Tag: Historical

  • A Historical Pattern of Force, Profit, and Human Cost

    A Historical Pattern of Force, Profit, and Human Cost

    From the mid‑19th century to today, U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean have consistently combined military force, political influence, and economic pressure. Across this long arc, millions of lives have been shaped—often shattered—by policies that prioritize strategic advantage over human flourishing. Today’s geopolitical tensions with Venezuela are the latest flashpoint in a historical pattern that rewards elites while exacting profound human costs.

    Note on Timing: This article is intentionally posted on Christmas Day 2025, a day traditionally associated with peace, goodwill, and reflection, to underscore the contrast between those ideals and the ongoing human toll of U.S. militarism and intervention abroad. The symbolic timing is a reminder that while many celebrate, others suffer the consequences of policies driven by power, profit, and geopolitics.

    A Critical Warning for Students and Young People

    As Higher Education Inquirer has repeatedly argued, the United States’ military footprint—its wars, recruitment programs, and entanglements with higher education—has deep consequences not just abroad but at home. ROTC programs and military enlistment are often marketed as pathways to education and economic stability, but they also funnel young people into systems with long‑term obligations, moral hazards, and psychological risk. Prospective enlistees and their families should think twice before committing to military pathways that may bind them to morally questionable conflicts and institutional control.

    Moreover, U.S. higher education has become deeply entwined with kleptocracy, militarism, and colonialism, supporting war economies and benefiting from federal research contracts with defense and intelligence partners that obscure the real human costs of empire. These warnings are especially salient in the context of Venezuela and similar interventions, where human toll and geopolitical stakes demand deeper scrutiny.

    Smedley Butler: War Is a Racket and the Business Plot

    Major General Smedley D. Butler, among the most decorated U.S. Marines, became one of the U.S. military’s most outspoken critics. In his 1935 War Is a Racket, Butler rejected romantic notions of military glory and exposed the economic motives behind many interventions:

    “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.”

    “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service… being a high‑class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

    “Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”

    Butler’s warnings were not abstract. In 1933, he was approached to lead a coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, known as the Business Plot, which he publicly exposed. His testimony before Congress revealed how elite interests sought to use military power to overthrow democratic government, an episode that underscores his critique of war as a tool for entrenched interests at the expense of ordinary people.

    Historical Interventions and Their Toll

    Below is a timeline of major U.S. interventions in the Americas, with estimated deaths, showing the human cost of policies that often served strategic or economic interests over humanitarian ones:

    Period Location Event / Nature of Intervention Estimated Deaths
    1846–1848 Mexico Mexican-American War: Territorial conquest ~25,000 Mexicans
    1898 Cuba/P.R. Spanish-American War: U.S. seized P.R.; Cuba protectorate ~15,000–60,000 (90% disease)
    1914 Mexico Occupation of Veracruz: U.S. port seizure ~300 Mexicans
    1915–1934 Haiti Military Occupation: Suppression of rebellions ~3,000–15,000
    1916–1924 Dominican Rep. Marine Occupation: Control of customs/finance ~4,000
    1954 Guatemala Op. PBSuccess: CIA coup against Árbenz; led to civil war 150,000–250,000*
    1965 Dominican Rep. Op. Power Pack: U.S. intervention during civil war ~3,000
    1973–1990 Chile U.S.-backed Coup/Regime: Pinochet dictatorship 3,000–28,000*
    1975–1983 S. America Operation Condor: CIA-supported intelligence network ~60,000*
    1976–1983 Argentina Dirty War: U.S.-supported military junta and coup ~30,000*
    1979–1992 El Salvador Civil War: Massive military aid to govt forces 35,000–75,000*
    1981–1990 Nicaragua Iran-Contra Affair: Covert support for Contras ~30,000–50,000*
    1989 Panama Operation Just Cause: Invasion to remove Noriega 500–3,000
    2025 Venezuela Naval Blockade: Active maritime strikes and standoff 100+ (to date)

    *Estimates include civilian casualties and deaths indirectly caused by U.S.-supported interventions.

