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 Hotter. I need it to be hotter. I'm sitting in the backyard of my sister's carriage house apartment in Orange, California, a circle of jolly boutique and micro brew quaintness amid the sprawling shit hole that is Orange Country. Of course nowadays, most any place in America afflicted by people is a…
by Akim Reinhardt David Bowie was a white Englishman. Prince was a black American. Bowie was deeply rooted in the riffs, major/minor chords, and melody of rock-n-roll. Prince was grounded in the syncopated rhythms and arrangements of funk and R&B. Prince's and Bowie's careers did overlap to a degree. Their biggest selling albums, Bowie's Let's…
by Akim Reinhardt You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. For example, some people will always believe that Abraham Lincoln first uttered this famous aphorism, even though there is no record of him ever…
by Akim Reinhardt I wrote my first poem when I was 11 years old. Simple quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme, it was a meditation on the 6th grade coming to an end. I enjoyed the work of writing it and was proud of the finished product. Up until that point, whenever an adult had…
by Akim Reinhardt Progressives, moderates, and even many conservatives are aghast at Donald Trump's populist appeal. As this cantankerous oaf flashes ever brighter in the political pan, they fret that his demagoguery might land him the Republican presidential nomination, and perhaps even carry him all the to White House. I'm not worried about the prospect…
by Akim Reinhardt I sat on a friend's living room couch, waiting for her to emerge from her bedroom contraptions. I had arrived at the time and date requested. However, my initial visit to her room had been cut short amid the beeps and whirring of machinery. After some brief exchanges, she began to raise…
by Akim Reinhardt In the 150 years since the end of the U.S. Civil War, the Republicans and Democrats have maintained a relentless stranglehold on every level of American politics nearly everywhere at all times. While a handful of upstart third parties and independent candidates have periodically made waves, none has ever come close to…
by Akim Reinhardt Last month, my second academic book was published by the University of Nebraska Press. It is entitled Welcome to the Oglala Nation: A Documentary Reader in Oglala Lakota Political History. The publisher's website for the book is here. The book reconsiders the history of the Oglala Lakota people, the largest branch of…
by Akim Reinhardt There's a new meme infecting the internet. The Syrian refugee crisis is the worst refugee crisis since World War II. It's all over the place. Just google the words “worst refugee crisis.” Don't even put “Syria” or “WWII” in the search bar. What follows is a string of mainstream media articles labeling…
by Akim Reinhardt I've lost track already. During the past month, too many people to keep count of, each with a look of bemused panic in their eye, has asked me if I think Donald Trump has a chance. Knocked back on their heels by the frenzy surrounding Trump's recent surge, they implore me to…
by Akim Reinhardt To be born in America in 1967 is, to some degree, to fall through the cracks. The Baby Boom was most certainly over by then, its most senior elements old enough to vote and drink. But the Millennials, now the focus of every drooling advertising executive and marketing guru, were naught but…
by Akim Reinhardt As has been widely reported, May was an exceptionally violent month here in Baltimore. The city has witnessed dozens shootings and 38 murders. That is the most murders in any one month since 1996. Such a spate of violence is certainly worth reporting, and the national media has been quick to pick…
by Akim Reinhardt Last Wednesday, over at my website, I published an essay on the riot that took place in Baltimore, a city where I've lived since 2001. Sincere thanks to 3QD for re-posting it here. That essay primarily focused on the riot itself, not the protests that followed or the de facto police state…
by Akim Reinhardt “It's all part of God's plan.” That's bad enough. But I go a little nuts whenever someone says: “Everything happens for a reason.” After all, if you actually believe that we're all just mortal puppets dancing on a divine string, then there's really no point in us having an adult conversation about…
by Akim Reinhardt Last month I offered about 2,000 words on the meaninglessness of life. “Life is meaningless,” I said. “Nothing matters, nothing at all.” I suggested that “meaning and truth are just illusions that humans chatter about incessantly because they can't stomach the sheer meaninglessness of it all.” Indeed, your birth was an act…
by Akim Reinhardt I was gonna write something about the Clint Eastwood film American Sniper. Seems like a topic of the Now. Something the internetting public can really grab onto and scream about. Clint Eastwood: Sentimental warmonger, or artist of more nuance than leftists and pacifists can discern? U.S. sniper Chris Kyle: Troubled war veteran…
by Akim Reinhardt I think I'm supposed to call it a ship. I get confused about these things. All I know for sure is that we're headed south. I used to be tough when it came to winter. Not like strap-on-some-snow-shoes-and-hunt-a-walrus-with-a-harpoon tough, but tough enough that a five month season in Nebraska or Michigan didn't…
by Akim Reinhardt I still remember the first time I heard it. It was back in the late ‘90s, when I had cable. There was this openly gay guy, bald, a little overweight, a beard I think. He had some design show about sprucing up your house. There weren't a lot of openly gay men…
by Akim Reinhardt I've made some deep runs in my time. I once drove non-stop from central Wyoming to eastern Iowa before passing out at a highway rest stop for a couple of hours, waking up with a scrambled brain, driving the short distance to Illinois, then staring with confusion and regret at the chili…
by Akim Reinhardt Part I of this essay appeared last month. Thus continues my grand voyage, in which a rusty ‘98 Honda Accord shuttles me from one end of North America to the other and back again . . . After stumbling half-way across the continent, I settled into the northern Great Plains for a…