"Most ironically, being based in the hopelessly lost cultural void of Ann Arbor, a notorious mecca for the last surviving remnants of the pseudo-intellectual street people movement that said much and accomplished little..."

"I use the term “debate” in quotes because it is fraudulent. Even advocates of the viewpoint of the “godless Constitution” (such as historians Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore) fully understand the religious base of American history. They suggest simply (as Jon Stewart was trying to get at) that the framers rather deliberately excluded religion, not because they sought an exclusion of religion from the public square, but simply to avoid any special privileges for it at the federal level. Eventually, those views were incorporated into state laws through the 14th Amendment, through the pluralization of American life in the twentieth century, and through the epochal court cases of the 1940s through the 1970s.

The Christian Nation “debate” is not really an intellectual contest between legitimate contending viewpoints. Instead, it is a manufactured “controversy” akin to the global warming “debate.” On one side are purveyors of a rich and complex view of the past, including most historians who have written and debated fiercely about the founding era. The “other side” is a group of ideological entrepreneurs who have created an alternate intellectual universe based on a historical fundamentalism. In their drive to create a usable past, they show little respect for the past as a foreign country. "

"The positive lesson for the US is that we have a lot of scope to give employers incentives to cut hours rather than jobs, including improving and expanding "work-sharing" (part-time unemployment benefit) programs as well as implementing new direct tax credits to firms that expand paid time off (paid sick days, paid family leave, paid vacations, and other measures).

The negative lesson is that focusing on supply-side issues such as training, education, and improved job-matching for the unemployed --as much sense as they make in the long run-- is not likely to get us very far when the economy is at 9 percent unemployment. Denmark does far more than we could ever hope to accomplish along these lines and the unemployment there almost doubled between 2007 and 2010."

"… This was not because they doubted whether there was a moral imperative to pay one's debts. Rather, they were shocked to see the idea of bank credit, based as it was on getting something for nothing, vying for the moral high ground. Credit of this sort was a speculation. Allowing it to flourish was one thing; granting it not only legitimacy, but moral status was horrific. If people were taught to consider their relationship with their banker as analogous to their obligations toward family, community, and state, the multitudes would indeed have come to ruin."

"… The Panic of 1837 launched America's biggest and most consequential economic depression before the Civil War. And it was the decisions and behavior of thousands of actors like Bieller that created a perfect financial storm: bringing an end to one kind of capitalist boom; destroying the confidence of the slaveholding class, impoverishing millions of workers and farmers who were linked to the global economy; demolishing the already disrupted lives of hundreds of thousands of people like Harry and Roberson.…"

"Wealth is no proof of moral character; nor poverty of the want of it.

On the contrary, wealth is often the presumptive evidence of dishonesty; and poverty the negative evidence of innocence. If therefore property, whether little or much, be made a criterion, the means by which that property has been acquired ought to be made a criterion also."

"The effect of that “Yes, but…” is to make scholarly history complex and at the same time weaselly, uncertain and always whirling around to catch the interpretation sneaking up from behind.

The complexity that this creates is, of course, at odds both with the simplicity that Paul Krugman craved and that economics provided. It is at odds, as well, with the adversarial nature of the court room, in which opposing counsels must argue, without doubt or allowance for ambiguity, their side of the case. It is why Krugman was right to leave history behind, for that complex ambivalence is at the heart of the historical project. Staying with a subject whose central tenet he found repulsive would have been difficult, at best. It is why historians like Ambrose were wrong to testify for the tobacco companies, because their testimony came in service of an argument in which the essential equivocation was stripped away."

"Every technology fits, in its own unique way, into a far-flung network of different sites of social practice. Some technologies are employed in a specific site, and in those cases we often feel that we can warrant clear cause-and-effect stories about the transformations that have accompanied them, either in that site or others. Other technologies are so ubiquitous -- found contributing to the evolution of the activities and relationships of so many distinct sites of practice -- that we have no idea how to begin reckoning their effects upon society, assuming that such a global notion of "effects" even makes sense."