasn’t…
by Akim Reinhardt I first heard “The Blundering Generation” in the 1990s when I was taking a course on Civil War history. As my professor explained, the early 20th century saw a new cohort of historians who no longer personally remembered the war and debated anew the nature of its origins. They were trying to…
by Akim Reinhardt Last week marked the 20th anniversary to the start of America’s recently concluded second Gulf War. It’s also been nearly 33 years since the much shorter first Gulf War, a.k.a. Desert Storm (1990–91). Unlike the “great” wars, these haven’t merited Roman numerals. My own Roman numerals now begin with an L. I…
by Akim Reinhardt and GPTChatbot A couple months back, I wrote an open letter to fellow professors. Don’t panic, I said. Yes, new crops of student plagiarism bound are sprout in the fertile fields of free, online AI software. But it’ll be alright. Here’s how to adjust. Then it occurred to me: Why should students…
by Akim Reinhardt There is a building on the Towson University campus called Van Bokkelen Hall. In that building, one of the rooms has recently been renamed for Richard E. Vatz. I don’t know who Van Bokkelen was (I should probably look into that), but I can tell you who Vatz is. Professor Richard E.…
by Akim Reinhardt The ChatGPT Bot has changed everything! That’s the basic vibe I’m getting from frantic press reports, early return think pieces, and even public-facing academicians. Specifically, this new, free AI software, only a few weeks old and still improving, is already churning out high school-quality essays on just about any subject a teacher…
by Akim Reinhardt It’s not so much that I’m like my father. Rather, I sometimes feel as I understood him to be. My mother? Not so much. Part of it might have to do with sex. My father was a man. I’m a man. But I can’t really feel like a woman. I can feel…
by Akim Reinhardt I like to vote in person on Election Day. I’m sentimental that way. My polling precinct is at the local elementary school. So last Tuesday, I woke up early, dressed and got out the door in a rush, and arrived to find not the expected pastiche of cardboard candidate signs and nagging…
by Akim Reinhardt Come die with me. I don’t literally mean die. Or with me. Or want. Do you ____ to ___ with another person/persons or by yourself? Are there any verbs you’d like to cast about as you sit alone beneath a budding tree, or amid the carnage of rampaging armies? I’m just asking.…
by Akim Reinhardt I have lived my entire life, all 54 years of it, in the United States. Not once have I ever met anyone who cares about the British monarchy. I mean really cares, beyond the fleeting and shallow passions of celebrity gossip, and even that has been rare. This is not to say…
by Akim Reinhardt The perfect, so the saying goes, is the enemy of the good. Don’t deny yourself real progress by refusing to compromise. Be realistic. Pragmatic. Patient. Don’t waste resources and energy on lofty but ultimately unobtainable goals, no matter how noble they might be; that will only lead to frustration, and worse, hold…
by Akim Reinhardt and Jennifer Ballengee First Discussant: For anti-abortion extremists, abortion is a fetish. It’s a symptom that covers a repressed, secret, and socially unacceptable desire. What desire? I’m not sure; it’s their fetish, not mine. But whatever it may be, it drives anti-abortion protestors to scream about saving lives, to hold up posters…
by Akim Reinhardt Dreams are about questions. Every dream sprouts up as an innocent question in the early morning haze. Maturing in bright sunlight, it opens up, like the petals on a flower, with vibrant new questions unfolding from the original. Then, after achieving its fulsome bloom, the dream begins to sag. No longer birthing…
by Akim Reinhardt Not 7,500 miles this time. Nor a mad dash from one coast to another. Rather, a wiry triangle: the first leg from Baltimore to New Orleans; the second, up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to South Dakota; the hypotenuse, back to Maryland. Abingdon, VA. I’m vaxed and boosted, but a bout of…
by Akim Reinhardt Death was already about me. I’d recently written two death songs. Not mournful, but peaceful and welcoming. No reason. They just seeped out of me. Then came the Covid infection. It must’ve found me in upstate New York while vacationing with friends. At first, I assumed it was just those damned seasonal…
by Akim Reinhardt Is the Past Prolog? I’m not convinced. I say this as a professional historian. The main problem, of course, is that there are many pasts. They are defined by temporality, by subjectivity, and by the limits of knowledge. The past is ten seconds ago. Ten minutes, ten days, ten weeks, ten years,…
by Akim Reinhardt The United States has always faced a fundamental tension. On one side are those who champion, enforce, and/or profit from hierarchies of power: white supremacist racism, sexist patriarchy, Christian fundamentalism, and capital concentrations chief among them. Arrayed against these hierarchies of power are people who promote and work for racial equality, gender…
by Akim Reinhardt Over the course of more than a decade, Michael Jackson transformed from a handsome young man with typical African American features into a ghostly apparition of a human being. Some of the changes were casual and common, such as straightening his hair. Others were the product of sophisticated surgical and medical procedures;…
by Akim Reinhardt Three things we know about #BLM, two obvious, one a bit more subtle. 1. Activists originally created the Black Lives Matter slogan to point out and push back against the generally unstated truth that in American society, black lives do NOT matter as much as white lives. That in America, black lives…