    Venezuela and the Global Politics of Intervention

    Venezuela’s 2025 crisis is the latest in a long history of U.S. pressure in the hemisphere. A naval blockade—accompanied by maritime strikes and political isolation—has already produced more than 100 confirmed deaths. Historically, interventions like this have often prioritized U.S. strategic or economic interests over local welfare.

    The situation is further complicated by global geopolitics. Former President Donald Trump, who recently pardoned key figures involved in controversial interventions, including Iran‑Contra actors, also maintains strategic ties with China and Russia, highlighting how interventions are entangled with global power plays that affect universities, recruitment pipelines, and domestic politics alike.

    A Call to Rethink Intervention and Recruitment

    Smedley Butler’s critique remains urgent: to “smash the racket,” profit must be removed from war, military force should be strictly defensive, and decisions about war must rest with those who bear its consequences. From Mexico to Venezuela—and including covert operations like Iran‑Contra—the historical record shows how interventions serve a narrow elite while imposing massive human costs.

    HEI’s warnings underscore that higher education, ROTC programs, and military recruitment pipelines are not neutral pathways but deeply embedded parts of systems that reproduce extraction, militarism, and inequality. Students, educators, and families must critically evaluate the incentives and promises of military pathways and demand institutions that serve learning, opportunity, and justice rather than empire.

    Sources

    1. Butler, Smedley D. War Is a Racket. Round Table Press, 1935.

    2. U.S. Congressional Record and Butler testimony on the Business Plot, 1934.

    3. Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.

    4. Scott, Peter Dale. Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America.

    5. Reporting on Trump pardons, Iran‑Contra participants, and global alliances (2020–2025).

    6. Higher Education Inquirer, “Kleptocracy, Militarism, Colonialism: A Counterrecruiting Call for Students and Families,” December 7, 2025. (link)

    7. Higher Education Inquirer, “The Hidden Costs of ROTC — and the Military Path,” November 28, 2025. (link)

    8. Historical records on U.S. interventions: Mexican‑American War, Spanish‑American War, Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), Argentina (1976–1983), El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela (2025).

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  • The American Historical Association Comes Close, but Misses

    The American Historical Association Comes Close, but Misses

    I believe it to be very important for disciplinary bodies to issue statements/guidance on the use of generative AI when it comes to the production of scholarship and the work of teaching and learning.

    For that reason, I was glad to see the American Historical Association issue its Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in Education. One of the chief recommendations in the concluding chapters of More Than Words: How to Think About Education in the Age of AI is that we need many more community-based conversations about the intersection of our labor and this technology, and a great way to have a conversation is to release documents like this one.

    So, let’s talk.

    First, we should acknowledge the limits of these kinds of documents, something the AHA committee that prepared the principles acknowledges up front at the closing of the preamble:

    Given the speed at which technologies are changing, and the many local considerations to be taken into account, the AHA will not attempt to provide comprehensive or concrete directives for all instances of AI use in the classroom. Instead, we offer a set of guiding principles that have emerged from ongoing conversations within the committee, and input from AHA members via a survey and conference sessions.”

    —AHA Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in Education

    I think this is obviously correct because teaching and learning are inherently, inevitably context-dependent, sometimes down to the smallest variables. I’ve used this example many times, but as someone who frequently taught the same course three or even four times a day, I could detect variances based on what seems like the smallest differences, including the time of day a particular section met. There is a weird (but also wonderful) human chemistry at play when we treat learning as a communal act—as I believe we should—but this means it is incredibly difficult to systematize teaching, as we have seen from generations of failed attempts to do so.

    Caution over offering prescriptions is more than warranted. As someone who now spends a lot of time trying to help others think through the challenges in their particular teaching contexts, I’m up front about the fact that I have very few if any universal answers and instead offer some ways of thinking about and breaking down a problem that may pave the road to progress.

