Month: October 2010

Q&A With the Public Professor – 1.2 Reinhardt: The forces that led to the decline of American communities were complex, and the process took a long time to unfold.  For example, communities in the East were under

Q&A With the Public Professor – 1.1 Reinhardt: It’s no secret that over the last 15-20 years, political commentary in this country has become ever more partisan, but also increasingly vitriolic, manipulative, and at times downright nasty. And this applies to both sides of the political spectrum, whether you describe it as Liberal vs. Conservative, Left vs. Right, Democrat vs. Republican , or whatever labels you may care to use. On TV, radio, and the internet, commentators practically scream I’m a Historian, so perhaps it was natural that as I began to mull it over, I soon began thinking about how social issues, both large and small, used to get decided back in “the old days,” and what is different about that decision making process now? And that in turn led me to a whole mess of questions about how society is structured, how those structures worked in the past, and how they have changed over time. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that what was different now as opposed to centuries past, is that there are no more communities where such issues would get decided and enforced for and by the local population.