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 As far as human experiences go, there's not much that tops doing something you love. But when doing it means you're not only indulging your personal creativity, but also sharing it with hundreds or thousands of other people who are appreciative, and you're contributing to something larger by helping to keep a…
by Akim Reinhardt Let me begin this essay by making one thing clear: I am opposed to capital punishment. I agree with pretty much all of the arguments against it. It's clearly not a deterrent. The possibility, much less the reality, that innocent people are sometimes executed is beyond inexcusable. A variety of factors have…
by Akim Reinhardt Let me begin with some personal disclosure. I am a half-Jewish American who has never been and has no personal connection to Israel. In the early 1960s before I was born, my mother, who has otherwise lived her entire life in The Bronx, spent two years on a northern Israeli kibbutz named…
by Akim Reinhardt In an early episdoe of Mad Men, a character named Ken Cosgrove publishes a short story in the Atlantic Monthly. It'sentitled: “Tapping a Maple on a Cold Vermont Morning.” That's just about pitch perfect for the American literary scene circa 1960. The coating of influential New England literati is so thick on…
by Akim Reinhardt American colleges have undergone substantial changes during the last three decades. Rising tuition costs, which have far outpaced the rate of inflation, are nearly universal. Other changes that have affected most schools include a tremendous growth in non-instructional areas and a serious re-shuffling of labor. Many schools have added layers of administration;…
by Akim Reinhardt It was 1996. I was 28. I had recently moved to Nebraska to attend graduate school. I was at a party. I didn't know a lot of people. Maybe I didn't know anyone. One woman was talking about palm reading. Apparently she read palms. Laughable, of course. But I didn't say anything,…
by Akim Reinhardt Black Pete. Good Lord, what a head shaker that is. Most anyone who's not Dutch looks at Black Pete and thinks to themselves: For real? You've got Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Santa Claus, working his Christmas season magic accompanied by an army of little Jumpin' Jim Crows? Diminutive, black face helpers…
by Akim Reinhardt In the recent Virginia gubernatorial election, Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis received over 6% the vote. If he had not run, much of his support would likely have gone to Republican Ken Cuccinelli rather than Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who won by a narrow 2.5% margin. Last year's U.S. Senate race in Montana also…
by Akim Reinhardt In part I of this essay, I offered a broad re-definition of the term “Dark Ages,” using it to describe any historical period when dogma becomes ascendant and flattens people's perceptions of humanity's very real complexities. From there, I discussed how the conventional Dark Ages, marked by religious dogma's domination medieval Europe,…
by Akim Reinhardt European Historians have long eschewed the term “Dark Ages.” Few of them still use it, and many of them shiver when they encounter it in popular culture. Scholars rightly point out that the term, popularly understood as connoting a time of death, ignorance, stasis, and low quality of life, is prejudiced and…
by Akim Reinhardt I. A Sneeze for All SeasonsII. God Bless YouIII. The Poetry of SneezingIV. Sneeze vs. Cough Sternuisso ergo sum. I sneeze, therefore I am. It defines me. It is at the core of my very existence. It is hell on Earth. I. A Sneeze for All Seasons Most people associate sneezing with…
by Akim Reinhardt I belong to a credit union. It's been fifteen years since I kept my money in a for-profit bank. Nearly one-third of Americans also belong to credit unions, and for most of us, the reason is obvious: for-profit banks suck. They nickle-and-dime you to death, looking for any excuse to charge fees.…
by Akim Reinhardt We should all probably be a lot smarter by now. The internet, more or less as we know it, has been around for about fifteen years. So if this magical storehouse of instantly accessible information were going to be our entrepôt to brilliance, we should all be twinkling like little stars. You…
by Akim Reinhardt Let me be clear from the start. This article is not about Ann Coulter's politics, which I find to be dogmatic, bigoted, and intellectually dishonest. I've already written about that elsewhere. Rather, politics aside, the goal here is to consider her humor and try to understand why it fails. To figure out…
by Akim Reinhardt The Ottoman Empire, which emerged during the beginning of the 14th century, reached its zenith some 250 years later under its 10th Sultan, Suleiman the Law Giver. By that point, the empire held sway over more than 2 million square miles spread across parts of three continents, from Hungary in the west…
by Akim Reinhardt On November 5, 2009, U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan opened fire on soldiers and civilians alike at the Fort Hood military base in Killeen, Texas. He killed thirteen people, including a pregnant woman, and wounded thirty-two more. Hasan is now awaiting a military trial that is scheduled to begin on April 16.…
by Akim Reinhardt Less than an hour apart, similar in size and population, and connected by I-95 and a tangled overgrowth of suburbs, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. are very much alike. The mid-Atlantic's kissin' cousins share everything from beautiful row home architecture to a painful history of Jim Crow segregation. But the wealthier parts of…
by Akim Reinhardt Earlier this week, the United States Post Office announced that come August, it would be suspending regular home delivery service of the mails on Saturdays, except for package service. The USPS is In financial straits, and the budget-cutting move will save about $2 Billion in its first year, putting a dent in…
by Akim Reinhardt To study American history is to chart the paradox of e pluribus unum. From the outset, it is a story of conflict and compromise, of disparate and increasingly antagonistic regions that somehow formed the wealthiest and most powerful empire in human history. For even as North and South grew further apart, their…
by Akim Reinhardt I have very fond memories from the 1990s of listening to a friend’s Gujarati Indian immigrant family butcher Christmas carols. It was an annual Christmas Eve tradition for these religious Hindus. Each year, with women on one side of the room and men on the other, the genders separated by the large,…