Tyler Kubik | George Mason University (original) (raw)

Uploads

Papers by Tyler Kubik

Understandings of the Founding Era have been under continuous debate since the American Revolutio... more Understandings of the Founding Era have been under continuous debate since the American Revolution itself. Whether one examines the Articles of Confederation or the Continental Congresses, the successes, failures, and significance of each have been argued over since the beginning. By looking at American understandings of crucial ideas about government and society during the American Revolution, including the foundation of American rights, we can better come to terms with an understanding of American identity. These understandings evolved during the American Revolution, and their evolution can be examined through the resolutions, debates, correspondence, and diaries of members of Congress from the the First Continental Congress in 1774 to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776. The Declaration represented the synthesis of natural law thought with British constitutionalism that was forged out of the necessity of compromise during the lead up to war in 1774, the outbreak of hostilities in 1775, and the subsequent escalation into war shortly thereafter, exhibiting the importance of wartime exigencies in the evolution of American thought.

There were two dichotomous views on the Constitution advanced during this age that attempted to a... more There were two dichotomous views on the Constitution advanced during this age that attempted to answer one of the questions of contention between the rival factions competing for political dominance: Was the Union created by the people of the several states in their highest sovereign capacity, with the federal government being their agent of limited, enumerated powers, as the compact theory asserted? Individuals such as Thomas Jefferson, St. George Tucker, Abel Upshur, James Madison, and John Calhoun supported this view. Or was the Union a creation of the American people in the aggregate, establishing a consolidated national government, as it was espoused by nationalists such as Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, John Jay, Daniel Webster, and Justice Joseph Story? This question was one of fundamental importance to the American polity, because a verdict on this subject determines whether the states are (a) legal fictions; administrative units akin to provinces or counties who had surrendered their sovereignty, or (b) through the consent of its peoples, were parties to the Constitutional compact who retained all aspects of their sovereignty not expressly delegated to the federal entity they created in signing the Constitution. Or, potentially, neither is true. This essay will examine two works by eminent Constitutional theoreticians whose writings on this subject deserve serious scrutiny, namely Justice Joseph Story and Abel P. Upshur.

Child labor during the British Industrial Revolution is a phenomenon that has, at times, been neg... more Child labor during the British Industrial Revolution is a phenomenon that has, at times, been neglected by historians. That’s not to say that little ink has been spilled about industrialization and child labor over the past two centuries; quite the opposite. Industrialism’s role in child labor and its intensification of misery and exploitation of children has been a consistent theme since industrialization itself. This essay centers on two more recent, but pivotal texts in the history of child labor during the Industrial Revolution, namely Clark Nardinelli’s Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution (1990) and Jane Humphries’s Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (2010). While each historian had taken an economic approach to the social history of the period, the differences between their approaches, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, are instructive. Interspersed with these two texts on child labor will be E.P. Thompson’s celebrated The Making of the English Working Class (1963), to examine the way historians have went about constructing their social histories of the British Industrial Revolution. We will also touch on the standard of living debate, for this touches on important methodological disputes as well. Finally, this essay will offer a different approach to examining these historical problems, an approach to the social sciences pioneered by economist Ludwig von Mises in his magnum opus on economics, entitled Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949). This approach will not resolve every question of methodology and interpretation advanced by the authors we will be reviewing here, but it will be applied to a few concrete examples to illustrate its usefulness in resolving some of the historical controversy, or at least clarify it.

Book Reviews by Tyler Kubik

Tyler Kubik HIST 8070 Dr. Rolinson 6/28/2015 Q: What distinction does Lewis make between a slum a... more Tyler Kubik HIST 8070 Dr. Rolinson 6/28/2015 Q: What distinction does Lewis make between a slum and a ghetto, how does this matter to understanding the Harlem Renaissance, how does Lewis use this distinction to set his view of Harlem apart from Osofsky's, and how does the history of Harlem and the Renaissance attest to each side? Ghetto or Slum? Economy and Culture During the Harlem Renaissance When Harlem Was in Vogue , by Daniel Levering Lewis, examines a set of elite Harlem 1 intellectuals and writers active during the Harlem Renaissance, claiming that these elites were pivotal in the history of Harlem during this periodessentially from the end of World War I to the Great Depression. It is a counter to Gilbert Osofsky's narrative, expressed in Harlem: The

Shortcomings aside, Baptist masterfully synthesizes a tragic history of slavery through its effec... more Shortcomings aside, Baptist masterfully synthesizes a tragic history of slavery through its effects on the body and mind, a narrative that will leave a lasting impression of the horrid injustice that slavery was for a whole population of African-Americans and the corruption with which it tainted the supposedly free American republic. His research confronts slavery’s contribution to the development of the American economy during the nineteenth century, addressing the uncomfortable tension with fervor and clarity sure to reinvigorate the historical dialogue on slavery, even if it arguably fails in its purpose.

Whatever Jefferson Davis’s reputation as a slave-holder and proponent of states’ rights, McPherso... more Whatever Jefferson Davis’s reputation as a slave-holder and proponent of states’ rights, McPherson has done a service in resurrecting Davis’s reputation as commander-in-chief from overly critical historians, even if McPherson himself overinflates Davis by ignoring some of his arguably more severe errors, including the deficiencies in leadership Davis displayed in economic matters. Davis’s brand of centrally planned, wartime socialism grossly exacerbated the problems in feeding, clothing, and supplying the military the commander in chief faced by preventing the maintenance of a market price system, whereby desperately needed goods could be efficiently allocated to where they were most urgently needed. The learned reader expecting the same level of academic work on display in Tried by War will be disappointed by the lack of novelty, but Embattled Rebel will function well for any student looking for a polished introduction to Jefferson Davis and the problems facing the Confederacy during the war. What we can garner from McPherson’s work is that Davis was handed the reins to a Confederate military that suffered from woeful inadequacies in supplies and manpower, was handicapped by disobedient or overly tame generals, and faced with an un-navigable political situation, but still managed to hold at bay the largest, most powerful army the world had yet seen for over 4 years—no small feat, indeed.

After the empirical failure of socialism in the Soviet Union, and the corresponding unpopularity ... more After the empirical failure of socialism in the Soviet Union, and the corresponding unpopularity of state control of the economy, left-leaning economists and politicos have increasingly turned to other justifications for state intervention into the economy, climate change being one particular example. Alternatively, one of the more “trendy” ways of justifying state interventionism has been a “dynamic” theory of the state. This theory might best be represented in Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz’s attempted revival of industrial policy, or in Mariana Mazzucato’s 2013 book entitled The Entrepreneurial State. In The Entrepreneurial State, Mazzucato fails to offer any convincing theory as to how the so-called entrepreneurial state’s mechanism for determining the allocation of investment funds — the political or bureaucratic mechanism — is superior to the profit-loss mechanism in which market actors operate. Throughout her book, Mazzucato’s economic reasoning falters on one of the most basic axioms of economics, namely the broken-window fallacy.

Emerging nationalism was one of the primary forces in shaping change in Europe throughout the lat... more Emerging nationalism was one of the primary forces in shaping change in Europe throughout the late 18th and into the 19th centuries, in no small part due to the enormous influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Of the Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right, written in 1762 in France. Rousseau’s Social Contract attempted to answer the question, “is it possible to establish some just and reliable rule of administration in civil affairs?”1 Rousseau explicitly laid out that his essay was an attempt to find a justification for the institution of government over man—his bondage—since government is a fact of life, but that most governments seemed to be in possession of arbitrary authority.2 Given that governments and nations existed throughout the world, if man was going to be limited by them, there should naturally arises a tendency to question how this can be legitimate.