I’m wrapping up a script for episode 16 and will have the episode out the door by Labor Day. The tentative title is Birth of the Replicant. It’s a dual feature about two people, one business consultant and one artist, who changed American capitalism around 1900 by attempting to standardize human beings into interchangeable workers and interchangeable consumers. Even though the model workers and consumers they developed were more fantasy than reality, they were wildly successful. We live in the world they helped to make, and the quest for replicable, standardized workers and consumers continues apace as you read this (duh).

Apart from my usual glacial pace, this episode took much longer than expected because I became a father in July 2024. My wife gave birth to our beautiful daughter, who just turned one year old. Child care and work required all my energy for the past year, but as our kid becomes more independent and starts daycare, I’ve been able to carve out more time for podcasting. Being creative helps me be a better father, and vice versa. I don’t share pictures of my family online, so you’ll have to take my word that our daughter is the cutest and the sweetest.

When I get to the closing stages of producing an episode of Inward Empire, I get itchy. I can’t wait to get the thing out the door so I can move on to the ever-growing list of things I want to talk about. I also vacillate a lot when I’m starting out. At first, the replicant episode was supposed to be about meatpacking, but I couldn’t find a way to make all the parts of the story fit together in a satisfying way, and in the meantime I got interested in a new (but related) topic. Next, I’d like to do a one-off before returning to a big multi-part series like the ones about Diem or the 1877 strike. I can confidently say the multi-parter will be about the aftermath of the First World War. The one-off will either be about the 19th century spoils system (unfortunately more relevant with every passing day) or the Seattle anti-WTO protests in 1999 … or one of a couple other topics I have in mind.

Cheers. Keep an eye out for the new episode in the coming weeks.

Sam

As the upcoming school year lurches once more into sight, I find myself thinking more and more about the role of AI text generation in my history classroom. My attitudes about this topic align with the Butlerian Jihad from Dune, but I am also fortunate to have colleagues who are thoughtfully trying to integrate AI into their writing assignments and a few students who want to learn to use AI responsibly.

A teacher can take one of three possible stances on AI text generation:
1) Students are better served by learning to do each step of the writing process themselves and should avoid AI use, even to do mundane tasks like summarizing documents.
2) Students should use AI as a tool (like spellcheck) to assist in some or all of the writing process.
3) Students can submit AI-generated work, as long as they are willing to take responsibility for the quality of the work.

I am firmly in camp 1. The more I learn about AI-generated historical “knowledge,” the more I am convinced that it is inferior to what an average high schooler can accomplish if they are motivated and well-taught. For every AI-involved exercise I read or hear about, I ask: would the student benefit more from this task if they did all the steps themselves? Almost invariably, I think the answer is yes.

Is this a failure of imagination on my part? Or are the humanities better if we keep AI at arm’s length?

Out of curiosity, I gave ChatGPT one of my favorite homework assignments from my AP US History class (a mentor came up with the assignment):

I love this assignment because it trains students not to take things at face value. The passage is from a January 1787 letter by Abigail Adams to Thomas Jefferson about Shays’ Rebellion, a revolt by cash-strapped Massachusetts farmers against the state’s attempts to get them to pay taxes. Like many states during the Revolution, Massachusetts had issued bonds to pay for the war and was now levying taxes to repay them. Abigail Adams (sharper at finances than her husband John) had speculated in war bonds, and was outraged that the state’s poorer residents objected to being taxed so that she and other speculators could get richer. Did farmers engage in armed protest? Did they shut down courts (that were engaged in debt collection)? Absolutely. But their grievances were legitimate, and Adams had selfish motives for painting them as “ignorant” “deluded” criminals.

In class, we talk through the answers together and wrap up with a meta-conversation about why historians do these steps. Most kids still need lots of reminders to do those steps on their own and to never take a source at face value — but it’s incredibly rewarding when those habits start to stick. This is what critical thinking (and a well-tuned bullshit detector) is all about.

I was curious how GPT would handle the first step (Who wrote this passage?); I have never taught a student who couldn’t figure this out with a simple google search. Here is the ensuing exchange:

I don’t know enough about the mechanics of GPT to understand why it persistently misattributes the letter to Washington. Washington did write a letter to Lee on October 31, 1786, but his tone and perspective were much more moderate than hers (Washington refused to use his personal influence to get the farmers to stand down and suggested the government should investigate why they were rebelling). I’m disturbed by the program’s blithe confidence in its attributing the letter to Washington, Jefferson, or Adams in the same conversation, even saying phrases appear “verbatim” in Washington’s letter when they don’t. The sniveling customer-service tone and chirpy faux-helpfulness straight out of a corporate Instagram post are, however, really funny, especially when GPT ends by setting the record straight on complete bullshit.

