Attention to the Unseen

Woody Norman as King Richard II in ‘The Uprising,’ which tells the story of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, a major uprising across England that was triggered by high taxes and economic exploitation. Betina La Plante/Focus Features By Joëlle Rollo-Koster, University of Rhode Island For decades, I’ve been showing my medieval history students the “autonomous collective” scene from the 1975 film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” The clip is funny because it features two medieval peasants haranguing King Arthur while…

Read More Read More

Dan Falk writes: The pseudoscience of eugenics, founded on the mistaken notion that nature envisions some “right” combination of genes, and that selective breeding can improve the human race, is making a comeback. While the heyday of eugenics was a century ago, the idea was never really forgotten. In the 19th century, the modern science of biology was in its infancy, but took a leap forward with the work of pioneering researchers like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. But…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More