Guy Chet

The book starts with the observation that for the first time in Jewish history, the Jewish nation is today evenly split in only two locations – almost half of the world’s Jews live in Israel & almost half live in America.  The book identifies the sociological, cultural, & political differences between these two Jewish tribes, and examines how these differences have produced simmering but ongoing tensions & hurt feelings on both sides.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CXB92L4H

A Dissenting Companion to the U.S. History Textbook

U.S. History textbooks habitually provide a view of Revolutionary America from the perspective of the early-national period.  In looking back at the Revolution from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they tend to paint the Revolution as a product of long incremental cultural change in colonial America; a process by which uniquely American circumstances – from slavery and ethnic diversity to demographic dynamism and other facets of expanding frontiers – produced certain American traits in colonists.  This process of Americanization gradually differentiated and alienated Americans from their compatriots and government across the Atlantic.  This storyline is reflected in textbooks’ typical periodization of the Revolution – by ending the Revolutionary era in 1789, with the ratification of the Federal Constitution and the founding of a new nation-state, these texts implicitly encourage students to see emergent nationhood as the key storyline in the coming of the American Revolution.  In doing so, they attach to the Revolution a meaning and purpose that the rebels did not envision or endorse. 

Specialists on the colonial era, by contrast, are generally more skeptical regarding Americanization and the alleged cultural divide between provincials and Britons; they are more likely to see the Atlantic as a bridge than a barrier.  Accordingly, this book presents the Revolution as an event that reflected colonial culture and politics, rather than as the national event it became retrospectively in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The book therefore ends the Revolution in 1783, with military victory and the ratification of the Articles of Confederation.  Within this framework, the Revolution emerges as one in a series of British constitutional crises – the English Civil War (1642-49), Glorious Revolution (1688), and Jacobite revolts (1715, 1745).  Like previous British rebels, the Revolutionists of 1776 were motivated by shared British fears of arbitrary power, rather than by common bonds of American nationhood.  By providing a colonial scholar’s view of the Revolution (a look to the Revolution from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), this companion to the US History textbook offers students an alternate understanding of the Revolution’s chronology, causes, ends, and accomplishments.  Namely, it presents the Revolution not as a tax revolt, a war of national liberation, or an effort to launch a new system of government, but as a conventionally English constitutional movement to resist novel reforms in imperial governance and preserve the inherited status quo.  This book challenges the narrative of the colonies’ centrifugal trajectory away from Britain, sets the Revolution within the context of English culture, and presents it as a product of changes taking place in London, rather than America.

While scholars have benefited from this lively debate on the origins, meaning, and ends of the Revolution, students and laypeople are largely unaware of it.  When paired with a traditional U.S. History textbook, this volume provides students with dueling interpretations of America’s founding.  It helps them recognize that the traditional textbook narrative of the Revolution is an argument, and invites them to evaluate both narratives on the strength of evidence.  Additionally, it opens up discussion on what it means to study history: what students gain and what they lose by examining the past from their modern viewpoint, as opposed to studying how people in the past understood their own actions.

The rise and decline of Atlantic piracy has been used to gauge the level of commercial, administrative, naval, and diplomatic control that Britain exercised in the Atlantic. Indeed, historians have suggested that by 1730, Britain had eradicated piracy in the region. These studies credit a governmental campaign of law enforcement and moral persuasion for a revolutionary shift in public attitudes against piracy. A close examination, however, reveals that piracy flourished in Atlantic waters well into the nineteenth century, and that Britain’s command of the region was not nearly as thorough as some have suggested. Old practices and beliefs regarding piracy’s legality and propriety persisted in the face of imperial attempts to effect change—Britons continued to regard “armed commerce” as wholly conventional and legitimate. Piracy was eventually ushered out of the Atlantic indirectly and inadvertently, not through forceful confrontation at sea and port, but in response to the reduced profitability of contraband.
  Britain’s ineffective anti-piracy campaign reveals the limits of British power at sea, but also on land, vis-à-vis its constituents. Violence and property losses at sea were useful to authorities in their efforts to articulate differences between the illegitimate violence of pirates and smugglers, and legitimate force wielded by the government. And yet, the government’s attempts to extend its jurisdiction beyond coastal waters, monopolize violence, and sanction some forms of maritime commerce while delegitimizing others, were consistently resisted, ignored, and thwarted by large swaths of British society on both sides of the ocean. British subjects retained an archaic and localist conception of society, state, and law, and resisted legal and bureaucratic structures put in place by landed governments to facilitate state building. 

