In his year-end op-ed in The Baltimore Sun for 2013, political science professor Thomas Schaller looks back 100 years to New Year’s Day 1914. Throughout the column, Schaller recounts what the political landscape looked like when the country hadn’t yet fought two major wars and the federal income tax was only a year old. The year 1914 also included election changes with the first round of senators elected by popular vote.
Schaller notes he normally writes about highlights and major happenings in Maryland or national politics and culture, but wrote his year-end column “Reflect on, don’t fetishize, the past” to argue obsessing over the political past can be a perilous exercise.
“Reflecting upon the past can be a useful thought experiment,” Schaller writes. “Fetishizing the past — and presuming that somehow our country was better when it was simpler or less democratic — is dangerous business. On New Year’s Day, as ever, it’s best to turn our sights in the only direction that matters: toward the future.”
You can read the full op-ed in The Baltimore Sun here.
Tags: CAHSS, PoliticalScience