Interestingly, while I could bluff / bully the program into reattributing the letter multiple times, it drew the line at Abraham Lincoln! The program “knows” that the grammar and syntax of the passage are 18th century, not 19th, but it can’t for the life of it figure out the much less sophisticated task of determining authorship.

I’m fond of Harry Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit, which analyzed the insidious trend of fake expertise. I think this quote is relevant:

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction … Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

Students should know what they are getting into when they delegate even a straightforward thinking task to machines. In education, we are all rushing to come to grips with new technology that threatens to do to thought what the power loom did to hand weaving. In history class, the advent of AI makes teaching young people to do these steps for themselves and understand why we do them seems more relevant, not less. It’s also more incumbent on us as teachers to help the kids understand that the purpose of all the readings and assignments and is to train them to think for themselves (if they get that, I could care less what they score on the AP!). This feels like a brutal uphill battle right now, given the technological and cultural forces at play in their lives.

Here’s one AI-involved exercise that I tried out as kids prepped for the APUSH exam that was much more successful. Again, though, I can’t shake the feeling that students would be better served by doing the whole thing themselves!

Any educators reading this? AI in the classroom is maybe the ultimate problem of practice. What are you doing about it?

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.

By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience. I do not deny, however, that a constitution of this kind appears to me to be infinitely preferable to one which, after having concentrated all the powers of government, should vest them in the hands of an irresponsible person or body of persons. Of all the forms that democratic despotism could assume, the latter would assuredly be the worst.

When the sovereign is elective, or narrowly watched by a legislature which is really elective and independent, the oppression that he exercises over individuals is sometimes greater, but it is always less degrading; because every man, when he is oppressed and disarmed, may still imagine that, while he yields obedience, it is to himself he yields it, and that it is to one of his own inclinations that all the rest give way. In like manner, I can understand that when the sovereign represents the nation and is dependent upon the people, the rights and the power of which every citizen is deprived serve not only the head of the state, but the state itself; and that private persons derive some return from the sacrifice of their independence which they have made to the public. To create a representation of the people in every centralized country is, therefore, to diminish the evil that extreme centralization may produce, but not to get rid of it.

I admit that, by this means, room is left for the intervention of individuals in the more important affairs; but it is not the less suppressed in the smaller and more privates ones. It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other.

Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.

I add that they will soon become incapable of exercising the great and only privilege which remains to them. The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the play things of their ruler, and his masters, more than kings and less than men. After having exhausted all the different modes of election without finding one to suit their purpose, they are still amazed and still bent on seeking further; as if the evil they notice did not originate in the constitution of the country far more than in that of the electoral body.

It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.

A constitution republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts has always appeared to me to be a short-lived monster. The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.

For the Union Dead
by Robert Lowell

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city’s throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound’s gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

After receiving the nth email from a listener asking what’s going on with Inward Empire – is it continuing? Am I even alive? – I realized it’s time to write a short note of explanation.

Ever since wrapping up the Diem Experiment series in July 2020, one thing after another has made it tough to produce more episodes. First there was teaching high school in the 2020-21 school year — a rewarding but astoundingly time- and energy-consuming process even in pre-pandemic times. While I’m grateful I was able to spend the year teaching in person instead of online, work-related anxiety and depression landed me on medication (which seems to be helping. Fingers crossed. Maybe I can get an endorsement from Zoloft). If you teach or know teachers, you know how all-consuming the job can be.

Things kept happening. My deeply-loved cat Vivian died of terrible stomach ulcers in October, a year after her sister died from FIP. I still haven’t fully processed that. Around January, I got covid. My piece-of-shit car kept breaking down. My dad, who is 82 and in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s, broke his hip. My fiancée and I went through a stressful move to be closer to family. She lost two grandparents and her 14-year-old dog, Belle, this year, too. With the bad news piling up, I couldn’t find the time or the energy to work on Inward Empire.

But the rain of body blows seems to be subsiding, and I hope that the next few months will find me with the time and energy to keep podcasting. I still have my vision, and my bucket list grows ever longer. Barring an apocalypse, my patience and that of my listeners will be rewarded in good time.

Over the summer, I was invited to join a project called Ripples of History, hosted by Daniele Bolelli, the creator of the podcast History on Fire. Daniele manages, somehow, to be a professor, author, martial artist, and dad on top of producing two podcasts (the second is the philosophical The Drunken Taoist) — the kind of person whose productivity provokes awe and not a little envy.

