Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 866 )

• Regulatory Failure in Freight Rail Traffic

  

  On any given day some 7,000 freight trains are in motion around the United States, with perhaps 70,000 individual freight cars and intermodal units in transit... Read more

  Posted on 22 July 2023 SOCIETY

• Trump, Hitler, and the Politics of Legality

  

  Christopher Browning is a noted and respected historian of the Nazi period and the Holocaust (link). His October 2022 article in the Atlantic on "the politics o... Read more

  Posted on 18 July 2023 SOCIETY

• The Air Traffic Control System and Ethno-cognition

  

  Diane Vaughan's recent Dead Reckoning: Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk is an important contribution to the literature on safety in complex... Read more

  Posted on 09 July 2023 SOCIETY

• Life and Memory in Lviv

  

  The tragic death of Victoria Amelina in Kramatorsk, Ukraine on June 27 in a Russian missile attack against civilian targets makes me think of her writings... Read more

  Posted on 08 July 2023 SOCIETY

• Asian Network for the Philosophy of Social Sciences

  

  The third meeting of the Asian Network for the Philosophy of Social Sciences (ANPOSS) took place in Bangkok last week (link). It was a highly stimulating... Read more

  Posted on 30 June 2023 SOCIETY

• Eric Hobsbawm's History of the Historians' Group

  

  photo: Hobsbawm at workThe British historian Eric Hobsbawm was a leading member of the British Communist Party-affiliated Historians' Group. Read more

  Posted on 11 June 2023 SOCIETY

• Aldon Morris on the Civil Rights Movement

  

  Aldon Morris's Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (1984) is a highly valuable treatment of the US civil rights... Read more

  Posted on 10 June 2023 SOCIETY

• How "micro" Does the Sociology of Social Movements Need to Go?

  

  Doug McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 is recognized as a leading sociological study of the US Civil Rights movement. Read more

  Posted on 08 June 2023 SOCIETY

• Touraine's Method of "sociological Intervention" Applied to Contentious Politics

  

  Alain Touraine has been one of the most prolific sociologists in France for at least six decades. Of particular interest to me is his study of the Solidarity... Read more

  Posted on 06 June 2023 SOCIETY

• Photographs from the Holocaust

  

  image: Warsaw Ghetto Memorial 1948 (detail)An earlier post analyzed Wendy Lower's stunningly original treatment of a single photograph of a 1941 mass killing... Read more

  Posted on 02 June 2023 SOCIETY

• Key Premises of Analytical Sociology

  

  Image: residential segregation by race, NYC 2010In Dissecting the Social Peter Hedström describes the analytical sociology approach in these terms: Although th... Read more

  Posted on 31 May 2023 SOCIETY

• Meso-foundational Explanations

  

  One of the catechismal ideas of analytical sociology is the microfoundations model of explanation: to explain a social fact we should provide an account of the... Read more

  Posted on 20 May 2023 SOCIETY

• New Thinking About How Authoritarian Rule Works

  

  image: Russian police arrest Moscow anti-war protesterThe risk to democracy in the United States is more serious than it has ever been (link, link, link). Read more

  Posted on 13 May 2023 SOCIETY

• Sources of Technology Failure

  

  A recurring theme in Understanding Society is the topic of technology failure -- air disasters, chemical plant explosions, deep drilling accidents. Read more

  Posted on 12 May 2023 SOCIETY

• Authoritarian Steps in Red State Legislatures

  

  Is it so hard to picture a United States that has succumbed to authoritarianism and the sacrifice of our basic democratic rights? Read more

  Posted on 05 May 2023 SOCIETY

• Analytical Sociology and Contentious Politics

  

  Analytical sociology is, as its proponents say, a meta-theory of how to conduct social research. In their contribution to Gianluca Manzo's Analytical... Read more

  Posted on 30 April 2023 SOCIETY

• Psychology of "comradeship" in Hitler's Armies

  

  What motivates violence, sacrifice, and atrocity among members of the military and other armed units in times of war and occupation? Read more

  Posted on 23 April 2023 SOCIETY

• Psychology of Morality

  

  Morality is a part of everyday life and personal experience. It is also, of course, the subject of a large field of philosophy -- philosophical ethics. What... Read more

  Posted on 21 April 2023 SOCIETY

• Social Science Study of the Holocaust

  

  image: "Mapping the SS Concentration Camps," Geographies of the Holocaust (Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds.)The complex realities of... Read more

  Posted on 13 April 2023 SOCIETY

• Origins of American Right-wing Extremism in the 1960s

  

  photo: Pat Buchanan, Newsweek, March 4, 1996The election of Donald Trump in 2016 presented mainstream America with a shocking wakeup: right-wing extremism,... Read more

  Posted on 11 April 2023 SOCIETY