JEFF PASLEY'S HISTORICAL PUNDITRY PAGE


Who is Jeff Pasley?

A Book No Home Should Be Without

Your pundit during his days with the movement
Articles on Other Web Sites
 


 a column for Common-Place,
 "The Interactive Journal of
 Early American Life"
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February 2008:  Publick Occurrences 2.0  debuts -- the column becomes what it always wanted to be, a blog. 

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January 2006: "The Kingness of Mad George," on the very deep roots of the current debate over presidential power

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THE RETURN! April 2005: "History Made Me a Liberal," or how social history comps reading changed my mind about Social Security.

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August  2002: "The Sandbox of Iwo Jima," on Lynne Cheney's America: A Patriotic Primer.

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February 2002: "Federalist Chic," on the sudden popularity of John Adams and other conservative Founders in the wake of David McCullough's book. 

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October 2001: "And Now for Something Completely Similar," expressing doubts about the newness of the war on terrorism. 

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September 2001: "E-Abolitionists", on iAbolish.org and the new anti-slavery movement.

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April 2001: "Losing One to the Gipper,"  on the drive to kick Alexander Hamilton off the ten dollar bill, seen in the context of the intellectual genealogy of American conservatism. Click here for a brief addendum to the piece.
 
bullet"Jefferson Am-Bushed in Austin: The Difference between Jefferson and Bush's Electoral College Victories," TomPaine.com, December 19, 2000. Reprinted in Columbia Daily Tribune, Harrisburg Patriot-News, and other newspapers. Subject: Jefferson analogy and quotation used in George W. Bush’s "acceptance" speech in Austin, 13 December 2000.
bullet"SHOWING THE SCARS: Presidential Illness and the Press over the Centuries" -- piece commissioned but never published by a suddenly "reorganized"  and now defunct media magazine. The "news peg" was Prince Regent Cheney's most recent (as of March 2001) hospital stay . 
bullet"Conspiracy Theory and American Exceptionalism from the Revolution to Roswell" -- an unpublished conference paper from May 2000, bursting with relevance for contemporary politics and culture.
 

 
WHY THIS PAGE EXISTS
Having given up on present-day politics and journalism years ago in favor of academia, I rediscovered my "inner pundit" (as my wife says) last fall. This was not so much because of the events themselves (though they were certainly a factor), as out of disgust with the inch-deep historical insights purveyed by most of the journalists, card-carrying "presidential historians," and ex-political consultants we had to see on TV every night. For most of  these people, the 1930s are a trip into the mists of time, while Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton might as well have been colleagues of King Arthur. As someone who both knows early American history and could once deliver a political jab or two, I decided that I might try  to occasionally supply some of the historical perspective that conventional pundits seem to have forgotten while rushing between television studios. This page contains links to some of my efforts. -- Jeff Pasley, May 2001
Back to "The Early American Republic Plugged-In" (Jeff's home page)