[woods]

Mine is doubtless considered an old-fashioned answer (by the way, I think this is more a question for the U.S. to 1877 course, since it’s an issue of constitutional interpretation), but I would say no. No one imagined that the First Amendment covered a local school board. It reads “Congress shall make no law….”

[woods]

It is difficult to find a historian who questions the orthodoxy. Gene Smiley’s book The American Economy in the Twentieth Century challenges it, but he is very much in the minority. You might look at Robert Higgs’s book Depression, War, and Cold War, and follow the footnotes to uncover the specific people he identifies (though he may be sparring more with economists than with historians). But seriously, the only problem you will have will be in finding historians who question the war prosperity.

[woods]

I haven’t ruled this out, but I don’t know of anyone who is both an expert on the subject as well as someone I would trust to teach it.

[woods]

The domino theory assumed that Communism was a monolith. It did not allow for intra-Communist squabbles, of which there have been many: the Soviet Union and China, the Soviet Union and Tito’s Yugoslavia, Vietnam and Cambodia, etc.

Secondly, what is it about Communism that should make us think it was destined to take over the world? Every country the Soviet Union acquired wound up being an additional economic drain. The Soviet Union was a basket case economically in any event. This backward, primitive thing was going to take over the world? I don’t see how.

Both the Left and the neoconservative Right promoted preposterous estimates of Soviet strength — the Left in order to show that central planning really did work, and the neocons so they could justify the expansion of the military/interventionist state they favored. Both were wrong.

Finally, I recommend looking at the references linked with the lectures on the Cold War in U.S. History Since 1877.

[woods]

The best book on it is unfortunately out of print: Fallen Pillars, by Donald Neff. That has tons of supporting quotations. It would be available via interlibrary loan, at the very least.

[woods]

I think you are unlikely to find a better online resource than this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_the_Mexican_Revolution

[woods]

I also recommend this article by Burt Folsom: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/what-ended-the-great-depression/

[woods]

I’m not a fan of Tyler Cowen, but his piece on the Marshall Plan is excellent. I drew on it for my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.

http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/faculty%20pages/Tyler/Marshall_Plan.pdf

[woods]

I disagree with the premise of the question, which is that the Fourteenth Amendment gives the impression that the states have the power to implement gun control. To the contrary, modern interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment, by which the Bill of Rights was supposedly applied to the states, would hold the opposite: precisely because of the Fourteenth Amendment, the states may NOT engage in gun control, because the Second Amendment has now been applied to the states as well.

As a historical/constitutional matter I agree with CSA1861: the “incorporation doctrine,” which holds that the Fourteenth Amendment applied the Bill of Rights to the states, is a false doctrine, so no valid conclusion can be based on it.

[woods]

I knew about the problem with the Washington Administration lecture but not about the other one. Dr. Gutzman planned to re-record the Washington Administration one, and I will bring this other one to his attention.

[woods]

I think this belongs in U.S. History to 1877.

[woods]

Not offhand, but this is likely a situation in which the traditional account is correct.

[woods]

This probably belongs in U.S. History to 1877.

[woods]

This is rather a tall order. You can get a sense of some of it via my resources on the pre-Fed panics: https://libertyclassroom.com/panics.

Part 1 of this book runs through them all: http://mises.org/books/historyofmoney.pdf

[woods]

I haven’t ruled out transcripts, but for now I want to devote our resources to additional courses.

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