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Category: History/Archeology

The shame of the American Jewish establishment

The shame of the American Jewish establishment

Peter Beinart writes: At the end of 2015, soon after taking over as CEO and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt brought the organization’s leadership to Georgia and Alabama. The journey constituted a kind of homage to the ADL’s role in the civil rights movement. In an essay about the trip, Greenblatt noted that in 1965, his predecessor, Benjamin Epstein, had summoned the ADL’s top staff to Selma, where they joined Martin Luther King Jr. in one of…

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The Smithsonian is under siege

The Smithsonian is under siege

Philip Kennicott writes: Lost in this new effort [by Trump] to rewrite American history scrubbed of its invigorating, infuriating, thrilling complexity, is the emotional toll it takes on people who serve the institution. I am sorry that the scholars, curators, volunteers, security guards and the rest of the loyal staff will have to pass signs that demean the integrity of their work. The contents of the museum, the history it explicates, will prepare them for this attack, which is yet…

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Meet Anton Jäger, whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left

Meet Anton Jäger, whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left

Zoe Williams writes: ‘I am acutely conscious,” said Andy Burnham outside 10 Downing Street on Monday, “that I am the sixth person in the last 10 years to walk up this street.” It was good to hear him say it because, beneath all the cabinet gossip and rune-reading, there is a feeling of terror about the immediate future and also about ourselves, the electorate. Is this who we are now? Wildly enthusiastic one minute, seething the next; as passionate about…

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Why Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz after decades of holding back

Why Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz after decades of holding back

By Ben Soodavar, King’s College London US forces have struck hundreds of Iranian targets – including in the southern port city of Bandar Abbas – over three consecutive nights in a bid by the US president, Donald Trump, to regain some modicum of control over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has also inscribed the US as the “guardian” of the vital waterway. He has revived a naval blockade of Iranian ports and briefly demanded a 20% charge on all cargo…

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The World Cup is exposing the contradictions of national identity

The World Cup is exposing the contradictions of national identity

Mohamad Elmasry writes: The World Cup always brings to the fore what is sometimes seen as a pure and mostly straightforward form of identity: national identity. But the 2026 tournament has demonstrated, perhaps as clearly as any global event can, that modern national identity is complex, contested and far from straightforward. The composition of the Moroccan World Cup squad offers a useful case in point. Nineteen of the 26 players on the squad were born outside Morocco, many of them…

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‘There is no going back’: The inside story of Europe’s rupture with America

‘There is no going back’: The inside story of Europe’s rupture with America

The Wall Street Journal reports: It was almost midnight in Brussels and the leaders of Europe were locked in their fifth hour of an emergency meeting with a single theme for discussion: how to manage a breakup with America. The new year was only three weeks old and President Trump, after removing Venezuela’s autocratic strongman, had briefly threatened to seize Greenland from Denmark. Around a circular table in the European Council headquarters known as “The Space Egg,” heads of government…

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America has lost its values. It’s time to go back to the founding text

America has lost its values. It’s time to go back to the founding text

Ted Widmer writes: In 1776, while the ink [on the Declaration of Independence] was still fresh, a young mixed-race veteran named Lemuel Haynes wrote an essay about what the declaration meant to him (it was not discovered until 1983). Another African American, James Forten, was nine years old when he heard the first public reading of the declaration in Philadelphia in 1776, and went on to a long career as an abolitionist. (The constitution inspired far less reverence from Black…

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Five words that changed America

Five words that changed America

Jamelle Bouie writes: There is a moment for every American when she first encounters the Declaration of Independence. For most, it comes to her as scripture — the highest and most sacred text in the nation’s civic religion, encapsulated by its moving assertion of human equality: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of…

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White House report brands Smithsonian leadership as radical activists who can’t be trusted

White House report brands Smithsonian leadership as radical activists who can’t be trusted

The Associated Press reports: A White House report brands the leadership of the Smithsonian Institution, especially at the National Museum of American History, as radical activists who cannot be trusted, indicating that President Donald Trump may be preparing to install his own team. The report released late on Independence Day by the White House Domestic Policy Council comes in the midst of Trump’s aggressive campaign to overhaul some of Washington’s most sacred cultural and historic institutions. Trump in March revealed…

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Mamdani rebukes Trumpism with pro-immigrant speech for America’s 250th birthday

Mamdani rebukes Trumpism with pro-immigrant speech for America’s 250th birthday

The Guardian reports: New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, exalted the city’s legacy of immigrants on Friday in a historically laden, ideological counterpoint to a US semiquincentennial address that was expected later in the day from Donald Trump – who has sought to deport immigrants en masse throughout his second presidency. Speaking from behind a desk at New York’s city hall that belonged to the US’s first president, George Washington, and which itself is a century older than the Resolute desk…

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How Trump cheated the American people out of the nation’s 250th birthday

How Trump cheated the American people out of the nation’s 250th birthday

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the US’s 250th anniversary celebration to enrich political allies, harvest voter data and promote Christian nationalist ideology, according to a congressional investigation released on Thursday. The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF). The document…

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The United States of contradictions, fears, and hopes

The United States of contradictions, fears, and hopes

Rebecca Solnit writes: The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is … so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter-millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things. It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good as…

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The justices had a simple task in Trump v. Barbara: uphold their oaths. Only five were willing to do so

The justices had a simple task in Trump v. Barbara: uphold their oaths. Only five were willing to do so

Madiba K. Dennie writes: A razor-thin majority of the Supreme Court confirmed today that the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says: “All persons” born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens of the United States. In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that attempted to unilaterally revoke that guarantee, limiting citizenship at birth to only U.S.-born children with at least one parent who is a citizen or legal permanent resident. If implemented,…

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The American myth always came at someone’s expense. Now, it has all but collapsed

The American myth always came at someone’s expense. Now, it has all but collapsed

Nikhil Pal Singh writes: Writing during the carnage of the first world war, the iconoclast intellectual Randolph Bourne described the American revolutionary inheritance as a squalid marriage between the town capitalist and plantation patriarch. Glittering generalities of freedom and democracy, Bourne observed, were indelibly marked by their long captivity to the money counters and owners of human chattel. In the land lorded over by the likes of Donald Trump, leader of one of the most indecently corrupt, violently inept administrations…

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Why J.D. Vance is wrong about Watergate

Why J.D. Vance is wrong about Watergate

The New York Times reports: Vice President JD Vance downplayed the significance of the Watergate scandal during a speech on Thursday, saying that the controversy that toppled President Richard M. Nixon would be “like a 12-hour news story” if it happened today. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Mr. Vance added, saying he had been joking backstage about the scandal before his appearance at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda,…

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What ancient philosophy really thought about domestic life

What ancient philosophy really thought about domestic life

Sandrine Bergès writes: Political philosophy – a discipline we trace back to Plato and Aristotle – is reasoning about how we live together in political units. It is about states, government, laws, institutions and citizenship. But it doesn’t have much to say about homes, families, marriage or parenting. The discipline that studies how we live together in family units, as opposed to political ones, used to be called economics, from the Greek oikonomika, or science of the home. This was…

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