    I cringe at some folks who seem to be positioning themselves as AI gurus, eager to tell us the future and, in so doing, know what we should be doing in the present. This is going to be a problem that must be continually worked.

    The AHA principles start with a declaration that seeks to unify the group around a shared principle, declaring, “Historical thinking matters.”

    My field is writing and English, not history, but here I think this is a misstep, one that I think is common and one that must be addressed if we’re going to have the most productive conversations possible about where generative AI has a place (or not) in our disciplines.

    What is meant by “historical thinking”? From what I can tell, the document makes no specific claims as to what this entails, though it has many implied activities that presumably are component parts of historical thinking: research, analysis, synthesis, etc. …

    To my mind, what is missing is the underlying values that historical thinking is meant to embody. Perhaps these are agreed upon and go without saying, but my experience in the field of writing suggests that this is unlikely. What one values about historical thinking and, perhaps most importantly, the evidence they privilege in detecting and measuring historical thinking is likely complicated and contested.

    This is definitely true when it comes to writing.

    One of my core beliefs about how we’ve been teaching writing is that the artifacts we ask students to produce and the way we assess them often actually prevents students from engaging in the kinds of experiences that help them learn to write.

    Because of this, I put more stock in evidence of a developing writing practice than I do in judging the written artifact at the end of a writing experience. Even my use of the word “experience” signals what I think is most valuable when it comes to writing: the process over the product.

    Others who put more stock in the artifacts themselves see great potential for LLM use to help students produce “better” versions of those artifacts by offering assistance in various parts of the process. This is an obviously reasonable point of view. If we have a world that judges students on outputs and these tools help them produce better outputs (and more quickly), why would we wall them off from these tools?

    In contrast, I say that there is something essentially human—as I argue at book length in More Than Words—about reading and writing, so I am much more cautious about embracing this technology. I’m concerned that we may lose experiences that are actually essential not for getting through school, but for getting through life.

    But this is a debate! And the answers to what the “right” approach is depend on those root values.

    The AHA principles are all fair enough and generally agreeable, arguing for AI literacy, policy transparency and a valuing of historical expertise over LLM outputs. But without unpacking what we mean by “historical thinking,” and how we determine when this thinking is present, we’re stuck in cul-de-sac of uncertainty.

    This is apparent in an appendix that attempts to show what an AI policy might look like, listing a task, whether AI use could be acceptable and then the conditions of acceptance. But again, the devil is in the details.

    For example, “Ask generative AI to identify or summarize key points in an article before you read it” is potentially acceptable, without explicit citation.

    But when? Why? What if the most important thing about a reading, as an aspect of developing their historical thinking practice, is for students to experience the disorientation of tackling a difficult text, and we desire maximum friction in the process?

    Context is everything, and we can’t talk context if we don’t know what we truly value, not just at the level of a discipline, or even a course, but at the level of the experience itself. For every course-related activities, we have to ask:

    What do we want students to know?

    and

    What do we want students to be able to do?

    My answers to these questions, particularly as they pertain to writing courses, involve very little large language model use until a solid foundation in a writing practice is established. Essentially, we want students to be able to use these tools in the way we likely perceive our own abilities to use them productively without compromising our values or the quality of our work.

    I’m guessing most faculty reading this trust themselves to make these judgments about when use is acceptable and under what conditions. That’s the big-picture target. What do we need to know and what do we need to be able to do to arrive at that state?

    Without getting at the deepest values, we don’t really even know where to aim.

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  • A Q&A with the American Historical Assoc. executive director

    A Q&A with the American Historical Assoc. executive director

    A chapter of history is closing: Jim Grossman is retiring after 15 years as executive director of the American Historical Association, a group of more than 10,400 members. He began leading the scholarly organization after two decades at Chicago’s independent Newberry Library, where he was vice president for research and education. His own scholarly work focused on American urban history, especially of Chicago, and the Great Migration of African Americans.