  The chronological discrepancy regarding the passing of piracy and the resultant misconception regarding Britain’s control of the Atlantic are products of historians’ modernist definition of piracy. This anachronistic understanding of piracy obscures the continued activity of pirates in the Atlantic during the “long eighteenth century” and gives credence to the presumptions of eighteenth-century governments to monopolize the use of force at sea.

The conquest of the North American wilderness and its native population by English settlers is one of the most compelling topics in American history. The military misadventures of the English colonists in New England illuminated tensions between American conditions and European military conventions. Successful Indian attacks on colonial forces during King Philip’s War have led some contemporary and modern observers to conclude that the combination of firearms and Indian tactics was too potent for English forces, relying on conventional European tactics. Consequently, it has been argued, exposure to Indian tactics improved the efficiency of English military forces by forcing them to ‘unlearn’ what their European military manuals had taught them. Chet demonstrates that English soldiery did not improve when “textbook knowledge of European tactics” was complemented by experience in wilderness warfare. Moreover, King Philip’s War and the later colonial wars were not won through a succession of tactical victories, but through logistical campaigns of attrition.
  A comparison between the first generation of European veteran commanders in America and the supposedly “Americanized” commanders of the later colonial wars reflects poorly on the latter. Similarly, the British army’s tactical victories during the Seven Years’ War indicate that the British were, in fact, more successful than provincials in countering the challenges of wilderness warfare. Colonists’ military ordeals during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century did not lead to a reevaluation and transformation of their military doctrine. Rather than revitalizing the settlers’ military establishments, these episodes highlighted the ongoing degeneration of colonial armed forces. Indeed, it was the poor performance of colonial forces in King Philip’s War and King William’s War that led colonial magistrates to address their shortcomings through greater reliance on British forces and imperial administrators. Thus, English military achievements in New England during the eighteenth century reflected an increasing degree of British participation, as well as British planning, administration, and command.

Madison's Constitution reflected a starkly negative assessment of human nature and human governments.  This belief system was commonplace among Anglo-Americans in the 18th century.  During the 19th century, however, Americans embraced different beliefs, which allowed them to trust the Federal Government, identify with it, bond with it emotionally, look to it for moral and political leadership, and to expect numerous services and protections from it.  This philosophical transformation explains Americans’ growing frustration with life under an eighteenth-century Constitution animated by distrust and fear of central governance. 

Americans have tried, since 1791, to liberate their national government from the Constitutional constraints placed on it by Madison and his colleagues.  This effort has accelerated dramatically in the twentieth century, when Americans devised a new way to read the Constitution; a new way to apply it to their daily lives.  This innovation in Constitutional jurisprudence has been pivotal in the transformation of the United States from a federated republic in which local communities governed themselves into a modern managerial nation-state that is governed from the center.  The key to this transformation – of the Constitution & of the United States – was the 14th Amendment.

Modern accounts of Atlantic piracy depict the Royal Navy as an effective police force that, in the course of a generation (1697-1730), transformed the Atlantic from a violent frontier into a locus of orderly commerce.  Scholars who see a sharp decline in piracy in the early-18th century argue that a governmental campaign of law enforcement and moral persuasion produced a revolutionary shift in public attitudes against piracy.  A close examination, however, reveals that piracy flourished in Atlantic waters well into the 19th century, with Britons persisting in seeing “armed commerce” as wholly conventional and legitimate despite imperial attempts to effect change.
As early-modern European states were centralizing their bureaucracies, establishing ideologies of state and law, modernizing their finances, and enacting bureaucratic and commercial monopolies as tools of state building, seas and oceans experienced a different course of development. As national mercantilist economies emerged in Europe, oceans formed trans-imperial trade zones, which operated as free-trade zones, given that legal trade restrictions were easily and routinely violated. The vastness of the ocean allowed British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic to retain an archaic and localist conception of society, state, and law, and to resist legal and bureaucratic structures put in place by landed governments to facilitate state building.
The distance between imperial law and commercial practice corresponded to the distance between the seats of government and the myriad locations of Atlantic commercial activities.  Governments’ efforts to bridge this ethical gap inevitably involved attempts to bridge the geographical gap as well, enhancing the presence and role of state agents in local jurisdictions and at sea.  In this sense, statutory law was a form of propaganda regarding the reach of state authority – a proclamation of national governments’ policy aspirations, as well as their presumptions to jurisdiction and administrative sway in peripheral communities.  Such propaganda remained unconvincing under governments that demonstrated to constituents that they did not have the capacity to enforce the law.

