Word by word, eh? Figures it would get down to that.

I'm home, letting the antibiotics do their work.... I don't have the desire to push through this week: I'll run through the Cold War next week, and scrunch the post-Cold-war stuff down, but it'll all get done eventually.

The worst of it? Checking today, I see that the ones I worked on last week are doing worse than the ones I didn't have time to mess with. Now I'm at a complete loss for what to do next. (But I'm leaning toward spending the day reading books online.)

How are you? Are you going to share the Cold War stuff with us?

For the Cold War stuff, you start with the chronology and list of proxy wars. I point out that I don't like the term "the Cold War" because it wasn't just one event ("the"), because there was an awful lot of shooting going on (i.e., not "Cold" except between the principals), and that what went on between the US and USSR was more like a propaganda and diplomatic exercise, and a lot of preparation for war, and fear about war, but not actually war. So basically I spend the first half of the class pointing out what's wrong with the whole term before I begin working on the chronology: the early stalemates; the middle-period crises (Cuban Missile, Sino-Soviet split) the later Detente and RealPolitik. That's as far as I got, really: Monday I'll have to fold my discussion of the end of the Cold War with the discussion of globalization, which works fine for me.

I'm not surprised that you had a little trouble with the campaigns this week: You're working through a whole new way of analyzing the data and implementing it. It'll take time to make it work.

Okay, I really liked the timeline. (I love a timeline.)

Why do I think of the Yalta Conference (the source of so many of the world's recent problems) as being so--distant, I guess, from other events? Intellectually I know it took place at the end of WWII, but somehow, in my tiny mind, it's always a decade or more before that....

P.S. Somehow I missed that Reagan article when you first posted it.

That's a shame. Even though you were writing from a "non-partisan" standpoint, my little, liberal heart would have loved to join the discussion to point out the significant role played by multinational corporations. Their influence in Reagan's Administration was, IMO, a major factor--certainly I don't think the "consumerization" of the US citizen would have happened quite so quickly without their enthusiastic pressure toward that end.

Of course, in Anne's World, Reagan was the font of all evil, so possibly I'm a bit biased. :D

I'm not disagreeing with you about Reagan and the '80s, mind you, but this was an attempt to put him in global perspective, instead of just the usual "He won the cold war" crap. You're right, though: At some point, we're going to have to rewrite the entire history of the 20th century -- and a good chunk of the late 19th as well -- to integrate robber baron and multinationals as political, cultural and social actors (as well as economic ones, obviously, which is still kind of understudied).

The Yalta thing is kind of the same problem that I was highlighting in the Reagan essay: it's one of those events that bridges the normal chronological divides. It's a Cold War landmark that happens before the Cold War (though I tell my students that the Cold War really started in 1917); it's a WWII meeting that isn't that important in the history of WWII itself (not like Potsdam, for example).

I could even take exception to the usual "he won the cold war" theme.

I could go either way (arguing Yalta as the defining moment, in one scenario), but mostly I do agree that the seeds of the Cold War were sown in WWI.

And, yes, I look forward to the time when we do revise the current, oversimplistic story of the second half of the 20th c.

In fact, I'd enjoy seeing a review of the role of the corporation in this country since the time when companies were declared "persons" - and some insight on how that decision might have influenced the role of corporations in other economies. (Possibly I'm assuming an effect that doesn't exist.) While I understand the reasons behind that particular Supreme Court decision, I'm not sure I would have agreed, even at the time, and certainly with the benefit of hindsight, I'm prepared to say that it was a mistake.

Although (working on my "he was the AntiChrist" scenario), I'm also willing to argue that it took Reagan and his criminal cohorts to take that next step--to decide that the "corporate person" was of higher value to the country than human persons were.

Sorry to go on and on--as always, I'm short on facts, but long on opinions. :)

P.S. On your list of "proxy wars" - the Greek Civil War?

Embarrassed, I have to admit I'm at a loss. Is there an online site where I can read some details about that one?

There's an excessively detailed history of it here. The critical thing to remember about it, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's the conflict which inspired the Truman Doctrine of intervention to support non-Communist regimes under threat of internal unrest.

I didn't call the "Reagan won the Cold War" theme "crap" because I'm bored of it: I called it crap because it's historically wrong. Reagan's approach to the USSR played well into Gorbachev's hands giving him the opportunity he needed to get perestroika underway. Unfortunately, perestroika was expensive, and glasnost gave everyone a chance to discuss how unsuccessful the Soviet experiment had been, and the combination was too much.

There actually is a book on my shelf at work called "The Corporation" which does exactly what you're looking for (I think). I'll try to remember to get the full reference at work tomorrow. I may have to mention it in class first, though.

Let me know if "The Corporation" looks like the right thing once you've looked at it.

I'm off to read the info at the link now, thanks!

Actually, it's The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, and I was rather disappointed. These guys are journalists, writing for that bastion of Thatcherism, The Economist, and it shows. Interestingly, the focus is on the American company -- the material on Britain is great, but the other "international" sections are perfunctory -- but that makes a certain amount of sense. The managerialist triumphalism alone was enough to make me want to fling the book, and the highly selective use of evidence was, to an historian's eye, unconscionable. Their sense of historical context stinks: technology, in particular, gets very short shrift when it actually could be used to explain a great deal about the transitions they're chronicling, and they keep talking about politics but never really deal with imperialism. They way they cite Chinese and Russian corporate innovation as part and parcel of the late-20th century corporate history without ever mentioning Communism is a neat trick, the meaning of which I haven't quite yet puzzled out.

That said, given that it's really a potted history by a bunch of journalists with an ax to grind (and nowhere does the grindstone ring louder than the last chapters on multinationals [misunderstood forces for good] and the future of the corporation [if only we were more open-minded about them, we'd all get along fine]) there's a great deal of information here, presented in a very readable form. It took me about three hours to get through 200 pages, and I didn't start to hate it deeply until the last third. I actually considered using it as a class text briefly; now I wonder if, somewhere in their bibliography, might be something suitable.

Okay, it's disappointing that your book was so deeply biased but if the target audience was Economist subscribers, it's not surprising.

I'm looking for more objective coverage. :) Journalists are all very well and I don't doubt there are some who are capable of writing an honest story, but what I was thinking of was something that illustrated the spreading tentacles of corporations. Moral judgments (which I'm fully capable of providing myself) aside, you know? I'll have to start poking around.

I'm thinking--my favorite used bookstore might be a good place to start. Reading the conscious and unconscious assumptions and "truths" of twenty or thirty years ago and contrasting them with what we know know, with the benefit of hindsight--I generally find that very informative.

I think I was conflating the book on my shelf with "The Corporation", which I know I read reviews of in Z and elsewhere.

There's a pretty substantial literature on multinationals -- I don't know how much of it's from a middle ground between leftist critiques and Economist defenses, but there could be some -- and increasingly some literature on specific corporate histories. I still think The Company could do you some good -- it's a quick read, like I said -- and the bibliographic pages have some good stuff, at least, might give you some leads. I wouldn't spend money on it, mind you, but if you see it at the used bookstore or library, you might want to take a look.