Bridges: Teaching Digital World History

January/February 2007 · Historically Speaking 37 and Reagan more liberal" (175). The difference was that Reagan blamed outsiders and encouraged voters to feel good about diemselves. Carter, perhaps because he was a more religious man, tended to look inward, finding American "selfishness and materialism " responsible for inflation and the energy crisis. Carter did not assume that God automatically took America's side or that God would "conveniendy eliminate any enemies" (175). Carter "pioneered the fiscal conservatism commonly associated with Reagan ." Among other things it was Carter's Fed appointee , Paul Volcker, who initiated the draconian anti-inflation program that finally ended die wild inflation of the 1960s and 1970s, though Republicans happened to be in office in time to reap the credit. Jenkins does not make as much of the strategic and military changes that are also erroneously associated with Reagan: all the new weapons systems associated with die 1980s, and crucially the nuclear war-fighting doctrine propounded by Carter's Defense Secretary Harold Brown, were initiated before Reagan's election . Reagan poured on the money and die rhetoric, but his only new program was Star Wars, which had no demonstrated capability by die end of the Cold War. If American policy had any effect at all on die Soviet surrender in the Cold War, only partisan special pleading attributes that effect solely to Republicans . Conversely, Reagan "raised taxes more frequendy than he cared to admit, and he negotiated widi both terrorists and die states sponsoring their activities" (177). The closeness of the two candidates in 1980 meant, among other things, that the smart money in the Democratic machinery was betting on a cultural strategy very similar to that of the smart money in the GOP machinery: move as far as possible from the social and political trends that so alarmed the voters. Prominent liberal intellectuals and activists today—including diose who write most of the history of the 1970s—still see all die attention to diose trends as diversions from the true "interests" voters should have cared about. More fantastically, diey assume it was obvious to rational observers that liberal Democrats could have gained control over economic trends and could have controlled those trends disinterestedly. Jenkins will probably annoy as many conservatives as liberals with all his attention to die widely based psychological pessimism and fear that ushered in the Reagan years. But his book is the best antidote yet published to die implausible—and deeply undemocratic —assumptions that underlie mainstream histories of die period. David Chappell teaches history at the University of Arkansas. His most recent book is A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and die Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). His next book will be on Martin Luther King's legag. BRIDGES Teaching Digital World History Patrick Manning At a September 2006 conference at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln I found myselfpresenting a summary of the computer simulation of the Adantic slave trade widi which I have been working, in various forms, for twenty years.1 The organizers, Will Thomas and Doug Seefeldt, had put together a fascinating two-day conference on "digital history," and I was happy to listen to presentations ranging from Peter BoI on the marvelously detailed China Historical GIS program to Abdul Alkalimat's "Brother Malcolm," a really extensive Web site on Malcolm X.OnIy when Thomas and Seefeldt pressed me to write up my presentation did the implications of their framework become clear to me. Is there a special relationship between digital media and world history? They wanted me to say "yes." For many years I had been an enthusiast for world history and an endiusiast for computer methods, but had not seen an inherent connection. The persistent questions of Thomas and Seefeldt finally led me to look more deeply, and to locate some relationships that I now find quite interesting. As I would say it now, diere has been a co-evolution of digital technology and world history. Digital technology has done a lot for the study and teaching of world history. One can even argue the reverse—that world history has brought advances to digital media, by emphasizing temporal scope as well as global reach...