The rise and decline of Atlantic piracy has been used to gauge the level of commercial, naval and diplomatic control that Britain exercised in the Atlantic. Indeed, naval historians have suggested that by 1730, British policing of maritime trade routes had eradicated piracy in the region. Yet statistical data and anecdotal evidence indicate that transporting cargoes in the Atlantic remained risky well into the nineteenth century. These data suggest that Britain’s command of the region was not nearly as thorough as some have suggested. Piracy was eventually ushered out of the Atlantic indirectly and inadvertently, not through forceful confrontation at sea, but in response to the reduced profitability of contraband.
Britain’s ineffective anti-piracy campaign reveals the limits of British power at sea, but also on land, vis-à-vis its constituents. Violence and property losses at sea were useful to authorities in their efforts to articulate differences between the illegitimate violence of pirates and smugglers, and legitimate force wielded by the government. And yet, the government’s attempts to extend its jurisdiction beyond coastal waters, monopolize violence, and sanction some forms of maritime commerce while delegitimizing others, were consistently resisted, ignored, and thwarted by large swaths of English society on both sides of the ocean.

Warfare in the Age of Reason is rarely seen as a particularly useful lens through which to examine modern military practices. By contrast, Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic tactics, strategy, and logistics are understood as essentially modern and therefore relevant to the study and conduct of contemporary wars. The interpretive model used to trace and explain this transition from pre-modern to modern warfare is the “military revolution,” a concept that has energized and revitalized military history scholarship during the latter half of the twentieth century. This essay is a reflection on the ways in which research on the military revolution has shaped the teaching of military history. Whereas the concept of a military revolution has redirected research away from decisive battles and Great Captains, it has not had a similar effect on teaching. It, in fact, provides teachers and students with a relatable framework of military modernization and progress that paradoxically preserves field battles as the narrative vehicle to explain change over time. As a result, classroom instruction of early modern warfare tends to focus on transformative commanders like Gustavus Adolphus (1594-1632), John Churchill Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), and Frederick the Great (1712-86), who are widely recognized as forerunners of Napoleon and harbingers of his modern approach to war and combat. This habit of identifying early modern antecedents of maneuver warfare encourages students, young commanders, and policy-makers to examine early-modern wars through the prism of nineteenth-century practice and culture, and to see field battles as the heart of war. It misrepresents the nature of pre-modern wars, thereby overstating the novelties of twenty-first century warfare.

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the American mainland colonies were not the center of Great Britain’s empire.  At the economic center were the sugar islands of the West Indies that provided the financial basis for naval conquests of new Caribbean territories and more trading posts.  They also financed the establishment and expansion of American mainland colonies, such as the Carolinas, and boosted the economies of all the mainland colonies, from Georgia to Massachusetts.  That the American colonies were on the periphery of England’s empire and on the periphery of its attention is evident from England’s allocation of limited military and naval resources to North America in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries.  By the Revolutionary era, however, the government in London had become increasingly interested in American affairs.  After the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763, Great Britain left ten regiments permanently stationed in these colonies, maintained permanent naval bases on the Great Lakes and along the Atlantic coast (including Halifax and Louisburg, two of the most strongly fortified naval bases in the New World) and established a permanent military presence in the American West, complete with roads, bridges and modern forts.  Moreover, for the first time since the administrations of Charles II and James II, imperial administrators attempted to use those naval, military and financial resources to centralize the administration of these colonies, to regulate and govern them more effectively, and to integrate them more fully into the British state.  By the end of the French and Indian War, then, these colonies were no longer peripheral to the Empire.  This transformation explains provincial efforts in the 1760s and 70s to reestablish salutary neglect as an imperial policy.
  This shift was certainly a reflection of the mainland colonies’ growing economic and demographic weight, but it was also occasioned and aided by a lack of military success on the part of colonial governments.  Imperial forces, as well as imperial investment in military infrastructure, were drawn into North America because provincial governments and imperial administrators became more and more frustrated with the military incompetence displayed by colonial military establishments.  Provincial failures in in the 1670s and during King William’s War (1689-97) and Queen Anne’s War (1702-13) led to a creeping enhancement of Britain’s direct military involvement in North America by the mid-eighteenth century.

