How 2025 Put the American Golden Age On Hold
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Aaron Burr
20 min read
The article references Burr's duel with Hamilton and his subsequent schemes involving Latin America, describing him as embodying 'caudillo' machismo. Understanding Burr's full story—his vice presidency, the famous duel, and his later conspiracy to create an independent nation in the Southwest—provides crucial context for the article's themes about American expansionism and its Latin American entanglements.
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Manifest destiny
15 min read
The article directly quotes Trump invoking 'manifest destiny into the stars' and critiques 'tired historical tropes of the American Frontier.' Understanding the 19th-century ideology of manifest destiny—its religious justifications, its role in territorial expansion, and its devastating impact on indigenous peoples—illuminates why the author finds these rhetorical claims historically problematic.
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Spanish colonization of the Americas
15 min read
The article makes the provocative claim that 'Anglo-America was not formed as an independent republic, but in imitation of the Spanish Empire' and argues the USA has a 'Hispanic Past and Hispanic Future.' Understanding the extensive Spanish colonial system that preceded and influenced Anglo-American expansion provides essential context for these arguments about America's often-overlooked Latin heritage.
Welcome to the new year on the Burning Archive.
In January 2025 the USA President declared an American Golden Age had begun. By the end of the year, the Américas were a zone of war and piracy. History had disappointed American Greatness, again.
This January I am recapping my world power world history tour, starting with the USA, and thinking deeply about the idea of the ‘civilization state.’
Recap of the World Power World History Tour
In 2025 I took readers on a world tour of the history of five great powers or ‘civilization states’: in reverse order, Russia, Europe, India, China and the USA. Through the weekly essays, deep dives and book recommendations, we explored an astonishing range of stories: from the volcano in Guatemala that created the Viking Age; to the 1926 visit of ballerina Anna Pavlova to my home town where she danced the Dying Swan and drank billy tea.
Since many readers have joined after the start of the world tour, I wanted to bring this world tour to you in the convenient form of a compendium post, where you can find all the stories about each region.
Two questions lurked behind all my essays of the World Power World History Tour:
How do the best current histories help you to reimagine the stories of these states, nations and cultures?
How does the concept of ‘civilization state’ improve, or impair, your understanding of those histories?
The power elites in each of these five states claim the status of ‘civilization state’. The idea has caught on in much popular commentary on international affairs. But the history underpinning such claims is often weak. For example, the claim that China has a 5,000-year, continuous, largely peaceful history as a civilization-state does not mention the Mongols or the Qing, or the many rebellions, state breakdowns, border wars or civil conflicts. I will suggest an alternative approach to the concept of the ‘civilization state’ in the first of my Long Reads at the end of January.
Major Theme of the USA World Tour
The world history tour began in January with the USA. In the same month, Donald Trump (or at least his speechwriters) declared his own reimagining of the history of the USA as a ‘civilization state’.
...Above all, my message to Americans today is that it is time for us to once
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