Ripples of History is a collaboration between some of the best long-form history podcasters. Each of us chose an event that didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, but which ended up having long-term significance beyond what those at the time could have foreseen.

I chose Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” (or if you prefer the more combative original title, “Resistance to Civil Government”). It’s a dense little tract, written by a proto-hippie survivalist after spending a single night in jail in Concord, Massachusetts. It’s a cantankerous, individualist, anti-authoritarian text, from which a surprising range of movements have drawn inspiration. Libertarians and tax resisters like it — but so did leaders of mass movements MLK. Pacifists like Gandhi were inspired by its message — but so were Danish resistance fighters who blew up Nazi infrastructure. In my segment, I take a close look at Thoreau’s ideas to understand why this essay, little-noticed when it first appeared in the 1840s, has had such an outsized influence on world history.

Other segments of Ripples of History tackle Bacon’s Rebellion, The Iliad, and the origin of suicide bombing. What’s not to like about that?

You can listen on Itunes here or PlayerFM here. I’ll add other listening options as they become available.

Stream or download it for free on iTunes, Spotify, or Podomatic.

Support Inward Empire by becoming a patron!

In November 1963, a faction of South Vietnamese generals overthrew and assassinated Ngo Dinh Diem with the support of the Kennedy administration. In the final part of this series, we’ll explore how infighting, ambition, and miscommunication sealed the fate of the Diem Experiment and set South Vietnam on the path to disaster.

Inward Empire music by Stephen Spencer.

Bibliography

Christian Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003)

Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Holt McDougal, 1977)

Monique Demery, Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam’s Madame Nhu (New York: Public Affairs, 2013)

Duong Van Mai Elliott, The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)

George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (New York: McGraw Hill, 2014)

Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America’s War in Vietnam, 1950-1963 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006)

Howard Jones, Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)

Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983)

Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013)

Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)

“Support any friend, oppose any foe.” JFK’s inaugural address, January 20, 1961.

JFK ramped up US support for South Vietnam in 1961-63, including thousands of new advisers.

“I am optimistic, and I am not going to allow my staff to be pessimistic.” General Paul Harkins, head of Military Assistance Command Vietnam.

“The Winston Churchill of Asia.” LBJ and Diem pose during LBJ’s 1961 goodwill tour.

Aerial view of a strategic hamlet.

While heavy fortifications helped protect the hamlets against larger guerilla forces, they were still vulnerable to infiltration and anti-government sympathy.

Neil Sheehan, one of the new breed of skeptical journalists who turned the tide of public opinion against Diem.

Destroyed helicopters after the Battle of Ap Bac in January, 1963.

Madame Nhu surveys the damage to the palace after the 1962 bombing by rogue pilots.

The immolation of Thich Quang Duc, June 11, 1963.

Madame Nhu’s incendiary comments about the Buddhist immolations did massive damage to the regime’s public image.

A protest during the Buddhist Crisis. Note the signs in Vietnamese and English.

Protest scene during the Buddhist Crisis.

“We must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.” A page from Cable 243, which set the US on the path to supporting a coup.

General Duong Van Minh (right) with Walt Rostow and Maxwell Taylor. The men are taking a break from playing tennis during one of Kennedy’s “fact finding missions.”

Lucien Conein (back), the CIA operative who helped Ambassador Lodge communicate with the generals, poses with several coup leaders.

General Tran Van Don, one of the key leaders of the coup.

General Ton That Dinh, the playboy general and self-proclaimed “hero of the Republic” who became the linchpin of both the ARVN coup and the Ngo family’s plan for Operation Bravo.

Henry Cabot Lodge presents his credentials to Diem in August, 1963. From day one in Saigon, Lodge pushed to overthrow Diem in the belief that a new regime could successfully bring the anti-communist war to a conclusion.

Rebel units attack the palace during the coup, November 1-2 1963.

Diem (right) and Nhu (left) after being assassinated in the back of an armored personnel carrier on November 2, 1963. The photo destroyed the generals’ claims that the brothers had committed suicide.

ARVN soldiers pose with Diem’s body.

Civilians in Saigon destroy a statue of the Trung Sisters. Madame Nhu had erected the statue in 1962, modeling the sisters’ faces on her own.

An ARVN soldier smiles amid the wreckage in the palace after the coup.

The Revolutionary Military Council. Its members almost immediately begin a series of coups and counter-coups against each other.

“We still seek no wider war.” Diem’s death destabilized South Vietnam and led directly to US intervention in 1964-65.