Much of American scholarship on the colonial era has focused on the cultural and political transformation of Englishmen into Americans in thirteen of Britain’s American colonies.  In the field of military history, this investigation has produced histories depicting colonists as “Indianized” sharp-shooting frontiersmen fighting as irregulars (avoiding large-scale combat and focusing on small-scale hit-and-run engagements).  Historians often suggest that English colonists were militarily transformed during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from defensive-minded collectivists to offensive-minded individualists.  Whether focusing on tactics or logistics, these scholars hold that exceptional frontier conditions in North America transformed English colonists into exceptional Englishmen, alienated from the mother country by a uniquely American martial culture.  Understandably, this storyline has been used as an allegory for a much wider cultural transformation – Americanization – that explains not only the American victory in the War of Independence, but also the birth of American democracy, nationhood and separatism.
  Benjamin Church and Robert Rogers, the legendary Indian fighters of King Philip’s War and the French and Indian War, occupy an exalted position in the historiography of the American way of war.  They represent bookends for the transformation that Englishmen supposedly underwent in America during the span of the colonial era – what Church invented (by borrowing from Indians), Rogers perfected.  Yet a comparison between the first generation of military commanders (European veterans) and the supposedly Americanized commanders of the later colonial wars reflects poorly on the latter.  The colonists' military ordeals during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries did not lead to a reevaluation and transformation of their military or tactical doctrine.  They remained committed to the accepted principles of European warfare;  their military manuals, their training and their actions on the field indicate that settlers did not adopt a new and more offensive philosophy of war.  Rather than revitalizing the settlers' military establishments, these episodes highlighted the ongoing degeneration of colonial armed forces.  In fact, it was this poor performance of colonial forces the 1670s and 1690s that led eighteenth-century colonial magistrates to address the shortcomings of their own military forces through a greater reliance on British forces and imperial administrators. 
  There is little evidence for a chain of military instruction leading from Benjamin Church to Robert Rogers, nor for an emergence of a new way of war in America.  An examination of the literary records of the exploits of both Church and Rogers indicates that their reputations as heralds and instructors of an American way of war were products of the Jacksonian era, rather than the colonial period.

This thoughtful and persuasive volume is one of the most important contributions to the emerging understanding of the limited reach of state authority and empire during the early Modern era. Focusing upon the British government's inability to stop piracy, wrecking, and smuggling both on the sea and along the coastline of the Atlantic world throughout the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, this study underlines the vast gap between policy and enforcement within the British Empire, the widespread dispersal of authority endemic to state and empire and indeed essential to their success, and the weakness of metropolitan coercive resources. In the process, he makes an overwhelmingly convincing case against those who have uncritically assumed state policy pronouncements can be taken as an accurate indication of how empires worked.
Jack P. Greene Andrew W. Mellon in the Humanities, Emeritus Johns Hopkins University

On October 7, 2023, the Israeli army did not protect Israel’s border with the Palestinian-run Gaza Strip. Thousands of Arabs – Hamas fighters and civilians – crossed freely from Gaza into Israel to attack the towns and villages there. They killed the men, slaughtered the children in front of their mothers, raped the women, and led them naked through the streets of Gaza to be humiliated in public and then beaten to death. The gruesome Palestinian attack left 1,200 Israelis dead and 200 more kidnapped.
This orgy of Palestinian violence and sadism against Jews produced horror and revulsion in most sectors of American life, and expressions of concern and solidarity with Israelis. But in the most Progressive venues of American life, the massive Palestinian pogrom in Israel produced celebration and anti-Jewish protests.

Observers of higher education cannot be surprised by these developments. No doubt the intensity of antisemitic rhetoric and violence on campus has risen to a fevered pitch, but antisemitism has been on display in American universities for a long time. These institutions have a quite-prominent record of bigotry and discrimination toward disfavored groups (such as Asian-Americans and Christians). The BDS movement – which supports economic and diplomatic sanctions against Israel and Israelis, and opposes Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state – has thus easily found a home on college campuses.

Most history textbooks trace American Revolutionary ideology to Enlightenment political philosophers and to republican principles drawn from classical history. This would strike Revolutionary Americans as odd, since hardly any of them could name an Enlightenment thinker or explain the basics of Roman republicanism, let alone explain how these relate to their support for the Patriot cause. Most Revolutionary Americans would point instead to the Bible as the source of their constitutional and political beliefs. Yet one is hard-pressed to find a textbook that identifies the Bible as a meaningful ideological influence on the American Revolution. This means that the most dominant force shaping Revolutionary Americans’ political convictions has become invisible to Revolutionary historians and students.

