So, I recently finished my thesis on Earl Browder which argues that his actions were informed by his identity and a political context much broader than soviet interests.

This puts me in a weird place between the traditionalist and revisionist schools of american communist history.

Most of the revisionist work within the context of cultural history; books like Hammer and Hoe are a good example. They tend to avoid the top-down conception of the CPUSA because the secretariat is over-studied and, in a lot of ways, not the most important thing contextualizing the events at the ground level.

The Traditionalists scoff at this. Draper famously called it "History of Communism with the Communism left out." Additionally, there's plenty of speculation about the revisionists motives, as it's been implied or outright stated that revisionists attempt to deny or apologize soviet influence in the CPUSA.

That situation has never sat right with me. Draper relied on ideas about totalitarianism in order to present the CPUSA as if it's a person possessed by the demon of Stalinism (he actually doesn't do much to separate Stalin and Lenin, which Palmer and Klehr had a back and forth about at one point). Every decision made in Moscow ripples through the possessed's body, and every clumsily. ill advised movement the body takes is ultimately informed by the choices of that possessor.

Klehr and others have moved towards a less simplistic and determinist understanding, but reading their works doesn't answer any question other than "was the CPUSA controlled by Moscow?" I think that's an interesting question with an obvious answer, but there's much more out there to study and write about.

I tend to be very skeptical of "big picture", "world systems" level analyses - dealing with a topic as vast, complicated and as full of unknowns as the entire world opens up a lot room for people to air out all their strongest biases with a shocking lack of inhibition - but I heard Immanuel Wallerstein give a brief talk on KPFA and, despite my copious eye-rolling at much of what he said, I found myself surprisingly intrigued by how solid the core concepts he uses seemed to be. The specific model he's produced, in which successive, singular European hegemonic powers (the Neatherlands, the British Empire, and the US) constitute a lens through which to view the entire global system, cast in the mold of the hegemon's influence, honestly seems archaically narrow-minded, egregiously Eurocentric and blatantly selective, no matter how much merit there may be in the more granular historical/economic observations that he supports the model with. I'm sure someone long ago has pointed out the obvious fact that, while it might be edifying to think of world economies as an interactive whole in the way he posits, human societies have always consisted of multiple simultaneous sets of overlapping cores and peripheries, not just these solitary capitalist monopoles from a small corner of western European states in the last few centuries.

HOWEVER, the basic idea - that the patterns of global life-cycles progressing through accumulative growth, ossification, and subsequent collapse comprise a sort of economic world rhythm - is pretty compelling, and it seems to make unassailable sense.

I'm not at all comfortable with history making sense; our world, in my experience, is profoundly senseless (or perhaps only sensible in extremely limited ways) and it makes me suspicious when someone offers some grand, clear cogency like that.

SO I was wondering what professional modern historians think of the "world systems" approach to economic/political/social history. Is it just an artifact of the selective perception of a prejudicially biased body of historical data, or is there actually something there? Wallerstein may or may not be full of crap, but what about, say, Abu-Lughod? Before European Hegemony seems interesting.

I've also got a more recent book called Civilizations and World Systems, but I only read a few of its sections quite a while ago before putting it down due to what I perceived as the authors' giddy obliviousness to the limitations of their sources of data.

Does anyone have any books or articles related to historiographical arguments about the effectiveness of the Maginot Line?

I wrote a paper on as much for my final in my upper level undergrad history course that argued the line did in fact do what it was intended to do.