    In the past decade and a half, the AHA and its members have commented on contemporary controversies that have arisen from or invoked historical events, such as the Charlottesville, Va., white supremacist rally; the debate over whether to remove Confederate monuments; the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection; and more. Over that time, lawmakers in some states began restricting how history—especially when it’s relevant to current events—is taught.

    Grossman headed the AHA amid such controversies and has repeatedly spoken out in defense of the discipline. He’s denounced the first Trump administration’s 1776 Commission report, which criticized histories produced by Howard Zinn and The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project. Grossman called the report “history without historians.” He’s also pushed for other historians to do more public-facing work.

    The AHA has itself faced criticism during Grossman’s tenure, including for then-president Jim Sweet’s critique of The 1619 Project in 2022. This past weekend, it entered another current controversy when attendees of its annual conference overwhelmingly passed a resolution opposing “scholasticide” in Gaza and the U.S. government’s funding of Israel’s war.

    Inside Higher Ed interviewed Grossman shortly before that conference about his tenure and the current issues the history discipline faces. The questions and answers have been edited for clarity and length.

    Q: Why did you apply to become executive director in the first place?

    A: I had been involved in a variety of AHA activities. There were things I was trying to do in Chicago at the Newberry Library that involved increasing the public scope of historians. What the AHA provided was the opportunity to do some of those things on a national scale, rather than just within Chicago. How do we get historians to be more involved in public culture, more influential in public policy?

    Q: Why are you retiring now?

    A: I’m 72 years old. It’s time for somebody younger to be doing this work—not because I don’t enjoy it, but because I think it’s important for membership organizations to be directed by people who are generationally closer to the membership and the audience. And I’ve had 15 years to accomplish what I’ve tried to accomplish.

    Q: What have your biggest accomplishments been?

    A: At least getting started on helping the discipline rethink the definition of historical scholarship—to broaden the definition of scholarship for promotion and tenure. We came out with recommendations that departments are taking seriously about thinking about going beyond books and peer-reviewed articles. Reference books, textbooks, op-eds, testifying in legislatures and courts—all of these things are works of scholarship.

    Second is I think that we reoriented the AHA towards a much broader scope, so that the AHA and the discipline itself take teaching more seriously. Our annual conference is no longer “a research conference”; it includes all sorts of things that relate to teaching, that relate to advocacy, that relate to professional development. I also think that we have ramped up and broadened our advocacy work. We’re very active in state legislatures now; we’re very active in reviewing changes to state social studies and history standards for K-12 education. So, we’ve kept our focus on Capitol Hill and in Washington, but we’ve moved out to the states.

    Q: Why did you make such an emphasis during your tenure on broadening the focus of AHA? Is it because of a decline in tenure-track, traditional faculty jobs for new history Ph.D. earners?

    A: That was part of it. But that came later. I had that goal from the very beginning because I became a historian because I think historians are useful to public culture as well as academia. If I had my druthers, every time a decision was made at a table in government, private sector, nonprofit sector, I would want a historian at the table. Everything has a history, and since everything has a history, historical context always matters when you’re making decisions, when you’re trying to develop good judgment.

    That’s what someone learns in a history course. They learn judgment by thinking about the past. Historians don’t need to be working just as teachers and professors. Historians should be everywhere.

    Q: You’re saying you’ve gotten AHA more involved in state legislatures, in discussions of state standards—all of these things are political or politics-adjacent, right?

    A: Not necessarily. Let’s start with the federal level. We work on the Hill and in federal agencies to promote history. Our congressional charter, which goes back to 1889, says that we are here to promote history. So that’s not politics. It’s engaging in politics in order to promote history, yes. We are providing historical context to congressional staff so that they can make well-informed decisions when they make recommendations to their member. If you’re going to think about immigration policy, you need to know the door was closed for 40 years.