Ever since Thomas Paine published Common Sense, many Americans and many American historians have explained the Revolution as Paine had – as a war of national liberation. They claim that over the course of the colonial era, Anglo-American colonists underwent a transformation – a process of Americanization – at the end of which they were no longer conventional Englishmen. They became something different: Americans, a new national group, with uniquely American ideals, values, and sensibilities. Thus, the Revolution of 1776 was merely the formal culmination of the “real” revolution – the gradual change in mentality, values and political culture that had taken place in the hearts and minds of Americans during the colonial era.  Other historians – a minority opinion – argue that this was not a war of national liberation.  They hold that Americans were not, and did not see themselves as, distinct from other Englishmen; and that they did not see themselves as connected to one another by a bond of nationhood before 1776.  These historians hold that the American Revolution was a conservative revolution; a revolution designed not to change the status quo and create a new social and political arrangement, but to preserve the status quo.  Americans were conventional and backward-looking Englishmen who wanted to resist changes that the British government was introducing to the Empire’s system of government, such as new trade restrictions and tax measures, strong enforcement of imperial regulations, undercutting the jurisdiction of local courts, and otherwise expanding the reach of the central government at the expense of local autonomy.

The Albany Congress and Ben Franklin’s Plan of Union play an important role in both interpretations of the American Revolution. Both groups of historians claim Franklin and the Albany Plan as evidence that supports their own understanding of the Revolution and its purpose.

1)  The story of the First Thanksgiving (1621) is usually told as a story of a neighborly gathering between the Pilgrims and Native Americans. However, this version is fraught with falsehoods about the times and the relations of these two groups. What do the facts reveal about that initial Thanksgiving? ___________________________________

2)  A thanksgiving holiday had been celebrated in England and later in North America at different times correlating with the harvest. But only in 1863, during the height of the US Civil war, was Thanksgiving declared (by President Lincoln) a national holiday. Likewise, in December 1941, soon after the U.S. officially entered World War II, President Roosevelt signed the law marking the fourth Thursday in November as a Federal Thanksgiving holiday. Is the wartime setting for these two recognitions of Thanksgiving significant?

Historians have long found it easy to explain the reaction of colonial elites to Britain’s imperial reforms in the Revolutionary era. This is because historians could point to the ways the imperial reforms threatened elite families’ economic interests, commercial enterprises, and political dominance in the colonies. It is common, therefore, to hear that the American Revolution was launched in pursuit of the material and political interests of the rich and powerful in the colonies. Yet if the Revolution served the interests and ambitions of elite families who led the Revolution, what explains the broad support they enjoyed from below (from lower- and middle-class colonists)? Indeed, many Americans – students, teachers, and historians – struggle to explain what moved common people to make common cause with colonial elites. Why did ordinary Americans – people who did not sit in the assemblies, and in most cases, did not even vote for representatives – care about and feel threatened by policies that Parliament initiated in the realm of high-politics?

Political scientists see modern piracy as a symptom of failed stateswhen a state government fails to make its presence (and its laws) felt in markets, ports and territorial waters, criminals step in to fill that governmental vacuum, and piracy and smuggling thus flourish. The study of Atlantic piracy came into being with this assumption as its governing framework. Leading scholars in the field thus hold that pirates prospered and multiplied in the Atlantic during piracy’s ‘golden age’ because imperial governments did not police Atlantic waters and ports. Pirates were indeed a mild irritant to these imperial governments in times of peace, but they were also useful third-party weapons against imperial rivals and, in times of war, they were valuable allies and mercenaries. According to this reigning storyline, Atlantic piracy ended violently and abruptly when the British Empire decided to change course and exert its will and authority in the British Atlantic.

Michael McConnell’s account tracks the campaign from the drawing board to its conclusion, when the French defenders (after losing their Indian allies) abandoned Fort Duquesne before Forbes reached it. Like the campaign, the book ends anticlimactically, with Forbes’s death at the end of a successful campaign. Yet along the way, McConnell offers not only high drama, but also perceptive insights on European warfare, the unique challenges of waging war in America, and the nature of the British Empire. The narrative of Forbes’s efforts paints a vivid picture of a European army on campaign.