Martin Meenagh blog

  The Civil War: Coverage and Coherence  These lecture notes have been cross-posted to my wix account.    I: The nature of History   If we begin at the beginning of things, history the writing and pursuit of history itself is the obvious starting point. By History, I mean to convey the nexus of professional, non-academic, personal, oral, social, and archaeological evidence and dispute which constitutes our understanding of the past. As a proven lawyer, I should also note that by evidence I mean the testimonial, circumstantial, forensic, and expert interpretation of the accretion of events. Counterfactual and inductive histories, which proceed from what didn’t happen, and from analogy and the perception of the observer as to what they think happened, aren’t really history, though they can be fun, and I feel duty bound to exclude them.   History is often called the Queen on the Arts. This idea, which emerged in the setting of the English traditi...

  Harry Truman became president in unusual, but not unprecedented, circumstances. Truman succeeded upon the death of a popular president who had recently been re-elected, in the midst of a global war in which the United States was approaching victory. At a basic level, he did not undermine the legacy his predecessor had worked towards, as Andrew Johnson had done, and nor did he preside over a dangerous post-war economy recklessly, as Calvin Coolidge had. He did not fire or remove the cabinet and advisors assembled by his predecessor—as Tyler did—and, unlike Lyndon Johnson, he did not deceptively escalate a major Asian war. He also won re-election in his own right, unlike Presidents Tyler, Fillmore, Johnson, and Arthur, who had risen from the vice-presidency to the presidency after presidential death. In this basic analysis, Truman was a somewhat successful president. Political historians and analysts may employ such a feral metric to assess Truman, but there are other outstandi...

    The Constitution of the United States is a document with seven articles and twenty-seven amendments at the time of writing in 2020. It does not represent a codified body of law, but nor is it the changeable Act of a sovereign parliament, as British constitutional documents are. Instead, the Constitution creates a flexible system of checks and balances which lay out the ‘ground rules’ for the institution, allocation and limitation of government power at the federal level. In itself, it makes any sort of positive governance difficult to begin beyond the core functions of foreign policy and defence, but once capacities and elaborations have been added, they have proven very difficult to reform. It is certainly the case that the original document, ratified in 1788 was both a response to the perceived weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation which preceded it, and a document which was less idealistic and more informed by Hobbesian and tough-minded ideas of power and capa...