A Mixture Containing More Snares Than Rewards

~ Michael A. Innes

In 1994, the legal scholar John Phillip Reid published a somewhat cynical article on forensic history in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review.  It contains some real zingers on the intersection between law and history, how practitioners of each perpetrate mutually abusive disciplinary transgressions, and the meaning (and substance) of forensic history. Here are … Continue reading A Mixture Containing More Snares Than Rewards

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you

~ Michael A. Innes

Context is everything. As Maya Jasanoff, the Harvard historian, asks, in lyrical terms: "If a writer harbored bias, shall we never speak his name? Or when he wrote with insight, might we read him all the same?" The questions appear in her review in The New Republic, of Christopher Benfey's If:  The Untold Story of … Continue reading If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you

Of which the essence thereafter remains unexamined

~ Michael A. Innes

I've been digging into the use of Pearl Harbor analogies in America's response to the 9-11 attacks - and, because of a curious twist in the political landscape in 2001, I've been looking a little more closely at a well known study of the Pearl Harbor attack, Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford … Continue reading Of which the essence thereafter remains unexamined

An area, call it what you will, of safety

~ Michael A. Innes

Colleagues at Arab Digest have just published an interesting commentary on "Boundaries in the Arab world and their remarkable durability." It's not publicly available, but I do hope they'll release it as a sample for general readers. The piece, authored by Chatham House's Greg Shapland, ex of the Foreign Office, alludes to one of those … Continue reading An area, call it what you will, of safety