    There are times when we take stands that are perceived as political. We took a stand against the Muslim ban, for example. But we did so on the basis of what we’ve learned from history. State legislatures, it’s the same thing—we are promoting the integrity of history education. We are saying high school teachers need to be trusted as professionals, high school teachers should not be censored in the classroom; we are saying that state history standards should be good history.

    Q: What are the biggest issues within K-12 history—teaching and learning—and how do they actually impact colleges and universities?

    A: State legislatures have mandated that certain things have to be taught for years. What they have not done in the past is say certain things cannot be taught, which is censorship. There’s very little precedent for this. So that is one big challenge, which is fighting back against this notion that state legislatures can tell teachers you cannot teach X, Y or Z. And that affects college because if students don’t learn things in high school, then they’re less prepared when they get to college. If students don’t learn in high school that racism has been a central aspect of American history since Europeans came to the Americas—if students don’t learn that in high school, then the college professors are starting off at a much different level.

    If I had my druthers, every time a decision was made at a table in government, private sector, nonprofit sector, I would want a historian at the table.”

    —Jim Grossman

    We do know that young people are reading less. Instead of wringing our hands and saying they have to read more, we need to step back and ask ourselves, “How do we rethink our college courses for students who are now educated differently?” That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be pushing them to read, but it also means that we need to think about different ways of teaching history.

    Q: Has the discipline of history become increasingly polarized over your tenure?

    A: The discipline itself has not been polarized. Historians are still much more capable of disagreeing with each other in a civil manner than my neighbors in the capital. The larger polarization in public culture has harnessed the discipline of history in the same way it’s harnessed other disciplines and other aspects of life, but no, historians are still arguing with each other in a way that’s productive and constructive.

    Q: How do you expect the Trump administration and Republican control of both chambers of Congress to impact the discipline of history?

    A: I have no idea—that’s why we’re here to watch.

    Q: I know you’ve expressed concern about the 1776 Commission coming back.

    A: There has been talk among people who are part of the incoming administration of reviving the 1776 Commission and that notorious report, and so I’m concerned about that possibility, and I’m prepared for that possibility, and when things like that happen, we will speak out.

    Q: What impact has The 1619 Project had on the teaching of history and history scholarship? For instance, I know you were leading the AHA as it faced controversy over former association president Jim Sweet’s criticism of that work.

    A: Jim Sweet, like every historian, has a right to criticize any work of historical scholarship. The 1619 Project is not a work of historical scholarship. It’s—according to its compiler, its organizer—it’s journalism. And that’s fine, and there are aspects of it that I and many of my colleagues agree with, and aspects of it that I and many of my colleagues disagree with, just like any other piece of historical scholarship or journalism. It’s an easy target for people who want to take one thing that has been controversial and then use it for all sorts of other purposes.

    Controversies that ask people to ask questions are useful. It’s useful for teachers to be able to say to students, “So how do we think about the beginnings of a nation? Do we think of the beginning of a nation as the creation of its governing documents? Or do we think about the beginnings of a nation as the origins of its economy? Or do we think about the beginnings of the nation as the beginning of its culture, or as the origins of it, the roots of its culture?” Those are good historical questions, and The 1619 Project has initiated or nourished those questions.

    Q: What impact have the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and related U.S. higher education developments had on the teaching and study and scholarship of history?

    A: I think that many people who teach Middle Eastern history have probably been more careful, and I suspect that classroom management has been more difficult because it’s an emotional topic. But it’s different from The 1619 Project. The 1619 Project offered a certain way of understanding the history of the United States, and a controversial way of seeing the history of the United States—and offered, therefore, teachers an opportunity, or a nudge, to ask important questions and have students address them.

    That’s very different from a war that’s happening on the other side of the world. It’s important to the United States, it’s important to Americans, but it doesn’t have the same valence in teaching a course in American history, which is the most widely taught course in the United States. It does mean that historians have to balance sensitivity to diversity of students in their classroom with the integrity of the history that they teach.

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